Solar Skye

 We're still waiting for the communications hub on our smart meter to be replaced with one that can actually communicate. Octopus has requested a change and I understand we have to wait for the network operator to schedule an engineer to install one that uses a different communications system.

An interesting report from EuroNews about how much solar has been generated during the heatwave and its use to help the european grids supply the increased A/C demand. https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/14/the-real-challenge-starts-after-sundown-europes-heatwave-boosted-solar-by-up-to-17-on-hot- They also mention the challenge after sundown when it's still hot so there's A/C demand but no solar electricity generation. The one trick you need to know is keep the structure of your house cool and it will keep cool over night until the solar electricity generation starts again the next day. We've experienced heat soak in a 1930's London suburban semi. In a heatwave the house slowly warms up so is cooler than outside. It eventually reaches equilibrium with the ambient temperature. However, as it cools outside the house takes longer to cool so it's hotter than ambient until it manages to cool. In a hot climate the PVAC should be run during the day to keep the house cool and ...

 We're using the Mitsubishi "Auto Adaption" aka "Room Temperature" mode and we're very pleased with it. The system has an FTC7 controller and is connected to a Mitsubishi room thermostat/control panel which is in our large south facing living/dining/kitchen room. The room gets plenty of sun and thus lots of solar gain. We've set the desired room temperature to 20C during the day and to 19C overnight. For the most part the heating has hardly come on this summer. We had a cold cloudy spell last week and the system kept the house nice and cosy. On the warmer days the heating usually does not come on at all and we get more than enough solar gain to keep the house warm. A problem I can see with weather compensation is on the cooler sunny days when there's lots of solar gain but the system keeps generating heat because it's cold outside. On these days you need less heating than you do on days that are the same temperature but not as sunny. How is weath...

 It's the summer and we're mostly self sufficient in electricity at the moment. This means our typical energy usage between 6pm and 8pm is zero as we're often still getting power from the panels and we have our battery. Also, as we don't yet have a smart meter with a working communications hub, we don't report our electricity consumption every 30mins. I think that alone would rule us out of this offer:

 I've got Home Assistant Green up and running and monitoring the Powerwall 3. I'm using the Teslemetry integration as it's really easy to set up and well worth the small annual fee. I now get graphs like this: The data is: blue - house load yellow - solar generation red - grid import/export green - battery discharge/charge and then the battery charge level. On the solar generation you can clearly see the impact of our export limit. Around noon we had a peak solar generation of 9.95kW because we could charge the battery, run a clothes machine and export to the grid. I'd love to have a higher export limit. I'd also love to have the smart meter communication sorted so I can move to a smart time based tariff and get some money for the power that I can export. Frustrating...