Thread: Solar

Hi

I have a very small solar array I.e. 2 panels. On the pergola over my pond.

If you want the pond to run entirely on solar panels, then you will need quite a few panels (more than most people realise). Because they will need to produce enough power, even on cloudy days in the winter, to run the pond during the day and charge batteries at the same time, so that they have enough capacity to keep the pond running over night. Which is easy in summer but a tall order in winter.

My approach was rather than having off grid inverters, mine are grid tied. This means they will cover what the pond needs, and if they produce more than the pond needs (which is always the case whenever it's sunny) then it'll feed back into my house.

And if the panels produce more than the pond and the whole house uses as well (which is alot of the time when it's sunny... providing I don't have any high wattage appliances on) then any excess Is fed back into the grid.

However as this is DIY, even though I got an electrician to wire it in to my consumer unit and informed my network distributor about the panels (it's a requirement I you have anything that feeds power back into the grid), my energy provider wont pay me any seg payments for anything I export. This is because when you sign up to your energy supplier for a feed in/seg payments, they will ask for the MSC number.

If you want to get paid for what you export to the grid, then it needs to be installed, or at least signed off, by an msc certified installer.

So it will depend on how much energy your pond uses, how much space you have available for the panels and what end result you want to achieve.

But in short I would recommend it. For example at the moment the 2 panels I have are covering my whole house and pond etc and is exporting about 100 watts excess energy back into the grid.

I only went for 2 panels because I figured if I got more panels, I'd be spending more money on panels that will mostly be sending excess power to the grid without getting paid for it. So kept it small.

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