Good morning
I’m new to solar (fitted Tuesday) and I’ve been monitoring everything and I’ve noticed I keep getting spikes of demanded power when nothing is being used ?. (Over night and when no one is at home)
Some times it’s very high 2kv.
I’m trying to work out what’s using this or is there a problem?
Can I please have advice on this.
Oversonneil Welcome to the forum.
That pattern is typical of some water heating. Do you have your emersion heater switched on or a kettle with a keep warm option? Next it could be some underfloor heating? Or possibly an EV connected but already fully charged? One thing to be aware of is that the graph is only updated every 5 minutes so what looks like wide spikes of usage could be just a single high reading and not really consuming any significant energy.
Fridge/freezer cutting in?
Qooker doing top up?
Washing machine or dishwasher on long cycle?
It might be a high power spike kW but may not be much energy kWhr
I get intermittent peaks like that from my freezers - there is a quick peak when the compressor kicks in - but I usually only get one or two a day unless I've been opening them up a lot or freezing fresh stuff. You don't notice them during the day , but they really stand out overnight
Two kilowatts is typical of some form of heating activity, either an oven, kettle, water heater or space heater.
Does you have a combination boiler which perhaps has a small tank which it keeps hot for an instant response to hot water demand? Also check your hot water tank and/or immersion heater.
Or something like a Quooker tap?
Those spikes are typically badly timed snapshots of whats going on as portal refreshes at intervals, it could have been a snapshot as fridge freezer kicked on like others said or any number of things such as hair dryer, hoover, kettle.
If you are familiar with home assistant or are thinking about using it to monitor things you can change the refresh interval to 1 minute (default I believe is 5 minutes) or you can ask Givenergy to increase the refresh rate to 1 minute but this can reset when updating.
If you have a smart meter and are with octopus you can go back from days before you got solar and you should see uneven usage there as well, its the curse of being able to see whats going on 😃
Do you have some kind of pumped septic tank system? We had a chart looking very much like that, as groundwater was leaking into the tank, causing the pump to run in the middle of the night at regular intervals.
Looks like around 1500W after you take the base load out of the picture.