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Solar equipment and installer prices
Johannvdm posted a topic in Starting In Solar? Feel free to introduce yourself,
Hi Guys I am new to the forum. I need some help here I am based near Alexander Bay. I am on a farmstead on the river my electriciry bill and loadshedding is killing me... my montly usage is average 62400 units of electricity per month I do a little farming but my main power consumption is my hatchery this has to run 24 hours per day I breed Austrolops and Rhode Island white chickens and a couple of quail breeds some are imported and not common in SA my main problem is power consumption and loadshedding I have lost a lot of eggs!! This is costing me a huge amount of money in losses and income... I have been following the forum for a couple of months and decided to join as a member. I have a limited budget of arround 500k I know its not a lot but thats my limit. I need a solar power solution with battery backup to save my farming opperation. I have read a lot about Sunsynk inverters and Victron inverters on the forum also the pylontech batteries. The problem I have is that Iam close to the coast and we have a lot of cloud cover through out the year and I don't want to waste my money I need a sound solution I would even consider wind power some times the wind can blow strong here I have looked at Tessup and EKalahari wind turbines I must say that the Vertical axis turbines by Ekalahari look very tempting to me. So with all this said I need some quotes on solar equipment and wind power and what would be advisable a local company in Alexander bay has quoted me for a system and they seem very expensive so good sound advice would be appreciated. I also need advice if I should try to install the system myself or do you recommend good installers. I have lots of north facing steel roof space available and my eskom power connection is three phase I run the hatchery and a borehole and basic houshold appliances my main power consumption is the hatchery my house only uses 18 units per day the rest is for the farming opperation. Thank you I am a desperate farmer..-
- 15 replies
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Shadowed for ages and jumped today
Guss posted a topic in Starting In Solar? Feel free to introduce yourself,
Hi
Dreaming about solar... not because of Escom, but because it's cool stuff. Never got so far to make the jump. The >100K always found another place where it was spend (sometimes on very big white elephants).
Today, I made the dive and transferred the payment of my first solar system. (With luck on my side, I will be dead before the panels read their end of life)
Sunsynk 8
6.4 BSL Bull
JA Solar 405 Mono's
and all the other related goodiest
A very big thank you to the guys from Power Forum Store for the good prices, good courier costs and excellent service.
I will start a post on my build so that other can see how a newbie tries to figure out all this nice goodies.
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- 10 replies
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New VRM Portal
stoic posted a topic in General Discussion,
I'm liking the new VRM Portal interface.
Do i need to run some updates on my venus, inverters and charger after the portal update?-
- 7 replies
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Newbie-ish
Mad Mike posted a topic in Starting In Solar? Feel free to introduce yourself,
Been following this forum from the shadows and quietly watching and learning. Finally I took the plunge!
Bought 120kg of laptop batteries ( areal leap of faith!), 3 Liitokalla Battery capacity tester, 4 lithium battery chargers, pliers, soldering gun, solder, PVC piping (initial battery holders), 5x4 18650 holders from china, 7s BMS from china, server cabinet, multimeter, glass fuses and the list goes on and on!
The hardware at hand was, 24V 2400W inline UPS and an unlimited amount of foolhardiness. I will post some pictures of the current temporary setup, was forced to put it in production to keep the lights on! The house has not burnt down just yet so i will push on in getting the system properly assembled and connected to the DB.-
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- 43 replies
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Axpert standby/off mode.
Chris Hobson posted a topic in Inverters,
After 5 years (yes one of those back burner projects) I am communicating with my Axpert using my own scripts. A Czech Axpert user, Josef Kriegelstein has a pair of commands MNCHGC1497 and MNCHGC1498 to cause the Axpert to go into standby mode and revert to normal. They look more like charging current commands.
I have used them to no success, getting a NAKss response from the inverter. Anyone had any success getting a inverter to switch off. I have a pair of inverters and after 6pm there is not much sense having both running.-
- 30 replies
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By AgroVenturesPeru · Posted
Hi, I thought I'd register as this forum came up a lot on my searches when looking for info about Pylontech and Narada batteries. Those are the only two LiFePo4 brands available here in Peru. The batteries are all 48v. So I thought I'd create an account. I'm trying to design a system around about 9-10kwh of daily use for a remote cabin in the high jungle. I've got Victron and Growatt for inverters/charge controllers. I'm not too keen on the prices of victron stuff as I'm on a pretty tight budget, so the Growatt is attractive. But, I want something that will work easily and not be a pain in the neck, and I don't want to have to modify anything for at least twenty years. I saw one verrrrrrry long post on here talking about Growatt with Pylontech. It sounds really complicated. Are the growatt units more compatible perhaps with the 48v 100ah Narada batteries? That would be the absolute cheapest option for me. It'd be great if that solution was optimal. Otherwise it sounds like the only surefire bet is to sell my first born and go with Pylontech + Narada. Any insights please? -
By gbyleveldt · Posted
There’s nothing to set up. The unlabeled ground connection on the backup output connects to a relay inside the Goodwe inverter that ties ground to neutral when the grid drops away. Someone on this forum actually showed the insides of this connection. For the life of me I can’t find it but I specifically remember seeing it, with a comment to the effect of “putting the debate to bed, with pictures” -
Busy with development of a wireless configuration programme. GUI for the first page is laid out (will fix the spacing once done). Now to start with the programming. -
By gbyleveldt · Posted
As I said above. Just go have a look at the Goodwe python stuff linked above. Pretty much all the hard work has been done already. No need to re-invent the wheel -
By gbyleveldt · Posted
That sounds...difficult. I simply used an app called tPacketCapture on an Android tablet that had PVMaster installed. Those saved captures were opened in Wireshark and it gave an idea of what was happening. Nice and simple. @mletenayactually used some hacking process to decompile the PVMaster app and managed to get much quicker results than I had in trying to decode the protocol. Be that as it may, the UDP protocol is 95% understood and documented currently, so I seriously doubt anyone will need to go the packet sniffing route again.
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