today we're looking at the eddi microgeneration energy diverter by my energy okay sounds technical
before we start so the glasses are on nice and early gordon explain the rig you've built behind
me here okay it's really not that complicated again i know you get scared when you see a display
buttons in an aerial but this is quite a simple concept this device here the Eddi looks at what's
been generated by say a solar panel or possibly a wind turbine and intelligently diverts that into
what we've mocked up here is an immersion here cunningly disguised as a kettle which means we
get a drink at the end of the video and yeah and it matches the power generated by the renewables
and puts that into the hot water cylinder right so this area here is the airing cupboard yeah
this is a 20 amp double pole switch with a flex that normally would go into your immersion heater
effectively you've cut that flex and you've inserted the Eddi i know we've got a kettle
but it's a good way of displaying the actual heating up of water and you said it's going
to divert the energy so my solar panels now are going to heat my hot water system how does that
work yeah well let's have a little closer look at an example so if we bring in the hand cam we'll
have a look at what's going on on the display here let's have a look so i'll say at the moment
that our display here so this is our solar panel this is the grid connection our water heater here
so the minute nothing's happening our house is in the neutral state we're not using any power
we're not exporting any power supply miraculously turn on the sun which is a miracle for us here
a lot of the time so off camera this oh is now shining and producing 800 watts of energy and
that is at the moment being diverted to the grid now that is not an attractive option at
the moment with the feed-in tariffs being pretty low the best option is to use that power yourself
so that's what's happening there so I'm now going to switch on our immersion heater
okay so the message is on so now you can see that the power that was going to the grid is now
diverting to our uh kettle slash immersion heater and and that will gradually start to heat up
right okay so let's come back out there so i'll always one for clarifying things here
this is probably a 1.8 kilowatt kettle and or three kilowatt immersion here and we only had 800
watts of energy being produced by our mimicked solar panel and it only sent that amount in
now what's that going to mean to heating of the water process okay so it will only heat as fast
as the amount of solar energy that's available to to put into that cylinder um which yeah obviously
depending on the time of year depending on how sunny it is that would be a very wet but obviously
if you're out all day that can take a long time and you've got a long time
of course yeah so if i'm out of work and i want to harness the energy of my solar panels over a
slow period of time maybe half a day or whatever i've actually diverted all that energy into my
immersion here and i come on hot water brilliant and i've got that for free and i've been exporting
and we know other tariffs are not all that good at the moment for exporting energy however the other
problem comes when i'm at home perhaps at the weekend and we've used all the hot water and i've
got sunlight might only be in 800 watts that's going to take a little while to heat up yeah well
there is a boost function so again gary bring the bring the camera in approach the boost function
select heater one and you can see now it's drawn in some additional power from the grid
to turbo charge the kettle to its maximum which is 1.8 kilowatts and now we can hear the cattle
boiling away that was clear absolutely clear as day when it you mean so by doing it we it
speeded up so much quicker we couldn't hear it in the early part of the presentation was taking
700 or eight hundred watts but time for a cup of tea almost done however how does it know which
electricity comes from say the solar and which is coming in from the mains okay so if you switch the
switch the kettle off gary slash immersion here you'll see we've got this we've mocked up this
current transformer here right which would go around the main incoming supply one of your tails
either line the neutral that sets the direction it goes in but that monitors the amount of power
flowing to and from the grid right so let's put it into concept for the people watching it
the likelihood of having a meter tail which this is here is a meter tail directly under your eddy
is probably remote and we've also got a small piece of cable and notice you've cut off a fair
amount of cable that could have got us probably closer to where the metering is or you could have
extended that cable but what if that was a real tricky process and that might be the thing you
know that's stopping you having the eddy installed okay so the clue here a little aerial on the top
my energy make a really clever piece of kit called the Harvi right and that harvests
the power generated by the magnetic field and the current transformer right assigned a small radio
signal with that data across the devices like this the myenergi or the Zappi we've seen in a
previous video so you're saying to me if i had the harvey located close to where my metered houses
my CT (current transformer) clipped onto my the line or neutral whichever one you wanted to choose
it would send the radio frequency signal to here means i didn't have to wire it back
yeah exactly that's that's the really clever bit but i thought about everything
now i'm a little bit nervous i'm going to leave the glasses on can we take the cover off and
have a look at the clever stuff inside yeah i'll have a look because there's a few other secrets
buried inside in the electronics i'll isolate the supply right so what do you what that cover so
this is the bit i'm really interested in i'm hoping it's simple i'm hoping because
you've cut this flex it's not going to be a a difficult task but with the CT and that gun's
going to hopefully explain to me what's going on inside the Eddi okay so cover's nearly off
there's gonna be a hand cam time for us so here we go so do you want to take the cover
oh yeah oh there's lots of green boards okay another way with that so let's just have a
real closer look and maybe you can explain some of that stuff for me Gordon yeah okay so first
you'll see there is a lot of electronics in here and it's it's all made in the UK by Myenergi
so the first thing you've probably noticed is quite a robust heat sink on the back
yes because this device does some switching but just more than switching actually so with a lot of
an easy way to think of this is a bit like a dimmer right so it's regulating the power flow
into the international immersion heater right but this does this in a really clever way with
something Mienergy called a Varisine technology so it uses a basically chops the waveform up
uh to regulate that power flow, not in the way a dimmer would do that quite crudely and very sharp
edges on either the leading or the trailing edge this technology the advantage of it is it's almost
silent in its operation where other versions of this type of technology would be quite noisy
certainly not something you want sitting in your air in cupboard right okay disturbing
your sleep right from the electrician's point of view talk me through these connections then okay
so the connection's very simple i like that already there you go here's the input okay
and here's the output that's it well so you will notice on the output here there's an option for a
second heater oh yeah so say in a water cylinder you may have the top around the bottom here you
can prioritize obviously the top one to get some instant hot water but you may have another one
that once that one is up to temperature you can switch to the lower heater to obviously power up
the whole tank okay how many amps is it rated out so this is 16 amps or about 3.8 kilowatts
okay yeah i can see that just there yeah and just explain the ct formula okay so
obviously the bit where it gets its information about what's happening in their supply and use of
power to the house we need this small current transformer connection here so that goes down
to here that's a mimic tail for us yeah and we've just got two simple connections there
in order to make that connection yeah so the word on the heating obviously this is a very robust
unit it is designed to go in the cupboard where possibly the immersion heater could be and if that
that tank's not well insulated uh you know you're gonna you don't want uh you don't want the actual
electronics itself affected by the heat from that so that's why it's got a very robust heat
sink on there it looks very clever but from the electrician's point of view i'd like to say it's
very simple to connect yeah so it's very very simple to connect uh but you know does that the
whole wealth of things that mileage you make goes behind it you can add an expansion card to it so
if you want to actually monitor the temperature in the tank using this unit you can add an expansion
card and put some thermocouples okay into the into the central heating tank to regulate the
exact temperature of the water right or trigger some other remote devices okay so what's nice
is the technology for my energy is the very complicated bit and back to the electrician
i've got a supply cable coming in i've got a supply out to my immersion heater very simple
and two connections to a ct which i can hard wire all the way to my tails or i can use the Harvi
that we suggested earlier on yeah it gets even simpler gary oh please even a switch underneath
if you don't want to work there is an app that goes with it you can control all this from an app
but if you if you get into a little bit of a panic and you just need some hot water now you
can just flick on a small bypass switch underneath or switch the unit off underneath it as well right
okay so thought of everything i would suggest yeah so obviously the primary target for this
is water heating but it will work with anything with a resistive element so you don't necessarily
want to be trying to control things that have electronic timers in line with them because
you reduce the power and alter the power flow to you could affect that but you could use this with
underfloor heating we've had tails that people even use it to control electric argus which can
be an energy millstone for the owners so great advantage there uh or storage heaters as well
okay so that's brilliant so that's harnessing the energy that you've produced yourself
either by solar or wind in order to divert it in this case into a hot water system making sure
that you take every penny that you possibly can of that energy and keep it running exporting it
so team efixx as well as our friends at myenergi are always interested in your comments have you
fit the eddy before have you fitted a harvey before have you fitted any other products from my
energy such as the zappi 2 ev charger you haven't seen that video i recommend you check that one out
on the channel as well and we will try and get back to as many of these comments as we can you