Answer:

Yes, you can do that without any problems, and we explain below what it entails concretely.

Production fuses mean that you have separate meter fuses for your property's electricity production facility and the consumption part of the property. The purpose of this is to be able to produce and sell more electricity to the grid than what you pay for in fuse size. Usually, you only pay a monthly fee for the size of the consumption fuse (e.g., 16A) but have a higher production fuse (e.g., 25A), based on the cable you have to the property or the power the grid operator allows. This production fuse costs nothing extra (except for installation and any connection fees) and allows you to sell more produced electricity to the grid. Different grid companies have different policies regarding this and whether they support this concept or not. The image below shows how it works conceptually.

When it comes to Ferroamp's EnergyHub system, you get more advantages compared to a system that only produces solar power, so there are more considerations to take into account when making your choice.

Option 1: If you build the system with a single EnergyHub and choose to place it behind a production fuse, you will lose certain functions that you would otherwise have access to when choosing only one meter fuse for both consumption and production.

Ferroamp's system offers many functions besides solar power production itself. For example, batteries and phase balancing are integrated functions that can be used for many purposes. Batteries increase self-consumption of solar power, reduce energy costs by charging when electricity is cheap and discharging when prices are high, and reduce grid costs by shaving peak loads and participating in grid support services. Phase balancing enables balancing your power intake from the grid so that main fuses do not trip unnecessarily and ensures that electric vehicle charging is as optimized as possible.

The first thing to consider here is that with a production fuse, you will never be able to consume all your produced peak power from the solar power system at once. Your meter fuse becomes the bottleneck as it is often smaller than the production fuse. This can be solved by storing the electricity in a battery instead of selling it directly to the grid to be used at a later time, so you don't need to buy back the same electricity you produced earlier in the day.

The second thing to consider is that if you place your EnergyHub behind a production fuse, you lose phase balancing of your meter fuse. The current passing through your meter fuse will not be balanced, and there is a risk that the fuse will trip if the load is higher than what the fuse can handle.

Option 2: If you choose to build the system with a standard meter fuse for both consumption and production, the situation becomes a bit different. Then you get full access to all the functions that the EnergyHub system offers, including phase balancing for your meter fuse. However, there is also a risk that you will need to pay a higher fuse tariff if you really want to sell out maximum power to the grid at once.

An alternative here is to have a lower meter fuse but at the same time have a battery to store surplus energy (instead of selling it directly), which is then sold or consumed at a later time.

Option 3: Ferroamp offers solutions for connecting multiple EnergyHubs in a local DC grid, which gives you a third alternative. Firstly, the system is adaptable physically over time, but it is also controllable as most of the control can be influenced from our portal via software. With two or more EnergyHubs, you can both expand your system even further and become more independent during days when the sun is not producing at maximum capacity. At the same time, you benefit from controlling the flow across your meter fuse for the lowest possible grid cost with phase balancing. 

Example:

An example is a house with a meter fuse of 16A for all the electricity they consume, but a production fuse of 35-50A for the electricity that can be produced from the solar power system. The electricity consumed during solar production will pass through the consumption fuse but is, of course, limited by the size of the consumption fuse.

We constantly want to improve the content in the Knowledge Database and would appreciate it if you give feedback on our articles. Does all the information exist, is there anything that needs to be clarified or is there any information that is missing that would help installing or using the EnergyHub system in general? You can give us feedback by choosing if the article was helpful or not in the options below. 

If you need to get in contact with Ferroamp's Technical Support or if you have any questions about the system, you can do so by creating a ticket here.