well today is a happier day.
The installation was booked for last week, but that failed as they didn't get the device here in time and the installer refused to come to the property until it was confirmed that the device was onsite, this speaks volumes about poor logistics, not only experienced by customers but installers as well, but later on the specified delivery/install day a pallet did turn up.
Goods were confirmed to have arrive and were safely palatalized and in my garage, install rearranged for Monday (today), the installation engineer was bang on time as promised and they started looking at where it would be placed, naively i said just pull the old one out from under the counter in the garage and stuff the new one in there, that was when i realized that i had not fully researched what i had asked for (12 kWh chassis loaded with 8 kWh of batteries so that i can expand it at a later date if i wanted too).
There was no way this new beast was going to fit in the space where the old one was located (small fridge size under the counter in the garage), first panic on realizing its size was "where to put it", considered the rear wall of the garage but i wasn't keen on that as the car goes in there and needs all of that room when i have it on axle stands for servicing or fixing the damn thing, luckily i had a spot that was filled with a shelving unit (and other various boxes of junk), so i pulled that all out, gave the floor a sweep and decided there was loads of room there even if it does mean that i have to rearrange the whole garage, truth be told its long overdue and there will be several weeks worth of sorting and throwing rubbish out before i can service any cars again. Loads of room in reality turned into "Just enough room" once it was unboxed and installed.
Now the old one looked like a fridge and was on wheels so i could roll it out of the way if i needed too, the new one however is bolted to teh wall and that is where it will need to stay for its entire life, no moving it now.
The installation team was excellent and was happy to wait for me to pull the junk out of the way, the previous model would only charge and discharge at 1.2 kWh so it only needed a smaller cable to the house, the new one however can (allegedly) charge and discharge at 6.5 kWh so all of that old cabling needed to come out and be replaced with 32 amp cabling.
half a days work and it was connected to the internet, signed off as working and the team left, as with all new toys i have been keeping an eye on it to see what its doing, this novelty will wear off quite soon and i will drop down to several times a day, then daily, then no doubt weekly, but for now watching th enew interface is quite interesting.
Like all of these devices it does not respond instantly to changes in the household load so sometimes the import kicks in to meet initial demand and at other times we are exporting a little until things settle down and it starts managing the demand.
I like the new interface but am disappointed with a couple of things, it doesn't state what percentage of charge the battery system is currently at, i am told that they are working on this and will be delivered by a software update "soon", I had also hoped that there would have been an option to request reports on daily, weekly, monthly or annual reports via CSV to be requested and emailed out, but this does not exist in the current portal, may be it will be a future feature that will be added.
What i do like is the fact that, rather than waste (export) the solar that is being generated due to only being able to charge at 1.2 kWh as per the previous version this device can easily take the whole load from my 4 kWh PV system and store the lot until full if i don't need it, and supply larger than 1.2 kWh demand such as shower, kettle or cooking demand when it is required up to 6.5 kWh, that will certainly save a lot of juice from being exported.
Good technology, still in an early state with features still being written and distributed remotely that will undoubtedly improve the system and the web portal in the hopefully not too distant future.
Now they just need to work on their in house services such as customer and system management & support, logistics and other things that customers expect from a modern company, if they can improve their business processes to meet their technical capability then they will be onto a winner.
There is no doubt that the PV3 system is vastly more usable than the G200 system just because it can import and export more at any given time, even though the G200 was an excellent bit of kit, I'm surprised at how far things have improved in only a year and a half or so, who knows what these systems will be achieving in another few years.
Now the obligatory images, the first one shows the system charging well this afternoon, the second the size of the thing and the third one looks like its now just about charges itself up and has starting exporting the excess.
