RocketBoy

Discharge amps should be 100. Shutdown at 20% is a little high for my liking, I prefer 15% but I dont know what the Sunsynk battery warranty is, it might be only to 80%DoD in which case its correct.

Yeah I thought it would be that too but it isnt, I had reset at 15%, low batt at 12% and shutdown at 10% Then in the battery restart it was at 15%, the grid start I changed a few times between 10 and 20% but it didnt have an effect. Basically I would change a setting then wait 5 mins to see if it did anything and it refused to play along. What I did notice is that the usage timer battery % for the time slot needs to be less than your battery % and you need to drop everything down and wait. It still only kicked in to serving loads at 21% though. Either way its not a normal circumstance, there was a grid fault for almost 48 hours and it was raining the entire time, was just a bad situation really.

That was the problem, it wasnt powering any loads it was just charging at the time. I turned off the battery and solar(~100W) and let the capacitors drain on the inverter before turning on again and hoping it would power loads, it got confused for a second and thought the battery was at 100% so it turned on but then turned right off again when it realised the actual state.

Im having a strange scenario at home at the moment with power. The municipal feed to my area has been off since Sunday night so its well over 24 hours now. I set my inverter to run on battery overnight and that normally just charges up wit the solar in the morning... except its been raining for the last two days and I barely got the battery to 20% My low battery is set to 15% and my cutoff is 10% with reset being at 20% but despite the battery being at 21% now the inverter still will not turn on and start powering loads in the house. The inverter screen is on and its charging very slowly but because the battery ran down to the shutdown off % previously and the grid hasnt been restored the inverter wont turn on. Does anyone know which setting that might be to get it to turn on with the battery? IS there a specific % it needs to get to? I have tried turning the battery off and then waiting for the inverter to discharge caps before turning it all back on again, but I still cant get it to power anything!! Im just looking to get internet working again so that I can work and its really annoying knowing I have enough battery capacity to get through the day but the inverter wont use it. Any ideas?!

The only time I have seen issues with a setup like that was when we forgot there was an old rackmount UPS with those devices still connected to it, seems they dont like having an inverter feed a UPS before hitting the devices. Straight feed should be fine though, I have plenty of servers and Cisco AP's/switch gear on inverters at various clients and havent had an issue with any of them.

^This. DC doesnt play games like AC does in terms of waveform so there are no dips which makes it difficult to break. In theory you should never turn any of that DC off under load but what happens if there is a fault and you have no choice? The inverter will limit the use of solar if there is nothing to do with it, but the full DC current is still reaching right through to the MPPT controller.

There are quite a lot of recorded cases in Australia, here is one vid I watched on the topic: I agree that there shouldnt be a reason if there is a arc diffuser like in DC breakers, but the argument that the contacts being disconnected under load can fuse and melt down is a little scary. Is the solution to have DC breakers *and* fuses? seems a bit overkill to me.

I installed one of these on my geyser to replace the digital timer. Was pretty simple to install and I am using Tuya to get it into Home Assistant. I have a few schedules set but with HA being aware of loadshedding its quite easy to turn off the geyser if Im running on battery. Im thinking of replacing a breaker I have for some LED outside lights with one, the daylight sensors on the lights flicker like crazy when it starts getting dark. With all of the flickering it destroys a bulb within a few months.

I was chatting to a mate who does installations and he was saying that he is planning on replacing his DC fuses between his panels and inverter with DC breakers instead. He had heard that fuses were a fire risk and breakers are safer. That is the exact opposite of what I have heard and there are numerous reports from the Aussies about breakers/isolaters catching fire. If I look at commercially available combiner boxes they normally just have breakers. I watched a video where an installer was explaining that breakers cant always handle the load when they get turned off while the sun is shining and the panels are producing. The sparky in the vid explained that the contacts in a DC breaker are too small to stop that power safely. Just like he said, when he turned the breaker off under power it melted down and caught fire. I have fuses rated according to my panel manufacturer and no breakers - the Sunsynk has a contactor for disconnecting PV. So to all of the clever people who have experience in these matters, which is the correct one to use? should it be fuses into breakers?

I think you should try dropping the Max generator input and dropping the generator charge battery. Im pretty sure all inverter generators have AVR so its probably just trying to pull too much power from the genny. If you drop them until it starts working then at least you are getting some charge into the batteries, in an extended outage that is very important.

Good solid inverters if you want something that will just keep going forever.

Keith from Sunsynk laughed in his one video when they handed him a 40A contactor because he said its massively overkill. I still dont understand why they dont just supply one with the inverter that is the correct spec for the unit. They supply pretty much everything else.

This is just my opinion and could be entirely wrong, so happy to be corrected. Question 1 - I dont think it even needs to be a contactor honestly as it shouldnt be holding a high load and a relay should suffice. A contactor is probably a better idea thought for longer service life. When the bond is in effect any leakage from the circuit should trip the earth long before it gets to any decent amount of current. Question 2 - Standard 2.5mm/2 should be fine as there is no major load. Thinner diameter should also be possible if using the L/N from the terminal block instead of the grid L/N Question 3 - I have seen both used with the NO being used in conjunction with the L/N connectors to the left of the terminal blocks. I personally prefer the idea of a NC contactor that is powered off the grid L/N and connected to the load N/E that way when the grid drops it closes and creates the internal N/E bond.

Hi All, I know this has been discussed to death already and I used the search function, but there is no definitive answer. I figured lets get a thread going to answer the questions and have the info in the same place. Question 1. What amp rating of contactor should be used to create the earth/neutral bond? Does it need to be a high current 60A 230v or will a 6A 230V work fine? Does it even need to be a contactor or will a relay suffice? Question 2. What size wiring should be used for the relay/contactor above? Question 3. Which configuration of relay/contactor is best Normally Open or Normally Closed? Depending on which one you get will determine how it is connected and could have an effect on the answer to Question 2.

I misunderstood that one too, you definitely can run the input off a wall plug as long as the charging amps are lower than 16A. My mate ran his Sunsynk 5kw off a normal plug(live stripped out for CT clamp) and the end of an extension cable so he could plug in tv etc until it was installed. It worked fine aside from the plug shocking you if Eskom was out.

How old are the batteries? Before I switched out to lithium I went through a LOT of AGM batteries. What I found is that the realistic cycle life before they are close to useless is around 300-500 cycles. If I avoided depleting the batteries past 60% then I could get close to 500 cycles. If I went below 50% even a few times then it dropped to around 300 cycles. Take loadshedding where it happens 3 times in a day... that is 3 cycles for a day. At that rate you could be looking at 4 months before you start getting 45 mins of run time out of the batteries. If you are at the point where you know they are only lasting 45 mins then I would say the damage is already done to those batteries because you have hit cutoff to find that out. This assumes that your inverter isnt set to a high cutoff voltage with that being the cause.

When this was being done with generators its was referred to as a "suicide cable" for good reasons. The short answer is no, you cant do it safely. Backfeeding into a socket eliminates earth-neutral bonds so no earth leakage. There are so many reasons why its a bad idea.

Just dont connect it to the internet and they should be fine! If you do then you can be sure it will send off data about you, its the Hauwei way.

My brother in law built an outdoor shower in his last house renovations and he likes it so much that he hasnt showered inside for the last few years. Im not sure what the appeal is but he loves it.

Heyo Phire, its a bit strange seeing your name without your usual avatar. Mate my brother is going through a similar thing at the moment, he went from the 12v with LA/AGM batteries in parallel to an Axpert 3kw 24V system and used the same batteries in series. Everything was run into the DB etc by an electrician. Now comes the dilemma, he has been running on that system for a bit and the batteries are knackered and he wants to add solar. So we start looking at panels, hmmm max V/W on the MPPT is very low so that isnt ideal, now we need to start looking at lower rated panels which means more money for mounting hardware. Ok cool, no worries lets look at batteries... hmmm again, slim pickings in the 24V lithium space. At this point the realization that the 3kw unit was a massive waste of money kicks in and its time to get a 5kw+ which plays nicely with all of the mainstream panels/batteries. I fully get where you are coming from in terms of re-using what you have while upgrading incrementally, just be aware that it will most likely cost you more in the long run. Often its a case of spending just a little more to save yourself down the line. Personally if I was looking in your situation I would go for an Axpert clone 5kw and something like a Pylon US2000 48V battery, you can always add more batteries later if needed. That would come in at around the R30-R35k mark.

Every man and his dog is suddenly an installer with 10+ years of experience these days, its amazing how these companies have popped out of the woodwork lately. The unfortunate side is that the legit installers with a longstanding reputation have pushed prices through the roof and are busy for months to come.

I think its pretty reasonable to assume that the inside of a garage can get to 50C+ in SA. Heck my garage is at least 10C warmer than anywhere else in the house and I have the same concerns about mounting batteries and an inverter in there.

Im in the buyers boat and Im happy to wait until the store has stock again, this forum and the store arent going anywhere soon and its just going to grow. The benefit is that I feel safe in the knowledge that they arent going to disappear, I cant say the same for a lot of the retailers that suddenly popped up. I was offered a refund as I had already paid and I had the option to find another solution, but after putting some thought into I decided to just be patient and get the kit I wanted from a store that Im happy to support.

I have noticed the same trend from pretty much everyone I know who has installed a system of sorts over the last 1.5 years. It was originally just batteries and inverters, people were happy to charge off Eskom and just be loadshed proof. That sentiment has changed now and the grid is seen as extremely unreliable so most people are factoring solar in to charge the batteries. Its almost as if the penny has dropped and everyone has realized that we are on our own here, if you cant generate your own power and at least harvest rainwater then you have to take your chances with the municipalities/government doing their jobs...

It does mention in the automatic reply for any query on the website that "we're getting your quotation ready. We will email it to you as soon as possible we are experiencing high demand for equipment at the moment we will attend to your order with urgency" Just as an aside, I was in my local Rubicon earlier this week because I heard they had 550W panels in stock, the queues of people wanting quotes on solar systems was nuts. The salesmen are run off their feet and they are unable to put together a full system because of stock shortages. Through the years of loadshedding I noticed with friends and family that around 8 months ago many were getting inverters and batteries installed. Now its inverters, batteries and panels and there are VERY few people I have spoken to that are not trying to put together a system at the moment. I think everyone is coming to the realization that we are on our own for power and need to make a plan.