My PowerVault - small milestone

[dan_b]

So my PowerVault experiment continues, and in April it passed a small milestone - I got 100kWh of electricity back out of the unit for the month.  Always nice to have a big round number like that - am approaching 300kWh in total now since install too.  Feels like the summer months from April-September will be nice and solid.

[dan_b]

If anyone's interested, here's what my PowerVault has discharged these last few months.
Jan - 30.67kWh
Feb - 31.25kWh
March - 74.02kWh
April - 102.88kWh
May - 97.14kWh
June - 103.94kWh
July - 94.27kWh

[Tombo]

Hi Dan,
How much power has been fed in to it?
Thanks

[dan_b]

Eer, pass, sorry! PowerVault claims a 80% round-trip efficiency for my battery chemistry, so I suppose you could work it out from that?

I know how much my SolarPV generates per-day/week/month too, but again that doesn't taken into account how much the house uses before the PowerVault sees the spare electrons.

[smegal]

If anyone's interested, here's what my PowerVault has discharged these last few months.
Jan - 30.67kWh
Feb - 31.25kWh
March - 74.02kWh
April - 102.88kWh
May - 97.14kWh
June - 103.94kWh
July - 94.27kWh

Thank you for posting that information. It's good to see a real world example.

Is your ImmerSUN still providing a lot of heat as well?

[TheFairway]

What are your equivalent import figures?

How much do you think you are limited by battery capacity/discharge rates?

Your winter month figures are probably better than I could achieve due to shading/pitch but i would like to think I could eek out a bit more than that in shoulder/summer months with a battery with more capacity, except with some of the recent weather patterns lasting several days.

[dan_b]

Here are my 2016 vs 2017 import figures in kWh

Jan 368   vs    285
Feb 221   vs    254
Mar 249   vs   177
Apr 153   vs   85
May 163   vs   84
Jun  145   vs   72
July  123  vs    72!

So a definite real dent in my import.

2016 vs 2017 ImmerSUN figures

Jan 14.9   vs    1
Feb 21.9   vs    3.3
Mar 35.6   vs   9.9
Apr 51      vs   54
May 88     vs   55.9
Jun  84    vs   79.1
July  122  vs    69

As you can see, the ImmerSUN has taken a significant hit in the low months Jan-Mar, but once April hit, there has been enough surplus generation to cover self-consumption, charge the battery and divert to the hot water tank.  No gas for the hot water from late April to now. 


I know I'm limited a bit by discharge rate - for example when the electric oven is used to cook, and if several other big-ticket items are all on at once we can trip over the 1100W limit and import, but it's pretty good otherwise.  I think the fact that hte charging is limited to 800W helps keep the ImmerSUN active too.     I can see though that I'm limited ultimately by usable capacity of 4kWh.  Might have to look at hacking the unit once I'm finished with the UKPN trial and seeing if we can add some extra batteries

[TheFairway]

Thanks. That's a useful set of data.

[dan_b]

Bit disappointed this morning to say the least.  Here's the story...

Last week I had a call from PowerVault saying they wanted to run a full charge-discharge cycle on my battery as a diagnostic maintenance check, so could I give them permission to access my battery remotely and basically consume 4kWh of electricity from Midnight last Monday to test it.

This morning I just got a call saying the results of the test show that my Lead Acid batteries are already worn out and need replacing after just 9 months!  They claimed they received a faulty batch of batteries from their supplier and will replace them under warranty next week, with a different battery from a different supplier (Gel apparently?) but that doesn't exactly bode well does it.  The warranty re-starts with the replacements, but I must admit I'm feeling like I made a bad decision at the moment to go this route! 

I guess if they burn out every 9 months and they keep replacing them under warranty each time it doesn't really cost me anything and keeps my batteries fresh, but that doesn't feel sustainable... I did ask if they could swap them for Lithium free of charge as part of the replacement, but alas not.

I'm off to drink some coffee. Will use my 1kW kettle to make the hot water. At least the sun is shining and my panels are putting out 1.68kW at the moment, so that'll be a green cuppa...

[Tigger]

Dan,

Relax, seriously. 

Your supplier has put their hand up to supplying faulty equipment and is replacing them free of charge AND restarting the warranty from the date of change.

You don't seem to appreciate how lucky you are, there are hundreds if not thousands of people out there who long for service half as good as you're getting.

Now ring them up and say thank you for being such an excellent supplier 

Ian.

p.s. I am in no way connected to PowerVault, just in case you were wondering......

[dan_b]

Yeah, you're absolutely right -  their customer service on this is spot on, they pro-actively raised it with me.  I'm chilled 

[Tigger]

Of course, we'll all have set a marker in our diaries for 9 months from now to watch out for a post from a very angry dan_b 

[dan_b]

LOL!

Here's a video of batteries exploding in slow motion

[dan_b]

So have got 6 of these going into my Powervault at the moment, anyone know much about them?

[RIT]

So have got 6 of these going into my Powervault at the moment, anyone know much about them?

Only the details posted elsewhere, such as at

     http ://www.alpha-batteries.co.uk/12v-110ah-leoch-powabloc-tubular-gel-battery/

And only the PDF sheet makes any real sense as it indicates a 40% loss of capacity if you cycle 1,700 at 70% DOD, not something shown in the rest of the text. This figure does at least fit within the stats used by Powervault, even if Powervault does not make any statements regarding long term capacity. Their quoted Tubular Lead Acid warranty only kicks in if the battery drops below 50% capacity, which would indicate it's become scrap and even then they only really offer a discount off their replacement parts.