Mau921020

I have a small solar system with only 2.4KW on my roof and 2xplylontech US3000C batteries and a 5KW RCT inverter. I was wondering if it would be possible to modify my Kwikot geyser (currently has a 4kw element in) by adding another element (1kw) and connecting it to the same thermostat. The idea is to physically turn off the 4kw element and have the 1kw element run off the solar. During the week nobody is home so I am wasting a lot of solar thats not being harvested or used. Then when its cloudy or I need to boost the geyser when we have guests, I can turn on the 4kw element and run it off Eskom as normal. Has anybody done anything like this? Is this even possible? I have a feeling I will need 2x thermostat's to be able to do this.

This is when grid power and solar power is off and the house transitions from solar to battery power. The lights flicker ever so slightly. It does go away after time. With this I mean that my inverter output Neutral is connected to the Earth I installed for the solar panel grounding. So there is a wire from the neutral output to the earth bus bar in the DB. My inverter does not have an internal bonding like that. I noticed this because the lights in my house would not turn fully off. Some would stay on. After I spoke to a solar electrician I made the bonding from neutral output of the inverter to the earth and the lights turned off completely when the switch was off. So what I mean is that I'll have the inverter set to SUB and have only solar charge the batteries and use grid power and not battery power. In the morning there is sometimes a 10% drop in battery SOC even though I never used any battery power. The graphs show I only used grid power. So I charged the new battery fully and made sure both batteries were fully charged before I connected the 2 together. I watched a couple of videos and was on this forum to do some research before I attempted to connect the 2 together. See attached picture. The bottom battery is the master. I have been wanting to run the batteries without the comms to the inverter but lost the setting. I did that when I had only 1 battery cuz I could not find the comms cable so eventually made a new one. Yeah, that's what I also think. The batteries drain all the way so I think the reading might not be correct. I will investigate this further. I am just trying to figure out if this is normal or if there is something wrong. With loadshedding I never ran the inverter in SBU mode, only SUB mode so that the batteries are full for when loadshedding happens. So, I never noticed the flickering on the lights when the inverter went from solar to battery. This is one of my main concerns, but I think its noting and just that my inverter is not a "fancy" as other inverters. It does stop flickering when the sun is gone.

I am not sure what the firmware version is (I don't even know how to check), but the inverter was originally bought in 2019/2020 so will be an old version. I have looked but was never able to find new firmware versions for my inverter.

I am sure the battery is charged enough. That was the first thing I checked when this started happening. I have also noticed that on the SBU setting when the inverter goes to full battery power the lights in my house flicker ever so slightly. If I set the inverter to SUB and then switch of grid power and the inverter goes to battery power the light DO NOT flicker. My inverter is connected with the neutral wire going to ground as well. I have also noticed that the battery voltage and state of charge drops overnight even though I was using grid power the whole night. See attachment labels Battery The battery 2 attachment shows that I only have 4.8 kWh of capacity, but I have 2x pylontech US3000C batteries. I don't know if the inverter is limiting the capacity, but I can't find any reason why it should. The settings tab shows that the batteries should only charge with solar. This has been the setting since I installed everything in 2021. The only setting that I'll changes is the SUB/SBU/USB setting.

I am sure the battery is charged enough. That was the first thing I checked when this started happening. I have also noticed that on the SBU setting when the inverter goes to full battery power the lights in my house flicker ever so slightly. If I set the inverter to SUB and then switch of grid power and the inverter goes to battery power the light DO NOT flicker. My inverter is connected with the neutral wire going to ground as well. I have also noticed that the battery voltage and state of charge drops overnight even though I was using grid power the whole night. See attachment labels Battery The battery 2 attachment shows that I only have 4.8 kWh of capacity, but I have 2x pylontech US3000C batteries. I don't know if the inverter is limiting the capacity, but I can't find any reason why it should. The settings tab shows that the batteries should only charge with solar. This has been the setting since I installed everything in 2021. The only setting that I'll changes is the SUB/SBU/USB setting.

Hi, I have a an RCT-AXVM3-5K 48V inverter connected to 2 pylontech US3000C batteries. The inverter is set to only charge using solar power. But for some stupid reason it's still using grid to charge. I only noticed because my power bill went up. The inverter is also set to SUB but have now changed it to SBU with back to grid voltage set to 48V. Why would the inverter all of a sudden just start using grid power to charge even though it should not. I am running solar assistance via USB on a raspberry pi to monitor the inverter. I have recently updated the Solar Assistant to the latest version. I cannot recall that it did this on the previous version. Could this be a Solar Assistant issue or is there something going on with my inverter? Please help. The inverter is now pulling extra power for absolutely no reason and it's using the same amount of power in a month as my geyser. Also, I have 7kw/h of storage, but solar assistant says I only have 4.8kw/h.

Hi, The battery in my dash cam has swollen up and I can't find a replacement. I was wondering if you could bypass the battery so that the dash cam will only work when the external power from the cars lighter socket is on. Has anybody tried this. If so please help.

Hi, I have a TP-Link deco mesh wifi network that all my sonoff switches are connected to. I have setup the ihost device and upgraded the firmware to the latest version. All my sonoff deviecs are on LAN control. The ihost does not pick up the devices. All the devices are supported in ihost. My setup is as follows: Router is connected to the main deco. Then the other deco device is daisy changed together. The ihost is also connected to the same router. Any idea what the problem is?

Thank you. I have a couple sonoff devices including light switches and geyser timers and powr2 and powr3 switches. I have linked the ewelink app to home assistant but how do I now set up a scene where if a device sends an offline notification, it must turn off another switch?

Thankx will go have a look.

Thats exactly what I thought. I learned my lesson with lead acid when I installed my solar on my house. The road to work does entail some gravel road, so a bike would be better. I just don't see the point in buying a R50k electric bike. The price of that scooter made it appealing. Do you have any recommendations on ebikes? My budget is like 25K to 30K. If I can get something for less than 15K it would be even better. This is the 50K bike. Has a lithium battery and a 5kW motor. 25Ah battery. It's just so much money for what it is considering you can get an ICE bike second-hand for R20k and my fuel would work out to about R200 a month. Would take a long time to make up the 30K in fuel to justify buying this bike.

I drive 13km to work in traffic, because the backroad had a bridge that was closed for use with a car. That back route is 4km and is between houses so there will be absolutely no traffic. I am looking for a cheap motorcycle to use to drive to work and back. I don't really want an ICE motorcycle, but they are very cheap second hand. I saw this and was wondering if anybody has one or has driven one. If anybody knows of an electric alternative that's available to buy locally without importing it myself. Please let me know.

My setup: 1x 5kw RCT inverter 1x Pylontech US3000C (going to add another one at some point) 5x 475W Jinko panels Most of my house runs off the RCT inverter in my house. There are 2 plugs that still run off Eskom. Those are for the dishwasher and the air con. It is a bit of a hassle, because I had to run an extension for the air con. This is so that when I sleep at night and the power goes off the aircon does not drain the battery. So I basically want a smart switch like the Vizia or Sonoff (i have sonoff and vizia switches that I use) switches that I can plug into the Eskom power. The other switch will be plugged into the inverter and the aircon will be plugged into that switch. The switch plugged into the eskom power must turn off the other switch once the power goes out. So if the eskom plug looses volts or amps or whatever value you want to measure, the switch must send a message to the other switch to turn it off and vise versa when the power comes back. Has anybody done anything like this?

Hi all, I have a RCT Axpert VM III 5KW inverter that I used with 4x Lead acid batteries. I have recently bought a pylontech US3000C battery that I connected. I have tried all the different cable configurations that I could find on powerforum but none of them work. I keep getting error 61. I have now connected the battery under the USE setting. I found this PDF that shows what I have to do. Has someone had to do this? I dont know what to do anymore. VM_III_Pylon_US2000_Communication_cable_check.pdf