Boosting battery charging by measuring when power goes to the Grid

[dawsonnick]

Hello everyone,

This one is a little tricky and I don't know if it can actually be done but here goes!

I have 21 panels in my solar installation but they have been split into two different arrays ( by the installer who insisted that it is better this way for redundancy) with 11 panels feeding my Imeon inverter to which my 5 X 2.5kWh batteries (12kWh total) are connected anf with the other 10 panels connected to Enphase micro inverters which feed the house with excess going directly to the grid.

Anything going to the grid is essentially wasted power especially when I have a battery bank that could use it.

I live in France and have a Linky meter which measures the amount of electricity I use along with how much I produce.

Surely there must be a way to measure when I am producing more than I need (from Enphase) and, when that is the case, tell the Imeon inverter to push that volume of electricity into the battery bank (should it not be full).

I have read about shunt meters, clamp meters, Home Assistant and various other solutions but am I fantasising that there is a solution out there thay won't cost a fortune anf works?

..and if there is - what is it?

As always, thank you in anticipation!

Nick

 

[binky]

Think you will struggle because of different makes of inverter.

In theory, your Ineon should have grid monitoring software to divert surplus energy into the battery, so if the Enphase is exporting surplus to the grid, it should charge the battery rather than export aswell. But what you want is both to put surplus energy into the battery. I think you need to talk to Ineon, or perhaps find an Ineon group on social media, to see if there's a software setting you can tweak to achieve this. It should be able to see grid voltage, the Enphase will also see this and output a higher voltage, so somehow you need to be able to get the Ineon to recognise the voltage differential between grid and Enphase output as surplus energy. It might just be a case of it sees export and charges battery anyway???

 

[dawsonnick]

Thank you.

I have now asked the same question of Imeon directly - let's see what their response is.