About solarprod (UK)

Know how much power you can use today

At 50–58° north, further poleward than every Australian capital, the gap between a sunny week and a cloudy one can be 5× rather than 1.5×. That makes the daily call harder, not easier. solarprod tells you, before you commit:

• Whether today covers the EV charge, the heat pump or the big load.
• How today’s choices leave the battery for tomorrow morning.
• What each export earns on your Smart Export Guarantee tariff, in pounds.

It runs on real Met Office and Open-Meteo forecasts, with confidence bands that widen the further out you look.

Get the savings of a VPP without giving up control

A virtual power plant pays you to let someone else run your battery. The rates are good. The catch is that they decide when it charges and when it empties, and you find out afterwards. solarprod gives you the first half without the second:

• We work out the week ahead for you: when to charge, when to hold, when to export. You do not have to think about it each day.
• The plan is built from your roof: the orientation and tilt of your panels, and the local forecast for your address. Most VPPs run a whole fleet of batteries against a market signal, and never look at whether your panels will be under cloud at 3pm.
• One press writes that schedule to your own inverter, as ordinary timers. Nothing of ours sits between you and your battery.
• Change, edit or delete any of it whenever you like. Timers you set by hand stay exactly where you put them; ones that came from your plan are labelled, so you can see which the next plan update will replace.
• No contract and no aggregator. Nobody else gets to decide your battery is needed at 6pm.

When the weather shifts, refresh the schedule with one press. Available today for Tesla, Deye and GoodWe inverters. With Sungrow and Victron inverters we can read your solar and battery data but can’t set timers yet. We’ll add more inverters as our users ask for them.

Get a forecast that allows for cold panels

Cold weather gives UK and Irish panels a bonus that most calculators leave out. A clear winter morning at 0 °C delivers around 5 % more than nameplate, and a frosty Scottish morning at −5 °C can be 8–9 % over. Summer runs the other way: even a mild 22 °C day pushes cells into the high 40s under bright sun and shaves a few percent off.

We track this hour by hour from the real ambient temperature in your forecast, which for UK installs is good news on annual totals: the cold bonus partly offsets the dark winter. You can switch it off if you want the old “25 °C lab reference” answer to compare against another tool.

Work out whether your solar can cover a heat pump or an EV

A 7 kW charger pulls more than the entire daytime load of a typical UK home, and a heat pump on a cold December evening runs for hours. solarprod models both as load profiles and charging windows, so you can see before you buy whether your existing array can plausibly cover them, and where the gaps fall.

See whether you could live off the grid

We play a real year of weather over your roof, day by day, carrying the battery over each night. You get:

• The days you would have run out, and how badly. At these latitudes it is rarely one bad day. It is a dark, still fortnight in December, and an average year never contains one.
• A calendar of the year, so you can see at a glance whether it is the whole winter or the odd scattered week. Different problems, different fixes.
• What a generator would cost. When it starts, how long it runs, and roughly the year’s petrol. A second calendar shows the thirsty days.
• More panels, bigger battery, or a generator? Answered for your roof and your latitude, not by a rule of thumb.

Croft, barn conversion, narrowboat or a place at the end of a very long track: if the connection charge is the reason you are asking, this answers it with your own weather rather than a national average.

Plan a trip across Europe before you go

A campervan in the Scottish highlands in October is a different solar problem to the same van in Provence in July. Ahead of time you can:

• See which stops have enough sun for your fridge, lights and occasional inverter use.
• Compare fixed panels against folding ones you can angle at the winter sun.
• Decide whether tonight needs the diesel heater or the battery, given the next two days of forecast.
• Right-size before you buy: battery, panel watts, and enough margin for a Welsh October.

Contact

General enquiries, feedback or feature requests: [email protected].

Product help, how-to questions or bug reports: [email protected].