Spat over inverter review intensifies as SolarEdge go legal.
At 3:15pm on Christmas Eve, when most Australian families were kicking back with a drink and looking forward to at least 2 days with family, friends and no work worries, Mark Cavanagh1, owner of the highly regarded solar installation company, MC Electrical2 received a five page letter from lawyers acting for $1.6 billion Israeli inverter manufacturer, SolarEdge. [Read more…]
Is it possible to keep a family home comfortable in an extreme heatwave using only solar energy? Yes.
Last week I received a phone call from an ABC journalist. Unfortunately he didn’t want to invite me on Gruen to talk about the joys of solar advertising, or book Ronald & Tonto23 to perform on Mad As Hell. Rather, he’d been told that solar panels lose efficiency when it gets hot, and was keen to learn more. Specifically, he wondered how much solar panel efficiency would be lost if the temperature hit 45º during the heatwave – as forecast for the following day. [Read more…]
By Dr. Nick Engerer
Note from Finn: This is a guest post by Dr Nick Engerer – Solcast is a super handy, free, quick and accurate way to check what your solar power system should have produced in the last 7 days. [Read more…]
If you bought a solar power system and your bills are still high, then either your system is not working or you haven’t considered the big picture of energy-efficiency, hot water heating and system size.
In this post you will discover:
So let’s get started shall we… [Read more…]
In June I published everything I know about buying solar in Australia as a full-on, professionally edited and published book. We had a big, posh book launch – opened by the SA Environment Minister and I’m happy to report that the book has been selling steadily ever since. [Read more…]
There are a few things you need to know if you are getting a 3-phase solar inverter and expect to add a battery later.
I love three-phase solar inverters.
If your home has a three-phase supply and you do not want or need micro-inverters then my recommendation is to use a three-phase solar inverter over a single-phase model. [Read more…]
Solar Analytics & Enphase have had a meeting of the minds which could lead to cheaper and better monitoring for everyone.
Solar monitoring firm Solar Analytics and microinverter manufacturer Enphase sent out a joint press release yesterday. It is unlikely to get much attention as it is very geeky: they are trialing making Solar Analytics monitoring software compatible with Enphase monitoring hardware. You won’t be reading about it on the front page of the Australian any time soon. But here’s why it’s a big deal (in my little world at least). [Read more…]
Almost 10 years ago, I sat down for 2 weeks in Brighton Public Library and put everything I knew about residential solar power systems into my battered old laptop. I used the free Wi-Fi to upload that information to a home-brewed website called SolarQuotes. The knowledge was picked up from working for the Energy Transformed Flagship at CSIRO combined with my broader background in electrical engineering.
Since then, millions of people have visited the site; which has been continuously improved over the years. [Read more…]
Solar Panel Optimisation is an extra feature you can pay for when buying solar that optimises the power output from each panel independently. [Read more…]
If you buy the wrong battery system for your three-phase home your electricity bill will not go down nearly as much as you expect. And with the economic return of battery systems being pretty marginal in even the best case scenario, it is super important that your battery gives you the best returns possible. [Read more…]
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