The road to nirvana |
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My journey into Photography, Horology, and Audiophilia |
Going solar: My love and (a little) hate with EcoFlow
October 1, 2024
Continuation from previous page...
The PowerStream configuration
There are a few PowerStream settings that I need to hone in to maximize its utilization and not to pester the grid with excess power.
Without a battery (or Powerstation), the operating mode of the PowerStream is "Prioritize power supply" mode. In this mode, the "Feed-in" setting play a crucial role to avoid feeding to the grid.
The preset Household power demand = sum of the Base load and all Smart Plug consumption. In my case, the Base load is set to 80 and my refrigerator connected to the Smart Plug fluctuates between 0W to 148W.
Since I don't have the PowerStream connected to a battery, I rephrased the paragraph from the manual to:
The microinverter powers the home using solar generation. If the PV input exceeds the demand for appliances, excess generation is wasted when Feed-in Control is on, but excess generation will be fed to the power grid when Feed-in Control is off.
This sounds like the perfect solution for my needs at the moment, until I add a battery.
I noted this observation one sunny day where the solar production is about 112W. The left photo shows solar input only at 81W (80W Base load and 1W Smart Plug consumption) therefore, the excess is wasted as the manual said.
The right photo show that when the refrigerator kicked in, demand increased by 139W prompting the microinverter to extract all Solar input (112W) which is not enough (80W + 139W > 112W) needing 107W from the grid to meet the Household power demand.
The "Solar" data in the Space screen maybe confusing because it will only show what your Base load value is set to even when there's actually more than that being harvested, if no Smart Plugs draw power.
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Exactly what I need! But wait there's more, it's leaking to the grid!
Does it mean my consumption is less than the set Base load? I asked Europe support to explain what has happened and their reply was:
"This is caused by the power generated by the solar energy exceeding the power set by the base load."
Therefore, I really need to get a battery where I can dump the excess solar input.
I was dilly-dallying the purchase of a Delta 2 Powerstation as I've read about the new Delta 3 Powerstation being reviewed by influencers already, but is not yet available locally. I was again browsing the Altitude Digital website when I noticed the Delta 2 Smart extra battery on sale so I wasted no time and ordered these:
Completing the setup, continued on next page...
