Automating immersion heater from Solar Voltaic ?

[Marcus Warrington <marcus.warrington@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a college at work who is having a Solar Voltaic array
installed, possibly as much as 6.6kw but maybe just 4kw, depends on the
network side of things;

Assuming during daylight hours he is over-generating 2-3 Kwh, let's say to
be on the safe side 2kw routinely.

What he want to do is, when he is definitely generating excess power, over
2kw, to remotely switch on a 2kw immersion heater, this should in theory be
enough to heat the tank all through the 8 'summer' months, and therefore
stopping him using ANY gas during that period.

The general approach would be;

Using something like the ENV Energy Monitor and a small app which checks
the current over-production and assuming it hits a user defined threshold,
set to 1kw or 2kw or 2.7kw (depending on your chosen immersion heater),
sends a signal to switch on the immersion heater.

So that's the theory but what about implementation , anyone got any
recommendations I'm guessing he'd need a pretty beefy relay to switch a 2kw
immersion heater.

Marcus



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