A solar installation is great way for reducing your energy costs but to maximise your return for the investment you have made, it is essential to squeeze every watt generated out of the system. There are several ways to do this, battery storage, ev charging or as per our example, heating your water. The most ineffective way is to feed energy back into the grid, they like to increase energy prices when selling to us, but the rates when selling back seem to be unfairly falling!
The energy manager we incorporate in our smart building controls continuously monitors the amount of energy being generated by your alternative energy sources or it can even monitor the lowest cost grid energy and switch a pre-determined loads on to use this energy whilst it’s available for free or at the lower rate, a good example would be an immersion heater. The water can be warming whilst the sun is shining or the wind is blowing leaving less or nothing for the grid supply to do when the sun goes down. We can even set the threshold as to when these loads are switched, maybe the load is 2kw but the solar is only generating 1kw, we can automatically set the load to be switched on when the solar generates 1kw and then the grid power tops this up with the other 1kw.
It’s great to have this visualization of where the energy is going and of course this can be mapped over time so you can see how efficient your system has been over a period of time.