I created a Slack-bot that reports excess solar power production

david3217

Hello everyone,

I live in a small apartment complex with three other families. We installed additional PV-panels last summer and now that spring is here, we're starting to produce quite a healthy bit of electricity. The issue is, that the sun shines during the day, when everybody is at work or at school, so most of the energy consumption happens outside the peak production hours.

I'm evaluating how to store the electricity or automate appliances (washing machines, air conditioning etc.) to go on when we produce electricity in excess. My initial approach was to start educating our residents by creating a Slack bot that posts to our Slack channel with the amount of being sold to the network.

So now I've opened the pandora's box We're producing already at March (in Finland) and excess of 6kW during peak hours (approx 30kWh during a sunny day), so the 5 min interval of sending the message might be a bit too much. At least the people will know that they should schedule their washing machines and AC's to those hours!

But next up, trying to automate stuff. I've ordered a Melissa, a wifi attached IR "thing" that can control your AC unit. I'm hoping at some point to push the excess energy into our water heater with two 3kW heating elements.

Thank you!

Photowhit

I take it this iis a grid tied system, but you want to use the energy when produced because you are only paid wholesale for energy back fed into the grid?