Bruce Hill

Has anyone bought from EnergyTechStore before and can confirm that they are a legit business?

Be careful with geoty, there are some people who have made purchases and not received them. There is a discussion on myBroadband about them.

@Gerlach Thanks for the reply. Whoa! That is an amazing setup that you have there! Yes, I am in Cape Town (I live in Plumstead) and would love to come around to see your solar setup. Yeah, The MLT inverter I bought was a bargain. I had been eyeing it for a while too, but was hesitant at first because I had been reading a lot about Sunsynk and was seriously considering the Sunsynk 5kw hybrid inverter - but eventually decided that the price of MLT was too good to pass up. I do realise, though, that the setup will be a bit more challenging as there is not as much information online about MLT inverters. That being said, I did phone MLT Inverters today and spoke to someone from their support team - they were very helpful. They assured me that the inverter that I have bought can charge lithium batteries, but needs to be setup correctly. So that is good to know. I will send you a private message and arrange to come see the setup that you have at your home.

Thanks, @hoohloc for the links. I am particularly interested in the Hubble batteries, but am concerned about compatibility of the MLT inverter with lithium ion. The person that I bought it from used it with 4 Gel batteries and he was not sure about lithium ion - he suggested that if the battery has a BMS built-in that it should be fine, but I am very new to all of this and want to make sure of the compatibility before I buy a battery. Price-wise your suggestions are very good, so thanks. @WannabeSolarSparky haha No problem about recognising the photos - I thought that someone might do a Google image search or recognise the photos - but I was too lazy to take new photos I don't have the manual, but I found this manual online: https://manualzz.com/doc/7186358/user-manual---mlt-inverters What concerns me is that the manual only mentions deep cycle, lead acid and gel batteries, so I am not sure that it has the correct charging profile for lithium ion batteries. I do see that it has the option to turn off equalization, which I read is necessary, but I am not sure if this change alone is sufficient to correctly charge a lithium ion battery. I have sent an email to MLT inverters to ask for the manual for the model that I have and to ask about compatibility with lithium ion - I mentioned some of the links posted by @hoohloc in my email.

So you found the expired gumtree listing? Yeah, I did get it at a really good price - that was the main selling point - left me more money in the budget to spend on batteries. Thanks for the suggestions, Morne, would something like this work with the MLT inverter? https://www.diygeek.co.za/product/pylon-us2000-2-4kwh-li-ion-solar-pylontech-battery/ Thanks also for the link. I will try get in contact with Stratos from DIY Geek.

I have just bought a MLT/BI-6000 Power Star 6Kw (48v) inverter to replace my Mecer 1200va inverter which has a single Probe 100ah deep cycle battery. I am currently using my Mecer to power my home-office and security cameras during loadshedding, but am finding that 1200va is just not enough for all the devices in my office. My goal, ultimately is to get my house less dependent on the grid and less affected by loadshedding - in the first phase I just want to focus on backup, so am looking for recommendations for at least 100ah 48v batteries that are reliable and take up as little space as possible. My budget for the batteries are around R20 000 to R25 000. The problem is that this MLT inverter does not have built-in battery management, so if I go for lithium-ion batteries they would need to come with built-in BMS. Otherwise, if I can't find compatible lithium-ion batteries in my price range, then the alternative would be 4 x 12v gel batteries. I would appreciate any recommendations, links to batteries to buy and general advice. The next phase would be to look at solar panels and a separate MPPT solar charge controller, as this is not built-in to the MLT inverter. But at this stage I would just like recommendation for batteries that would be compatible with this inverter and that would fall within my budget.