In the summer of 2024, I got a solar plant installed into our house. I spent a lot of time researching the technologies and really fell in love with Victron-based ESS systems. I picked Pešek & Mudra to built it and I could not have chosen better. Amazing company, full of people who really know their stuff. And could be proud of what they do.

It’s a 3-phase, full-backup system, connected to the grid as a source of “extra energy”, when there is not enough solar of the inverters are overloaded due to too many appliances running concurrently.

It has 7.2 kWp of panels on our main roof, 16x 450 Wp panels arranged as 2 strings of 2p4s, facing south-west-west (azimuth of 208 degrees), then 10,65 kWh of Pylontech batteries (3x US3000C), all bound together using 3 MultiPlus II inverters / chargers and two 250/70 MTTP chargers. We also got a PLC installed from them, which is feeding the excess solar energy into our 300 liter water tank, used for the house. We sell any extra energy to the grid using spot prices, the income is negligible, but better than leaving it on the roof nothing. I plan to experiment with Victron DESS, so hopefully I’ll get all of this a bit optimized.

The experience has been great so far. We cover about 75% of our consumption with solar over the summer, we’ll see how it fares over the winter, where more grid will be used as, expected. I’ll share some live stats here, once I set up the VRM sharing.

We also got an EV charger installed, but with no EV yet, it’s only used by friends coming to visit from time to time. I need to make proper calculations on the “ROI” of an EV. A car is never an “investment” of course, but I just need to bend the numbers a bit, to justify the purchase price at least a bit :-)

It was not all sunny for us in this area. It’s actually our second solar power plant being installed on our house. To have something special, I first (unknowingly of course) chose a very “innovative” and shitty company, being recommended by an “expert” which I trusted at the time. I guess he did not vet them enough either before starting to recommend them. The company was extremely incapable, just riding on the ware of solar popularity in Czechia in 2022. After 2 years battling them, most of that time waiting on laywers and courts, we got a court decision where they agreed to take the whole thing back, at their expense, and return us the money. We were still in the red, for various out-of-pocket costs, but at the time I was glad it was finally getting somewhere, so I was fine to make a compromise. Whew, what an experience, but worth every penny it cost us on lawyers and forensic experts :-)