Storing our home-grown power!

It’s been some time in the planning, but the end of May saw a major milestone in the ‘organic growth’ of our energy system at East Cambusmoon Farm with the addition of battery storage to store our excess solar power during the day to use at night! Thanks to our electrician, a day with a digger to lay 50m of new cable and a perfect install of the 3 x Tesla Powerwalls, we’ve brought our 22kW of PV across 3 separate system into single ‘hub’ where power is collected, stored and distributed across our all-electric farm.

We’re fortunate in having a 3-phase electricity supply, so that our consumption and solar power generation are broadly balanced across all phases with 1 x Powerwall per phase. We had to get permission from our electricity network operator SSE to install the batteries, but also took the opportunity to add another 3kW of solar to increase our energy independence.

We anticipate that we should be >90% 'self powered' for 6 months of the year going forward, and in the two weeks since the batteries were installed we have only imported about £3 worth of electricity from the grid. Not bad for a house, two holiday cottages, an office, 3 sheds & an electric car...plus of course the 10% of our guests who charge their EVs here!