Hi guys, it's a rather chilly Winters morning here in Sydney and but Sunny Which is good because I'm getting my new solar system installed. If you've been following along on the Forum, you'll know that I've been talking about a solar system for quite some time and yes, it's happening today. I'm getting a 3 KW uh system with Um LG mono X panels and a sunny boy inverter installed. Not doing it myself, paying someone to do it.

It only take like 4 hours or something like that to install the Uh 12 panels up on the roof, so let's go check it out. And here's some of my panels. Five of them to be precise and uh, they LG There you go. LG Panels LG 250 250 wat uh S1 C-g 3 250 wat uh voltage Pig what is it? Uh, 30.77% amps V Open circuit There we go and um Short Circuit Ciruit current is 8.62 amps, maximum system voltage 1000 volts and uh maximum series fuse 15 amps under the various standard test conditions All U listed Vde It's got all the requisite uh uh, qualifications on there.

There you go produced by: LG Electronics made in Korea South Korea Obviously and yes, I believe they do have a uh diode in them to uh, you know if one panel gets shaded, then uh, it can bypass most of the power. There's going to be some loss there, but uh yeah, it can. uh, just bypass that individual panel that shaded. And here's the front of the panel.

and uh, I Was just told that apparently, uh, not everyone can install these LG panels. You've got to be a qualified uh installer. Like you've got to actually be uh certified by LG to uh, install these things and uh, there we go for those into their solar cell. Construction Struction.

That's what these suckers look like up close. Yeah, so it looks like they go in a configuration like this. a string like this. You can see the metal down in between there there it is going between.

there's three tracers going all the way down and then it gets down to the bottom and there we go. Three parallel traces, goes across and then it goes up and up and up and up. sorry if there's motion blue here. for those who get motion sick and jumps across there and so forth.

and then it just goes. Yeah, so it goes up here, down there and then across to that one and up and back. and I was just, um, told that, uh, uh, these panels possibly, um, absorb light through the back as well cuz they are. You probably can't see that on the camera, but they are sort of a, uh, um, the sort of, you know, a semi-transparent uh kind of thing so the light can actually come through.

These are the mono x uh panels by the way. so these are fairly recent ones I think and there is one that has like a black uh backing, but I'm not sure of the uh difference with those, so there you go. I am told that these are the Ducks guts, uh penals and they look really good too. So yeah, very impressed.

Not that looks as a big deal, only the neighb overlooking our house are going to see that, but uh, because it's on the side of the house here. so uh, we don't uh, really get to see it when we drive in. and uh, by the way, yeah, they're going to be on this side of the house. so let me see if I can There we go.

It's going to be on the roof up here. they're going to have to move uh, the antenna cable and yes, I've got uh, terracotta roof tiles so they're really annoying to get into and you can see that the sun. it's it's winter time here of course and the Sun is popping up over there. North's about somewhere there so we could have.

We could have put them on either the front of the house or over here, but this, um, side of the house will get, uh, much more. um Peak afternoon sun. So we decided to put it here and we're not putting the inverter on uh, this side of the house over here. even though though we could put it on that wall.

We might want to install another air con unit, but there's no Eve there, um at all. and the inverter will get the full sun in the afternoon as well. So we've already got an airon unit there and they couldn't install it by regulation. They're not allowed to install it here next to the fuse box because, um, it's too close to the Um gas.

We've got, uh, gas down here. There it is. so uh yeah, it has to be like, um, half a meter or something away from the gas. And for those interested in my fuse box here, it is, uh, not very, very exciting at all.

Um, it the panels are being installed today. but uh, then they need somebody else to come out and install the new, uh, smart meter. um tomorrow. So uh yeah, won't be able to switch the thing on today.

But there we go. There's our email. uh, made in Australia not Austria what hour meters? Um, that's I believe that's a off peak um hot water? uh controller. But we don't have that.

We've got gas hot water so it's a ripple control set. There it is. and uh, we've got our Um Earth leakage, uh circuit breaker and our two aircon um circuit breakers up there and the main incoming 60 amp uh uh. fuse up there.

Yes, this is only a single Uh phase. We don't have multiphase here. it's all underground wiring. by the way, all the Uh Cable in comes in under our garden there somewhere.

So if we ever have to dig that up, um, we're in serious trouble trouble. So yes, we're going to have uh, 12 panels total 250 WS We're getting a 3 KW uh system installed and uh, here's the uh. here's the connectors on them. There we go.

Can't say I've uh, seen those before. They're obviously uh, a custom. well, some some sort of custom type I don't know. They might be a standard in the Uh Solar IND industry.

Do not disconnect under load and there's our sunny Boy SMA inverter. It's already mounted on the bracket here and uh, there's the LCD controller for it and there's all the uh inlets and uh, we're just in the middle of getting it installed. We're going to have a Uh breaker box I See, that's that's that's the AC breaker box which we're going to install and uh, there it is. It's a sunny Boy B 3000 T-21 looks really good.

It's actually quite big. Go for it. He's got a hammer and he's not afraid to use it. all right and that's going to be a second Uh breaker for DC Excellent.

It'll look beautiful when it's done. so I'm told we had the option to install it either inside the garage or outside. but inside we would have, uh, we've got uh, various things hanging up on the wall and stuff. It was just a bit more convenient to, uh, hang it up under here.

And we do have Eaves here so it's a little bit protected and it doesn't get the afternoon sun so that should be a reasonably good option next to the water tank just in case it catches on fire and that's the uh front cover plate on the sunny boy inverter got a really nice looking uh gasket on there to keep all the water out. These things are, of course, uh, completely weatherproof so uh, rain and uh, everything else is not a problem. and there's our uh DC breaker so that comes from the panels that's ready to go in so there'll be uh two, um cable Ducks I think coming down here one will be the DC of course. yes, this is on the opposite side of the house so they do have to run conut right on the other side so there are going to be losses.

but uh, as I said, the other side of the house wasn't um that ideal because it to get the full uh sun in the afternoon. even though this thing um is designed, you know for that. but they do recommend you don't put in full sign I Believe there's a fan up in there somewhere and there's the uh, there's the installation bracket for it. it's got three huge bolts on the thing and uh, it just hangs there.

Not a problem and um, but yeah they do recommend you don't put them in full Su which it would have been on the other side and also there was no Eaves and it was too near the gas and we'll going to install maybe install another Airon system in the future. and yada yada yada. So we're just going to put it on the other side of the house here and we have to run. You know 20 M of conut I don't know 1550 M of conduit 20 M something like that so we'll just have to live with some losses there and there it is made in Germany All my German viewers are uh jumping for joy.

Yes, it is one of the best, if if not, um, the best inverter on the market. the SMA Sunny Boy So I'm told so I splurged a bit to uh, get that one and it does have a Bluetooth interface so I'll be able to uh hook it up to my uh phone or hook it up to the web or uh, do all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff with it. hopefully to uh, log and extract the data from it. So I hope it's worth paying the very significant extra for the SMA inverter.

That's one thing I didn't really want to skimp on is the Uh inverter pretty much you I wanted to get a good quality one and here's our conut and various stuff: I guess they got orange and white. One will be for the DC and one will be for the Uh AC I'm not sure what. uh uh that looks like that's big thumping. well there can we get shot of that? that's some big thump and copper right there.

So that would be your Uh DC cable. Not sure are the uh, no, there's no, uh, there's no brand on that electrical cable. Solar cable specific solar cable. It's um 4 Square mm I'm not sure.

yeah, you probably can't see that, but uh I can read that. We got 4 Square mm cable for that and we've got some SLT brand cable here. This is also 4 Square mm and this is a single one which they, uh, use to wire between the individual panels and the other one of course goes over to the inverter. And here's our bracket that's uh, going to mount our panels.

Can you tell us how it works? All right? So you slide one tile up. Yep, now there'll be a tile obviously. sit on a tile like that, right? So to end your tile, it'll sit onto your Rafters like that and then the tile on top will slide above it, slide above it, and out. yeah and then on the rail here.

I'll show you is then this Clips in like that? Yep, then once that screws on, screw and we're going to have 24 of those total right now. What happens here is when you get two panels that'll sit there. oh got it. and then it'll sit obviously on the edge of the so it'll pretty much sit like that right and then this on the top.

So when that sticks out, that also Clips in there. Yep, and then you just scrw it down and it fantastic. clamps the panels down. Terrific! Yeah, and that's Chris So we're going to put on this side cuz it is better than the other side which I think is 41 or something.

So this is 311 so it'll catch that. uh Peak afternoon. uh Sun much better, better. That's the plan.

anyway. Anyway, you only have two options. Uh, when you got a house like this, it's not like we can install it in the backyard because here is the backyard folks. and well, you know we don't have a huge amount of uh.

backyard so we can't really, uh install, um, it here. There's our lovely backyard with all our Australian native plants and not only are they natives, but there are some of them are Local Natives from our local uh Creek No, we didn't, uh, steal them at all from the local Creek the uh Council actually cultivate these things and we've got a lovely Banks here tree. A uh, classic Australian uh flowering tree. Here it's called the Bankia and uh, they are absolutely stunning.

When they're out, they're they're called Dark candles. There's like a dead one, an old shriveled up. um Dead one from last season. But uh, these ones are massive.

They can grow more than a foot long 30 cm long. On this particular tree, they are rather stunning. Um, haven't got too many at the moment. They're just clinging on there.

but uh, when it's um, comes out in full. Uh Bloom I guess do you call Bloom for bankia trees? I'm not sure but uh, anyway, and so the inverter is going to be on uh, that side of the house over there, so it's got to run Cable's got to run all the way over to the other side. It's probably further than it looks cuz this isn't a particular big house. And here's the data sheet for our Mono X panel.

Uh, that we've got. There's our mechanical characteristics: mono crystalline, Uh technology. Um, each cell is 156 by 156 uh mm and uh number of Uh bus bars three and dimensions blah blah blah maximum load weight 17.3 kilos each. Um I Believe that's relatively light.

Uh, for one of these 250 W uh panels of this size, there we go. Three uh, bypass dodes in there IP67 rating on the Uh junction box on the back side of it and uh, it's anodized aluminium with protective black coating and there. Um, it's got a 10-year uh warranty and a 20 I think it's 25e linear power warranty. Um, so there there you go.

First year, Uh, 97% Um, after second year, 7% annual degradation after that and 80% after 25 years. That's what they're uh warranted for. There's the Uh IV characteristic curve for it and the Power Max that is another thing. Um, these panels do not like um, well, solar panels unless you get those um, little micro ones designed for uh uh.

Lensin systems do not like to run uh hot so the hotter they get the uh less efficient. So at 25 C there, that's what their rate output is. So if they get hotter than that, which um, they pretty much will on anything but winter here in Sydney So in summer it'll get damn hot up on there on the roof and unfortunately the power is going to drop. You know they could easily get to 50 or something like that so we might only get like 80% uh Power output I mean some people um, put in Stall like a uh water sprinkling system and have water uh dripping uh down over them and they you know these sprinklers going all the time to try and cool things down.

So we're obviously not going that far and we got some temperature coefficients of the um short circuit current ISC there and V open circuit and uh electrical properties as we saw printed on the back before and LG Electronics here in Australia is just over at Eastern Creek like barely uh, 10 minutes from my place. So if they did, uh, design and build them here I would have uh seen if I can get a tour of the factory but unfortunately it's probably just a distribution and uh, office complex and then we have our Main's cable as well. There it is 4 Square mm as well, so that's pretty beefy stuff. and uh, that of course is uh Three core.

You've got your Earth in the center there and there's Sean he's helping out and if you're curious to see what's inside a solar installer's kit bag, here we go check it out. There we go. Lots of electrical tape measuring tape a some Allen Keys Cutters Lots of cable tires got have cable tires and uh, your requisite screwdrivers and that looks like a multimeter. Ah, it's a ah it's a Sr There we go.

let's have a look. There you go. It's a Sanir Cd800a 4,000 count and uh, haven't seen one of those before but uh I Cat rating: Cat 3 600 volts. Nothing special.

There you go, but does come in a nice hard case which you can just of course throw in your toolkit and there's my time lapse camera. Hopefully we'll get a time lapse of that and uh, we'll see what happens. That's my B-roll camera, that's my other Cannon and that's a neat way to pull the cable. Just put it in a little crate there.

You don't need one of those little stands with the uh reel. so that's a uh Paul man's uh C um pulling stand I Guess just a milk crate Beauty Go. We're going to have 12 panels installed right along there. There's the brackets there, they just uh install on the beams underneath and then just pop out under the tiles.

so there's no um issue with water, uh, getting in and stuff like that. we don't have to penetrate any of the tiles so that is really easy. and apparently my roof is uh, bowed. they didn't know that, hadn't really noticed it before.

but uh yeah, you can see it with the uh, see it with the railing for some reason due to the framework inside I Guess it's uh, just bows a bit. Not a problem for uh installing the panels though. There we go. This got little uh Joiner pieces in there and that's how what uh keeps the rails joined.

and there's our AC uh breaker installed and of course that just goes into the uh sunny boy into the Uh line. Neutral: Earth there. easy. And here we go.

The panels are uh, looking good. There we go. that's where it's uh, going to pop through into the conduit. They have to put uh conju all the way through the roof.

It's the Uh regulation. so uh, that's our DC cable and that's just going to hook up. The wires actually go through the uh railing down there. they actually in the back of the railing down in there.

they put the uh, they put the wiring and there's the brackets and it looks uh, looks pretty darn good I like it. Woohoo! Solar System! And we're going to install one of the clips so that just joins both the panels together and then it slides down I Better get out of the way otherwise. uh and there we go. So that just holds the panels together like that.

too easy and they screw them in. Awesome! This is the fun part. There we go and we got four more left and that's it. Takes up most of the roof as uh, although we think we have room for another uh 3 Kow if we really wanted to, we could move them a bit.

uh, could move them a bit higher. but uh, and there we go. There we go. There's a bit of a closeup of one of the cells Tada That's it.

The finish it please. And all we have to do is join the cables up and Tada There it is. There's the complete 3 KW 12 panel array with the LG mono X panels. You should be able to see that the roof isn't exactly uh, flat.

You should be able to see a wave in those panels I think Hopefully so. uh yeah. oops. but anyway, you can't do anything about that.

Most uh RS have uh I'm told that most RS are have some sort of um undulation like that. so but Tada that looks impressive. Shame, we're not going to see it. The house next door is going to see it, but we won't and our DC cable has been pulled through there.

That'll be the Uh DC breaker so we'll be able to just, uh, switch that off. Of course the front plate will go on there with a uh key switch on it I presume and uh, the cable will enter up in there somewhere and Tada there it is. My sunny boy inverter fully installed. Very nice, very professional.

I Like it. There we go. That's our AC breaker and our DC breaker and we're just doing an initial startup test here. It's uh, go through an initi ization procedure.

it's uh, temporarily hooked up and we're just checking it out and uh 456 Vols uh open circuit and uh 7 amps short circuit current. No touchy. So there you go. It's actually producing.

uh, just over 2 Kow and uh, of course, where um, it's only 1:00 on, uh in June the middle of June So uh, it's middle of winter here. so you know this is probably one of the best figures we can expect for uh, winter. But this is our 3 KW array currently producing almost 2.1 Kow There and the shade just came over. Then a second ago, it just dropped down to like 800 and then 500.

but even when it was shady, it was still, um, quite. Uh, you know the clouds came over, it was still producing. you know, 500 watts or so. so not bad at all.

Is producing? See, it's switched over to the second Channel there. now. There's actually two channels on this thing, so we've only got one array there? it is 345 Vols So that's what the array is producing at Uh 6.6 amps. And of course, we're getting out uh 8.4 amps there into the grid.

That's what it's claiming at 252 volts is our line is our grid line voltage. All right. It's the next day now, and uh, well, the day after actually, and we've had, uh, somebody come around the Energy company install the Uh meter in the the box. So now it's officially on the grid and producing all legal and signed off.

Fantastic! It's currently overcast here, and it's producing 660 watts at the moment. Uh, very common to produce, you know, very overcast. Uh, kind of. Sky the sun is not directly on it.

um, the wife, uh, reported this morning. she came out about 12:00 it's currently about uh 1:30 or thereabouts. and uh, she said it was up, um, to 2.5 Kow which is, is, um, absolutely amazing because those living in the Northern Hemisphere may not know it's actually winter here in Uh Sydney at the moment, almost the middle of winter. So um, yeah, um, it's basically going to be as low as it gets for.

So for a 3 Kow system to be producing uh 2.5 KW on a nice sunny Winter's day is, uh, absolutely fantastic. Anyway, um, the graph we've got here is today's Um graph so it obviously DED off there uh this morning and has uh, uh, come back. so that's an hourly I think that's an hourly interval? uh, bar graph and uh, that shows today's response and it's produced a total today of 6 almost 6.5 Kow Fantastic. Um, some of that we've used, uh, some we're going to feed back into the grid.

I'll show you that in a minute. Total produced uh .11 megaw since we've installed it a couple of days ago. So awesome. And uh, well.

since we, yeah, since we turned it on, it's been tracking. So um, what we can do here is we can actually tap this. Okay, if we go tap, we'll see the backl comes on first, tap it again and this changed to an E. So the bar graph has changed and now it's producing a daily total.

So each one of those um, bars there is a daily total, so you'll be able to. Once we get more data in there, we'll be able to, uh, see that. So that's really quite nice. and if you tap it twice quickly, apparently it's hello.

There we go. Pops up with the firmware version. There it is I'm not sure if I have the latest uh, firmware or not I'm assuming so it's uh, straight out of the box and comes up with a serial number and the Uh net ID and uh AUST Strali and standard I guess that is 47.3 no idea what that is and uh English language. So um, there you go I haven't been able to connect Bluetooth with this thing yet I it can see it.

Um, but I haven't been able to connect so a few issues. But anyway, let's go around and take a look at the Uh meter box and uh, here we go. t So yeah, it's um, really kind of overcast now at the moment. but the fact is, we're uh, producing, still producing enough energy.

um for it to, uh, be useful. Now here are our uh, well, the these aren't actually Smart Meters I Was under the impression that they're going to install Smart Meters but they haven't. There's actually uh, two of these identical ones and they're um, Rron brand. Never heard of them before, but Rron Ace 1000 Smo and I've looked up the data sheet for these things and these are not smart meters.

They're just bottom of the range dumb ones with the old, um, electromechanical, um, uh, you know, uh, tumblers there for the uh reading. Now what we've got is one that's labeled Dom this top one I assume that stands for domestic Supply And that meter, uh, tracks how much energy we're using from the grid. So that's energy that we're going to pay for. And since it's been installed, we've used 16.

Just over 16 kilowatt Um, hours there? I Think we average home. Here we average. Well, last quarter we averaged uh, 12 kwatt hours. uh, per day.

So we've used that 16 since it was installed and this one down here is is the solar one. There it is and uh, this is the amount of energy which we're exported back to the grid. So this meter up here is the energy we pay for and this uh meter down here is the energy we get paid for. So uh, at the In: New South Wales at the moment used to be 60 cents feed in tariff.

uh per kilowatt hour. It was massive. The government went crazy on that and but they've stopped that now I'm only going to be getting 6 cents per Kow hour feed in tariff. So there you go.

We haven't earned much at all feeding just over 6 kwatt hours back into the grid since it was been installed yesterday. So um, and you can see that it's produc. there's 800 impulses of that lead per kilowatt hour and as well, the sun's just come out. you can see it.

and uh, so now that lead should blink faster because we're using the same energy inside. So yeah, there we go. and uh, that should tick over quicker we're exporting and I have very ified that this domestic one up here. um does go Burco at night because we're not producing any energy from the panel so we're extracting it all from the grid and uh but during the day it practically stops and since I checked this morning, it's only moved an a tiny smidgen there because we're getting all of our energy from our panel.

So this one down here for the solar one. Um, let's say the solar panels producing 1 kwatt Hour 1 kilowatt um of energy and our is using precisely 1 Kow of energy. then uh, this thing would not, uh, tick over at all because there's no excess to go back into the grid. So the whole idea is that, uh, you use as much energy during the day as you can while the solar panels are producing it cuz you don't get paid much for it going back in.

In my case, it's uh, with Origin Energy. it's uh, six, um, cents per kilow hour Endeavor Energy is the bigger group which own Origin Energy or something like that I don't know Anyway way I don't own these things. They're the property of Endeavor Energy. and uh, yeah, so it's better to use that energy during the day when.

uh, otherwise. um, if you feed it back here, you get paid for it, but not as much as it cost you during the night when you're using up here. So this is like I think we're currently about 26 cents per kwatt hour? Um, plus a green uh tariff or something like that. Don't uh, quote me and we only get paid this one down here.

Um, 6 cents per kilowatt hour. So during the day we're going to change our weight, us usage habits a bit. Um, things like, um, you know, the dishwasher, the washing machine, and uh, some stuff and uh, some you know will heat up the house during the day and uh, stuff like that keep it warm while the Sun's actually producing energy. So uh, it should, um, really give us a uh, good benefit.

but yeah, um, you. you know you do have to change your usage habits a bit to get the uh, most benefit. um out of this thing during the day cuz this is a net metering system. It's not a growth grow gross, uh tariff, uh system.

So yeah, we get paid for the energy, the excess energy, only the excess that we export, not the whole lot. So there you go. We've still got our old uh, met one of our old meters in here, but that doesn't work at all. That's for our off peak electricity which is there's the um, off peak electricity controller as we saw, but we have gas.

um, hot water? We don't have off peak. there's my gas hot water tank. So there you go. Um, that is my new Soul system.

I Hope you like the video. If you want to discuss it, jump on over to the EV blog. Forum Best place to do it and uh, hopefully once. I get all the stats um connected to my sunny boy inverter.

Hopefully I will, uh, export that data uh live to the web or at least uh, daily and then uh, you can track how much via the web my panels are producing. Fantastic! Catch you next time! Um.