Charl Yazbek

Battery is shot,  R200k for new battery? - have 2 Leaf's, am looking for parts - i.e. to cannibalise- cheaper than to import parts! Fast charger, and 100% charge kills these batteries!! Got latest one with 10 bars for R50k, and spent another R30k to fix! Kids LOVE the "Golf Carts"! To date best zippiest car we have had

I have a similar problem but been doing some investigation and noting of events.  I live in a retirement complex.
What I have installed:
I have solar hot water heater. I have a gas stove and oven. Sunicom M5000h-48 48VDC Inverter  4.8KWH 48volt Deichmann Lithium-ion battery YLR48100. 6 * 550 watt solar panels on the roof facing north I live in Pretoria All globes are LED and total wattage is 95watt. I have two fridges - both inverter - and 1 deep freeze, rated A+ TV, Computers and other small non element items. Backup grid electricity for the geyser is not wired thru the inverter. What I have noticed.
When ever I turn on my electric kettle - 1600watt - the inverter switches  to use grid electricity.  This even happens mid day, cloud less sky an temp of 31C
About two weeks ago we had a power outage at the retirement village.  It started at 10H00 the Friday morning and power was restored at 15H30 on the Saturday afternoon. 29h30min of no power.  I only was aware of the power outage on Friday night when I went to check that all doors locked etc. and saw no street lights were on.  During the time of the power outage I used the TV extensively, probably 10 hours, boiled the kettle 5 times but used the gas stove to boil water after I realized that there was no grid power; used the micro wave 900watt for probably 15 minutes in total. My fridges were also on, Internet modem etc.  During the daylight hours there was full sun and the temperature in the high twenties and low thirties. Both my wife and I had a hot shower on Friday night, which can only have been hot water from the solar hot water system.
With the power outage, due to the prevailing circumstances, it has proved to me that the inverter and battery can handle my electricity needs without grid power backup.  
I can only think that there are settings in the inverter and/or battery that have been set incorrectly.  I would like these settings to be that Grid power is only used whjen the battery level reaches a certain level of discharge, whatever is recommended.  Having said all of that the installer of the hot water and solar power was a qualified electrician. 
Any advice would be welcome. 

Thanks very much for this.     I have downloaded the manual and extremely informative and got me spending a lot of time looking at YouTube and exploring the WWW.  I will have to get someone in to change the panels into 3 strings of 2 panels each.  
I am considering enhancing my solar hot water system of evacuated tubes with solar electricity and increasing the panels at the same time I change the string of panels.  Is there a topic on this on this forum, and if so how do I look for it?
 
Thanks again
 

Yes it switches on automatically. On my system if the battery is 99% and I have 400W or more generating from the PV's, the geyser heats up. I need to add that at 95% battery the AUX will switch off power to the geyser. On a hot day the aux switches on two or three times.

The marvellous part of my system is at the moment at 12h20 all the PylonTech and also the AGM batteries are full. Then once I get the alert, washing and tumble drying can start. No load on the batteries as demand is now supplied via PV and around 17h45 the Li-Ion batteries will kick back in. This means that effectively the AGM battery system works for around 4 hours a day, supplying the household and once full, adding extra amps to the PylonTechs. They rest for 24 hours. The PylonTechs will work from 17h45 up to 9 tomorrow when the cycle starts over.
This is depending on available PV yield. I have on cloudy days had this change only happen around 14h00 but to me this means the AGM batteries will last a long time, not being overworked.
Something I never even realised is that the change happens depending on PV availability 1st and then state of charge. As this is dynamic it happens witout intervention. 
Truly automated.

I have connected my Sunsynk auxilliary ourput to heat up my geyser as soon as the batteries are full and the PVs are generating more than 400W. This helps a great deal with idle time and keeps my geyser nice and hot. The same can be done with aircons on the grid side, if your Inverter can handle it. I have installed an 8KVa which can handle the amps easily.
 

Hi.
 
This is the exact reason why I designed and built my system with two PV arrays of 12 panels each covering a wider spectrum of daylight hour exposure with two sets of batteries, each with it's own inverter. Once the first set getting morning sun is full, it will swith ocer and charge the second via domestic grid and solar. Though my harvesting is greater I still have extra PV capacity to mine during the day, so I will expand with more batteries.

Even during the worst winter conditions I have not had any outage at all. The trick lies in my own designed "Frankenstein" Arduino controlled changeover system and a decent inverter ensuring no interruption during changeovers. 
SA gets a lot more useable sun than people realise
Regards

The incoming phases all are referenced to a common neutral, however each Earth Leakage device requires its own separate neutral bar for all devices connected "down stream" of the E/L unit.  As Johan mentioned, one can have an "interesting time sorting it all out". Especially if one has an older house where the electrics have been extended by multiple parties over the years.
The real fun starts when you have two circuits, that need to be separated, and they have a shared neutral wire in some well-hidden junction box.

The inverter needs its own neutral bar. You will have an interesting time sorting it all out. Inverters give the most interesting errors when the neutrals are mixed up. It also indicates house wiring problems which must be sorted before thing will run properly.
Btw, Id and mark all cables (I used heatshrink) before stripping and replacing the db.

Interesting, I thought all phases share the same neutral. Why is this?

Normal residential 3-phase electricity meters will correctly record total power usage even if you only use power on a single phase. It is recommended to divide the circuits/loads across the 3 phases so that there would be roughly the same load on each phase if all circuits/loads were in use, but in practice one never uses all loads at the same time.
I have a 3-phase supply but many of the houses in our street have a single phase supply. It looks like they try and balance things out by connecting houses, with single-phase supplies, roughly evenly across the phases.  We have had a couple of occasions where one phase has been down and only a few houses in the street were affected.
I have also installed my system on a single phase and have not run into any issues.
EDIT: The municipality generally wants the maximum possible current drawn on each phase to be roughly equal. It does not matter if you are currently using a relatively low un-balanced current.

There is no three-phase loads in the house I bought. It is biggish house at 500 m2 and as such a single-phase 63A was insufficient for the loads in the old days. Each phase was treated as a separate 63A supply to spread and balance the loads. 
But as things stand now, I actually have limited use for the three-phase supply and can easily get away with a single 63A supply. However, the municipality do not want to convert back to single-phase supply. I therefore still need to try and balance the three-phases as much as possible, but it turns out very difficult to do with low loads.
It also seem cheaper to have 3 x Victron Multiplus II units than a three-phase Victron, but I cannot see the use.

Sunsynk is testing their 12kw 3 phase inverters. Maybe try contacting one of their local agents to find out a release date for SA. 

Hot Water and DeepFreeze Graph... Today...
Yellow-Deep freeze on/Red Geyser Temp/Blue Deep freeze temp/Orange Geyser elements in use, ie just after 9am is step 1, just before 09h30 is step 2...etc...
 
Deep freeze temp is measured within 100mm of the top of the freezer, at -10C the bottom of the freezer is around -40 to -50 or thereabouts...
Green dot-Deep freeze compressor running/Blue border means under Auto System Control, the thermostat in the deep freeze is for safety/manual only...
E:3 denotes 3rd element step in geyser operation running at 933W Output...
Totalizer on top right is over the last 3 weeks, maybe a bit less, just for geyser itself....
I have set this up so that any kit that is turned on either manually or automatically beyond this available power then backs the geyser off a bit as required...
The Deep freeze also runs a bit harder under surplus conditions, bringing the temp further down... If I store hot, why not cold as well?
Cheers
E

Faced with the costs of "Wonder Gadgets" to heat water from excess solar availability, I have come up with a different way of doing it....
I have already had, for some time now, a raspberry pi hooked to my inverter monitoring and controlling various bits and bobs around the place...
One of my greatest frustrations is the "lost solar" power that is often available during the average day.... This hot water system but one small addition I have made to try and utilize this unused power.
I put in an order to a local (EL) company for a triple 220V geyser element. It wasn't as pricey as I expected. The 3 elements are 500W/750W/1000W respectively, all on a single screw in, standard fitting (with an extra long thermostat pocket as well, which reaches well beyond the ends of the elements.).
The long and the short of it is, using my pi/mqtt/fabricobbled system, I can get a pretty close estimate of what inverter/solar power is available beyond the immediate consumption at any given point in time...
Using a small "Sonoff" wifi switch, hot wired to a quad 10A relay board, a bit of Node-Red and some head scratching,  the net result is, well fantastic!
If there's 500W excess available, turn on the 500W element... Same for 750/1kw.... Need more? Turn them on in combination, to step in 8 steps, 0W to 2.25Kw  as needed... The extra deep pocket for the thermostat got a Sonoff with a DS18B20 temp sensor to feed info back into the mqtt as well.... (Yep, you can series the elements as well with a bit more head scratching to lower the wattages still further, but lower than 500W is a waste of time as I have found out...)
Safety? Sure... Using the existing Thermostat pocket in the geyser, there's a good old fashioned clicky-clicky rod slotted in... Hooked up to the common neutral of the 3 elements... If he's unhappily hot, everybody shuts down...
And... It works... Well!
Total cost of the additional bits was less than ZAR1K, its been running for about 6 months now and barring some really crappy weather, the household of 4 has used very little gas in the geyser system over the period...
Cheerz...
E
 
 

1) I don't see the reason to switch anything to gas unless that is your absolute favored way of cooking or you want to have redundancy solution in case your PV trips out. Heating anything, but especially water with gas is more expensive than solar or solar PV will ever be + it's polluting + potentially a fire/explosion hazard + you have to replace cylinders when they run out + gas will go up in price over life of your PV system. Rather get a little more PV and storage and some energy efficient appliances.
2) Parasitic loads can make up a large portion of our night time loads eating away at the battery capacity. Switch off and unplug everything that is not absolutely essential and you'll be astounded how much you can save. Even 300W over 10 hours x 30 days adds up to 90kWh over a month. I have wired TV, amplifier etc etc so that I can switch it off on the wall when we go to bed - just get rid of all those little red standby lights and you will save 100-300W easy.
3) Water heating - get a bigger tank and low-flo shower heads and use your PV to heat it up. Some days there won't be enough sun, that's when Eskom will have to step in.

The physics is easy: the specific heat of water is about 4.2 kJ/kg.  This means that 4.2 kW will heat 1 kg of water by 1C in 1 second.
More practically a 3kW element will heat a 150l geyser by 1 degree in 210 seconds, or about 17C in an hour.
These numbers do of course exclude heat required to warm up the geyser itself, as well as heat losses occurring during the heating. but they are relatively small.
 

Speaking of water as an energy storage medium, I was thinking of using a 1000ltr water tank to store heat energy in during the day to heat my house up at night.
My PV Panels are capable of generating a lot more power as my batteries are fully charged by 12:00, was thinking of what I could use the extra power for. 
1000ltr Flow bin can hold water up to 60c safely, can then circulate that through a water radiator in my house to heat it up (wishing now I have put in underfloor water pipes when I renovated) 
Alternatively was looking at a Thintank for water storage as a big heatsink in my house, the aren't too confident on it's ability to store water over 50c though. 
Just heating the water up using a submersible element during the day.
http://thintanks.co.za/
 

Just put the 3 panels in parallel.
The panel has a Vmpp of 42V and Voc of about 50V . 
 Your 100/50 can handle 1400 W max and can handle 100V MAX and require 5 V above Battery voltage to start the mppt - so that should be about 29-30V . The panels will operate well. Your amp limit is 50A and the three panels will operate at about 33A max . So you are ok . The  two panels in series are vary close to the max limit if open circuit and on cold days you would probably exceed it . 
With the three panels in parallel you also have 1200w  available that is within the spec of the MPPT . You are also limited by the original choice - a better option would have been 4 panels of 340 W probably but this should be still a ok setup .
Dont worry about the 5 W difference between the panel rating - panels derate over time and you will find on new panels that this is within the tolerance anyway you probably have on randomly selected panels . All those panels are assembled on the same line and with the flasing test at the end  the rating is assigned anyway . That is why you have families of panels with the same number with only the rating different. The component combination of the silicon wavers give the difference . In large solar panel installations such as PV grid installations this do become important . Not in this case .
Hope this help and good luck .
 
 
 
 

A simple rule of thumb.  You panels in parallel will always be equal to the lowest voltage and current.  In series it will add but will not deliver more than the lowest current.

Parr   you calculate  if you have 4 panels 8.9A, 9.1A 9.1A , 9.7 = 4 x 8.9A   If the V are equal then you can say 8.9 + 9.1 + 9.1 + 9.7A  very seldom this happens therefor the rule of thumb is simple V = lowest V and I = lowest x panels without getting to technical

Hi Paul Greeff, intelligently moving power from night time use to daytime when my panels are powered up is my pet project at the moment!  
I recently installed a 8KW Sunsynk inverter with 24 x 455W panels, 2 x 6kw/hr Bull Batteries. 
The batteries usually last me until about 22:00 after which I run on Eskom power until the sun comes up and I switch back to solar. 
My batteries are usually fully charged by 11:00 and I have surplus power after that.
I have an Intel Nuc which is connected to my Sunsynk via RS485 interface and collects live data regarding battery SOC, Inverter load and power from PV Panels, etc
The NUC is running Home Assistant, Sonoff LAN, Node Red, Influx DB & Grafana.
I have Sonoff switches on my lower power items and 63A eWelink Smart Breakers on my geysers, borehole, water heater etc
I am currently trying to work out how to set up Flows in Node Red to manage my loads and switch on heavy load devices on when the PV power production allows.
I was thinking of purchasing a 1000ltr wall water tank that I can heat up during the day with excess energy to provide radiant heat in my house at night.
  

I watched the P-Grid and at no time did it approach the MAX
The temperature stayed low (compared to the normal hot day where they an go to over 80)
You taking about 3 X 405w -  connect them and watch the data, going into winter you not going to have a problem, but please do contact technical support to share your concerns / get their suggestions.
I have found a dramatic reduction in power generated over the last few weeks as the sun weakens.
Please let me know what you find?

Hi
The SunSynk/Deye Inverters are true hybrid Inverters that can either automatically start your generator if it supports it - or you can manually start it and feed the power in via the AUX port on the Inverter - You have many options to choose from . You can also put your entire house on inverter if you wanted to if you do not want to split out the loads . 
I have the 8 KW Deye Inverter with 22 X 415 W panels and 20 KW of Battery (2 X Dyness F10 Powerboxes) so my whole DB is on the inverter .
Also have a 5500W generator that I manually start if the battery is flat , the sun does not shine and Eskom decides to hide the power . I start it manually and the Inverter picks up the feed automatically once the Mains is down .

With any sort of alternate power, even a solar geyser, you have to modify your habits to make the most of it. You have a solar geyser? Don't shower in the morning when there's going to be all that hot water in the afternoon. Etc.

Start with some simple disciplines. Don't fill the kettle all the way up in the morning and then boil it 3 or 4 times before you actually make a cup of coffee. Don't heat your water to the point where you need to crank up the cold tap to be comfortable - then you've wasted energy making that water too hot to use. Everybody should do these things anyway because they will bring some relief to your wallet. 

Most modern solar systems will give you some kind of monitoring tool. so early on you should use that and see what your load is at different times of day and then you can do the analysis of why things are as they are. You can then start "moving" loads. EG I have a heat pump, which is more efficient than a geyser element, but I don't let it run all day. It's on a timer and turns on twice a day - which gives us quite enough hot water when we need it, and means I have solar power available for other jobs during the sunny hours. The pool pump is on a timer so I can control when that runs and try to avoid too many big loads at the same time. The timer for my dishwasher is a nagging husband type. I tell them you can run it from this time to that time, not at 4 in the afternoon please.

Generally I try to do as much "heavy lifting" as I can during the day. Then at night it's just the fridges and the TV and maybe a bit of microwave. 

You literally have to make hay whilst the sun shines.

Hi Charl
While waiting for my new inverter and 12 panels to be installed I connected a 425W panel to a single Hoymiles 1200 input and it worked well.
I had a 4 way combiner unit so connected 4 x 425W panels to a single input Hoymiles 1200  - also worked well.
So then I went big and attached 2 panels per DC input for 3 inputs and 4 panels on a single input.  It continued to generate power and worked well.  No problems.  
The comment from Hoymiles support was it is a waste of power but nice to know IF I had extra panels to use?
The Hoymiles 1200 appears very well built!
Barry