Fronius has launched its new Energy Management Relay at Ecobuild 2012, designed to cater for the UK consumer’s growing interest in home energy management.
Recent surveys, such as that conducted by Good Energy, show that consumers that have installed PV are changing the way they use their energy, as well as paying attention to what time of day the power is utilised in order to make the most of when their system is generating renewable power.
As a result of this change in consumer behaviour, Fronius has developed an intelligent energy management system for its IG Plus and CL range of inverters. The solution allows the power hysteresis to be configured for the inverter, which means that switch on or off thresholds can be set directly on the inverter at a specified unit of power.
Joseph Clarke of Fronius explained: “Commonly, owners of solar PV systems will set a timer to allow electrical-heavy appliances to run during daylight hours. However, if the weather is cloudy then the panels won’t produce enough electricity to run the appliances and the consumer would have to draw additional energy from the grid at extra cost.”
“The best example of this is to feed the power into an immersion heater thus storing the energy as hot water during the sunlight hours which can then be used at any time. Installers can set the inverter so that when it delivers more than, for example 2000W of power, the relay output is activated on the signal card, and the immersion heater turns on. When production falls below 1800W, it is deactivated again, therefore at no point will power from the grid have been used,” Clarke explained.