JonB

Hi all, I didn't want to hijack Friendly Toast's awesome thread, so I thought I'd wade in separately. Some Background: I recently bought an old house with 5 (yes 5) geysers. No way to consolidate them, the place is stretched out and cavernous, aside from telling some family to suck it up and just not shower or shutting off water to the kitchen and outbuildings, it's just not feasible. Then we had a 15 day power outage... so my wife gave me that look that said "fix this, now! I am on prepaid. Monthly bill is R6k. +- 2040 kWh monthly. She's a hungry house. I added sonoff switches to measure geyser consumption. Daily load is around 34kWh. 3 of the geysers have non-working heatpumps. Option 1 is to fix at cost of R12K (for the 3 total) and reduce load to 1.4kWh per unit. Option 2 is to take the geysers off power onto PV completely (R60K) Option 3 is to integrate it using option 1 into by solar PV setup. House has 5 db boards. COC issued but she's going to need some work to wire as kitchens / geysers all run of secondary db's I've had a couple of installers in - everyone's got a product and varying degrees of pricing, but i'd appreciate advice from users I've been quoted / recommended a 8kWh backup solution + 10kWh Li batteries and 20 +-400w panels to power it That's not enough power to take the house off-grid, i know, but it's a start and can keep the lights on in a 15 day power outage and take care of loadshedding so an oke can work and run a few essential geysers. WHAT ARE MY BEST OPTIONS?: 1. Should I separate my geysers from my PV solution and run them independently as has been suggested by one contractor? Maybe add one or two on the PV and take the non-essentials offline or put them on separate power? 2. Should i spend the money instead on just bulking up my PV to the home and include the geysers in the PV system? 3. Something else? Thanks!