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The next phase in my Setup.


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Complements to the new year for every body , my your success end up being boring to you all :)

Its been a while since I posted anything and to be honest I have not spend enough time on Pf but in my defense I had quite a bit on my fork. The place that we bought two years back was/is quite old and it still has those horrible red semi backed clay bricks. When I started with my Solar project I knew that the houses wiring was in a very shabby state but at that time there was not enough time or tom to redo it and I also had some "plans" that I wanted to figure before I started with the project. So almost two years later I had all my plans and material to grab the wires and start pulling. 

Now my wire work is not nearly as good as some of the folks stuff that I saw here but it works and it is safe and that is the most important part.

This was what the DB looked like before I started

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As I also wanted to introduce some home automation into the house I knew that I would need to install a bigger DB and as it would be a DC/AC system two DB's would be better and those things are flippen duur. So I had to shop a while to get something that would fit my budget :rolleyes:.

This is what I came up with. The Box and the left is the controller board where I receive all the inputs and on the right the AC side with all the relays and cb's. I ended up using ducting to run the wires down the wall as it would look neater when it was all done bit it does make the wire management tricky also I did not keep in mind that the wires came from the top and the space between the CB and the top end was a bit close but it worked with some slow working.  Take note of the "nest" on the right. I just could get all those wires neatly lined up. Lucy for me the covers takes care of that.

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Gone is all those wires!!!

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Closeup of the CB's and the labeling. As I redid every thing I made a point of marking all the wires so that I could label them afterwords. This makes things a lot easier in the future

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The box with all the bits and pieces added 

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This is just a quick view of the system. I still run emon for the data collection.

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All the best 

Paul

 

 

 

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Job well done Paul.

I think most of us who went the same route knows how long things like this take and the amount of effort and planning needed to get this far.

IMO you took the right approach and with your labelling and all, future fault diagnosis and tracing would be a breeze.

One small thing though: (Call me anal :()

Main Bracker aka Main Breaker ;)

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3 hours ago, Noobie said:

what are you using to control the relay board?

I am using Arduino via MQTT and a mix of Openhab and NodeRed , on a Pi,  depending on what I need to do. For now its the most cost effective way of doing things. There are a few other protocols but that would push the costing up by an easy 300%. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Nice - I was going to get a 12v PSU but they are not cheap... ;(

How is your prepaid setup going - I seem to remember you switched from postpaid and I'm almost at that point... what meter did Eskom install?  I have an Infini and so am nervous of the feedback tripping the meter.

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I also looked at the 12 but since every thing in my system is running 5v it made more sense also I did not need to the step it down to 5 if I used 12v. The only thing was that I had to make up my own USB rail but that was easy enough thanks to Google. 

Prepaid s running well it is a Concord (I think) and as I remembered it you could not do back feed into it. But then I have a Axpert so no problems there :) 

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  • 2 years later...

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