my landlord has finally given clearance for solar on my balcony, so I’m starting to think about it. I’m living in Germany, so according to the German regulations, I’m thinking about 800W (I guess that’s two panels each 400W each). Additionally, I’m considering getting a little battery. Here’s the rational: I have a minimum energy usage of around 70W. If I want to have that energy for the night (say, 14 hours), that adds up to around 1kW, for which batteries are pretty affordable by now. However, if I spend all the money, I want to have all the fun. So here’s what I would like to do:
Get solar panel, battery etc.
Get something like this meter to measure my apartment’s energy consumption.
Use Home Assistant for control to minimize energy consumption through my energy provider:
If apartment consumes X W, make sure that panels deliver X W to the apartment, and the rest to the battery
If panels can not provide enough energy, make sure that battery helps
So here’s my question: Does that make sense, and is it possible? And if both answers are yes: Has anybody built something like this? Care to share your (exact) hardware configuration, and maybe your approach or even some code?
I have similar plans but I plan to do it with an Easymeter Q3. That meter is supporting the EDL21 integration. Even though I could do this myself I will contract an electrician since I am renting the apartment and they probably want it done properly.
Unfortunately, I can’t give you any empirical values by myself. I find the concept of zero feed-in very interesting.
But in our 2-family house we have a average base load of 200 watts. The utilisation rate of the energy produced by our 800W balcony power plant is 92-95% on average. Unfortunately, this still makes a storage system economically unattractive in our case. :-/