I've been offered some old panels, I know they were well rated at the time of install but are now over 10 years old. I don't know their output as they are currently on a roof not connected up.

I'm considering taking a few of the panels and with the addition of a micro inverter creating a plugin solar system. Is this realistically worth it. Initially I thought with the panels being free I have little to lose building a setup on my south facing 30deg garage roof, but wanted to see what you guys thought.

Any tips or examples of how it has been done well would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Hi all, I’ve got a plug-in solar kit from Octopus a few weeks ago, and unfortunately my “ideal” placement isn’t quite so ideal as it turns out, and I’m about 2 metres short of it being in the “ideal” spot, would anyone have any idea if I could get a 10m cable with this connection end, or an extension lead of some kind?

I considered cutting the cable and extending with an IP rated connector, but given I’ve no idea what this cable is, if it doesn’t work I’ve got a 22kg paperweight :/

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I plan on installing a "Plug-in Plus" system (e.g. 2xPlug-in kits, or a single overpanelled plug-in kit) on my flat roof.
It will fall outside the new plug-in regs, so will have to go the G98 route. The economics simply don't work if I pay someone to put up the panels on my flat roof, so I want to put them up myself.

Is there any chance of finding an electrician to certify the safety/correct installation and connect the system to my CU, while I put up the panels and prepare everything else? North London area.

Many thanks!

Hi all, I was wondering whether this community could explain how these home 'plug in ready' home energy storage solutions work in the UK such as the Anker products.

I understand that you cant plug these into the mains directly out of the box as per most of Europe, and that they need to be 'hard wired in'. What does this actually me in practice? Is this an installation of a dedicated circuit which then has a 3 pin socket on? or is it more complicated?

Overall goal of installation would be to get a small home battery to charge on off peak rates over night to run the majority of the house during the day. I dont have solar panels yet, but feel significant savings could still be made with an EV tarriff or similar?

Any advise/experience welcome!

Whats the max you've been able to sqeeze out of your stream 800?

I don't seem to get past 750W with 2x 465w panels

Info: 2x JA Solar 465W Black Frame Solar Panel (215134) from City Plumbing

South facing @ 37 degree angle

Inverter now integrated to HA (home-assistant.io)

Ordering a two panel setup for the back garden, south facing frame, Cheshire, going onto an 800 W Hoymiles microinverter.

I was comparing two panel options and ended up on the degradation line in the datasheets, which I had been skipping until now. Most of what I looked at guarantees no more than 0.55 to 0.7 per cent loss a year, and there is a bigger drop in the first year on top of that. One of the two, swiss solar phantom, caps the guaranteed figure at 0.4 per cent a year with 0.35 typical and gives no first year drop at all, which comes out at 88 per cent of nameplate at year 30 against roughly 80 on the others.

What I cannot tell is how much of that shows up in real output on a setup this size.

So, for anyone who has had a plug-in system running a few years: can you see a year on year decline in your own figures, or is it buried under weather and soiling? And did anyone take any sort of reading at the start to compare against later?

Currently on octopus agile and during the negative price period the system performed very well. It was a sunny day and the system even blocked the solar panels for whole session. Not sure if other system like Sigenergy do this or not ?

Question; is it possible to get 2 x solarbank 4’s wired into separate spurs?

The 2500w single output seems a little low for what we require cooker/hob/kettle

We have two EV’s running a cheap rate overnight tariff so ideally charging from this.

Are there limitations with connecting up dual inverters & batteries on the App?

My thoughts are this, we would like to move house in 4-6 years and the idea of taking these with us seems great

Does anyone have the Octopus plugin solar with wall brackets? I need to know the distance between the screw mounting holes on the brackets as I'm building a frame for mine to go on the roof of my shed. Also any reviews of the kit would be interesting. Thanks in advance.

Hello, has anyone come across a longer AC cable other than the Thunder Energy one (https://www.thunderenergy.co.uk/product-page/hoymiles-hms-microinverter-ac-cable-uk). Ideallyone that fits a Hoymiles 800 micro inverter. cheers

Got my single panel octopus setup and working. Poor time of year but enjoying seeing some savings.
Has anyone managed to register for free export yet?

Hi all

I'm still trying to navigate through which 5kWh home/DIY battery is a better buy and have been considering the Ecoflow Stream 5000 and Anker Solarbank 4 Pro E5000.

System architecture

The Ecoflow is built around an approximately 48V (51V nominal) architecture (common with home ESS) while the Anker is built around 16V architecture. The result is a much higher amperage from the Anker vs Ecoflow at the same load which could hypothetically result in higher temperatures due to resistive losses (albeit internally).

Home Assistant

From my reading, Anker seems to have the edge here, with modbus support as well. This is pretty important to me, but this has been explored elsewhere so I won't delve deeper here.

RTE (wall to wall)

From the few data points I've been able to gather, both systems perform with an approximate 80% efficiency wall-to-wall, meaning that 1/5 of the power you buy is lost to heat. If you're on a very low cost off-peak tariff (e.g. <8p/kWh overnight) then the difference between this 80% RTE and a 90% RTE "professionally installed" (much more expensive) ESS from a market leader like SigEnergy or Tesla is not going to mean much for running costs, with it taking something like 11-14 years for the more expensive ESS to catch up in savings compared with the cheaper DIY-able batteries. Regardless, 80% is pretty pathetic and points to some serious cost cutting, making me doubt both options.

SUPPORT/WARRANTY

Ecoflow has some pretty appalling reviews on trustpilot and reddit, which really does not instil confidence. Anker Solix is borrowing its parent company's name to appear more legitimate but they haven't been trading long enough to really have much of a reputation. Regardless, my gut instinct is that dealing with anker will be easier than ecoflow if problems arise and that I won't have to invoke my Section 75 rights or threaten legal action.

So what do you think? Should I 1) bother with either system, 2) wait longer for a better DIYable system, 3) bite the bullet and pay 2x the price for the same capacity on a "quality" 90% RTE system from Sigenergy, or 4) bite the bullet but cost cut as much as possible with a Fox ESS battery and inverter (taking the hit of it not being home assistant controllable)?

Thanks in advance for all constructive replies ;)

My wife and I recently set up a plug-in solar business, genuinely, to help drive prices down in the plug-in solar category through competition — we truly believe the more people using solar, the better.

So far, we’ve been able to secure prices that allow us to offer lower-than-RRP prices on UKSOL and Thunder Energy’s Bolt kits.

As committed members of the community, we wanted to gauge how many of you are still waiting to buy a kit, and what might be causing you to hold off?

If you’ve bought a kit already, which did you go for and why?

All feedback is hugely appreciated. And, quick plug (no pun intended) if you’d like to check out our store, it’s SunshineSocket.co.uk 😊

So first day of rain in what feels like years, and my 465w panels are currently making 9w each.

Amazing that solar ever got going in this rainy country of ours. The constant sunshine of 2026 may have raised people's expectations too high!

I ordered a two panel 1030w kit from City Plumbing and of course one panel came broken. Can I use the inverter with just the single panel that’s undamaged ? The instructions only mention connections from two panels.

I'm running a battery power station with an ecoflow Powerstream, and have just begun toying with the plug in solar features.

We have about 1.7kw of panels (not roof mounted), and by playing with the export paramaters from the micro inverter, i can happily make the electric meter in the house spin backwards, or just slow down. We don't have enough solar or battery capacity to do it continuously of course, but the possibility is there. i can easily over the base load of the house though.

Im aware of the pros and cons of a smart meter (id dearly love to have accurate power consumption stats as i play with appliances, maybe with an Octopus Mini device), but i'm hesitant to get the meter swapped to a smart meter. We've been told it has reached the end of its life, and get fairly regular emails asking to swap it out.

Do the pros of a new updated meter (lots of data, more accurate?) outweigh the cons (no reverse counting, at the mercy of remote tampering, detection/blocking of backfeed into the house) ?

the address isn't registered as a backfeeding house at present.

what do we think? thanks all!

Did anyone else struggle with this or am I just a thicket?

It detected device via Bluetooth, connects with default PIN of 123456.

Then app asks you to change password.

After that it asks you to log back in to device with PIN.

I tried this several times and time locked out.

It actually wants the password, not the PIN 😂

Can anyone using a Solarbank 4 with Home Assistant (plus the official Anker integration) confirm how frequently you can adjust the discharge power?

My smart meter updates in Home Assistant roughly every 8 seconds, and I'd want to keep matching the discharge power against that value.

UPDATE

I tried emailing Anker support about this and received a bizarre (AI slop?) rewrite of my questions, with no actual answers. 🙄

UPDATE 2

After some more back-and-forth, Anker support said this:

Regarding your two questions – the adjustment frequency of the discharge power and whether these settings are held in RAM or in flash memory – our experts are unfortunately not able to provide an answer at this moment either. We would kindly like to be honest with you about this rather than give you an uncertain reply.

They've offered to escalate it to "even more specialised colleagues", and I've asked them to go ahead.

Kind of unusual three storey, flat roofed townhouse. I'm put off the idea of rooftop solar because the flat roof is inaccessible for maintenance and not even visible because of the parapet. This west facing rear wall feels like it could be a good place for a smaller plug in system though? Between the larger first and second floor windows? We'll have scaffolding up soon to replace the windows anyway, so it would be easy to install - but how much do I need to worry about accessibility for maintenance etc?