DownTime

I have done installations where the systems work 100% until winter starts.  In some areas of CPT for example Camps Bay, Rondebosch, Constantia and Oranjezicht  the grid voltage tends to drop due to heavy loads from underfloor heating and heaters being used.  I have seen the voltage drop as low as 195v, with some very upset clients because their systems aren't working.  Some suppliers will help with adjusting the tolerance on the inverter to accept a lower grid voltage before shutting down, but then the inverter is not NRS compliant anymore.
I have had some clients where their electronic appliances got damaged due to high voltage and they where blaming the inverter.  On two occasions we found that the municipality did maintenance on the sub station and used higher tappings on the transformer, pushing the grid voltage up to 260v.  Another problem was with a faulty/floating neutral in the substation.  When testing between Live and Neutral the voltage was as high as 302v.

SegenSolar is cheaper than Sonop and it's not on special, the only issue you have to register as a re seller or installer before you can buy from them.

UT7 slide lid box with the wooden backing on the inside AC/DC should have them as well as Voltex.  Remove the two srews holding the wood onto the box, mount drum busbar insulators onto the wood, put it back and then mount the busbar on the insulator

Then try using WURTH's bond and seal around the hole when the conduit is in, it lasts much longer then normal silicone.  I inspected some installations I did 7 years ago with bond and seal and no leaks at all.

Depends on the drugs you are using, apparently they can be pink sometimes

yes and sometimes no one wants to see it in the room  

Ok, so quite a few companies stock this geyser controller and it's being installed by many solar geyser installers as well. It's slightly cheaper than a geyserwise controller. sustainable and thesunpays are two common names in the industry who stock them. Rather get a geyserwise unit. 
I would not advise anyone to ever buy a SR609 / SR609C geyser controller. Why? 
- It's not SABS approved so you will probably have trouble replacing it through insurance. Your insurance may probably also deny your burst geyser payout.
- It plugs into a wall socket, and then have another power cable into the roof to the geyser. This might be fine for some people, but IMO a geyser should be permanently wired in such a way that un-informed people can't turn it off or fiddle with it. 
- The above point also mean, that if your insurace were to send out a plumber to fix a burst geyser, while you're on holiday (and your neighbor / family member / friend) watches the house, the plumbers might reject the job if there's no isolator in the roof - or worse, redo the wiring to be of correct standards. And then you might have to redo it when you get back. SO, one way around this issue is to run a power cable from the isolator in the roof to the geyser controller, and another one back to the geyser again. 
- it doesn't have a proper safe connection for geyser elements with push in terminals - commonly used on Kwikot, Franke, etc. i.e a "screw in" type element has two screw rerminals where you can connect the wires to. With these elements you connect the electrical wiring to the thermostat, which then push into the pocket and connect to the push-in terminals. You have to remove the thermostat to insert the SR609 thermostat, thus exposing the push-in terminals.
- The menu options on the screen are not that easy to understand or use. It's fine if you're a geek, but your mom and uncle will battle using it. 
- You can't activate the geyser element on demand. So, let's say your scheduled time-on is at 15:00 but you want to shower at 10:00am, you can't just active element at 8:00am. You need to set the timer to activate at 8:00am. There are three timers, so if you already have those set, you would have to change one of the timer's time settings to 8:00am. 



Geyserwise VS SR609C:
- Connecting the geyserwise to your geyser is much simpler. There's a small cable that goes down the wall, to the display unit. The rest of the equipment stays in the roof and get installed right next to the isolator. This makes a 3rd party plumber's work also much easier. 
- The geyserwise unit replace the existing thermostat with another one, built by Geyserwise for this purpose. i.e. it won't void your COC
- The geyserwise unit is SABS approved and insurance don't have a problem with them
- The geysewise unit allow you to activate they geyser element with a push of a button, instantly. 
- Lastly, the geyserwise menu options aren't Chinglish - you can actually understand it without consulting google or youtube. 

The last conversation I had with the City of Cape Town which was 2 months ago, I was told that any inverter that is connected to the grid, even if it does not feed back in to the grid must be NRS certified and the installation must be registered.  I'm not sure about other areas in S.A

A client of mine extended his garden irrigation pipe onto the roof, put it under the panels and had a small sprayer between each panel.  Summer time when his wife cleaned the house and used the vacuum cleaner he would put the water on and it would cool the panels down and  produce more power.  The panels produced up to 300W more every time he did it.

A client of mine extended his garden irrigation pipe onto the roof, put it under the panels and had a small sprayer between each panel.  Summer time when his wife cleaned the house and used the vacuum cleaner he would put the water on and it would cool the panels down and  produce more power.  The panels produced up to 300W more every time he did it.

One of my recent projects, the battery cooler box. The temperature in my garage easily reaches 35°C in summer - on average it is in the lower 30's. According to the T105RE's datasheet, any lead-acid battery should be kept at 25°C or lower and an increase of 10°C halves the expected life of the batteries. Therefor I decided to keep them cool...
The box is constructed from 50mm coldroom panels and is attached to a plywood base fitted onto an angle-iron frame with castors. The inside of the box is watertight and coated with stone-chip - the stuff used to coat the chassis of trailers and caravans. The compressor assembly is from an old ice-machine The temperature is controlled by a temperature controller bought on ebay - it is set to turn the compressor on at 25.2°C and off at 24.8°C The internal circulation fan is on when the compressor is on and switches off approximately 20 minutes after the compressor has cycled off. The air pump is controlled by a digital programmable timer and used to force air into the box and to force any gas build-up out of the box - the outlet still needs to be connected to a hose to take the gasses outside. Hydrogen, which is highly explosive, is released during charging and Hydrogen Sulfide, which is extremely poisonous, might be released during over-charging. Hydrogen is less dense than air and Hydrogen Sulfide is more dense than air and therefor the need for two gas outlets, one at the top and one at the bottom of the box. The control panel contains a battery fuse The shunt of the Vicron battery monitor is mounted inside the control-section of the box and the RJ12 connection is extended to the rear panel A 40mm drain connection is mounted on the side of the box in case the box needs to be flushed. The drain connection is kept closed by a lever valve. Swimming pool hoses fit tightly into the 40mm drain connection and can be connected to take the water etc. to the outside of the building, if needed. An Anderson connector for the battery connection is mounted on the rear panel
 

Another recent project of mine - rainwater harvesting. The 2 x 2500l tanks were installed on 22 Dec 2016 and we got some rain on the 23rd, but only enough to fill about 300mm on both tanks - not sure how much that would be in liters, but no rain since.
I've also bought a JoJo pump kit which still needs to be installed. The water will be used to irrigate my small garden, a lawn of about 20m2 and maybe to fill up the toilets after flushing.

CoCT do not test the inverters they need to be sent to a testing facility like TUV Rheinland or Bureau Veritas to be certified for NRS which cost quite a bit of money if you are a local manufacturer.  I know MLT Inverters had a professor from Stellenbosch university do the testing on their inverters for the NRS, but they had to go through a lot of red tape before it was allowed.  

It actually has nothing to do with grid-limiting, it has to do with anti-islanding. There are two things the city don't want you to do, the first is spinning the meter backwards, the second is accidentally creating a powered island. NRS-097-2-1 is about the second half of that problem.
The Victron documentation specifically states that a Multiplus combined with a Ziehl UFR-1001e does comply with NS-097-2-1. The Ziehl itself is on the CoCT list. It's possible that adding this device to other inverters will also be sufficient, but I think this has to be tested on a case-by-case basis and you cannot just assume that this is sufficient. I'll attempt to explain my own understanding thereof, which may or may not be accurate.
NRS-097-2-1 says you must have two switches, one of which must be physical (not electronic). In the case of the Multiplus, it already has one electronic switch which is sufficient in some markets (eg the UK), so when you install a Ziehl in front of a Multiplus, you only use the one contact to drive a contactor, though the Ziehl itself can handle two. In other words, the anti-islanding isn't down to just the Ziehl device, in this case it is the combination of the two that is compliant.
Second, purely passive anti-islanding will always have a non-detection zone. As far as I know, if you want any sort of certification, there has to be a measure of active detection in your inverter. Active measures usually means the inverter deliberately leans to the left just a tiny bit so that when the grid goes out it falls off the horse very quickly.
As I said though, the Ziehl is on the list on its own. I'm not sure what that means :-)

@Don your idea will work, depending on how the DB circuits are wired there might be a speed bump or two.  Check which other appliances work on the same plug circuit, usually the plugs for the microwave, washing machine and tumble dryer are all on the same circuit as the fridge/freezer (as well as toaster and kettle).  If you want to cut the power to those appliances you will also lose power to the fridge/freezer unless you install a separate plug circuit for it. 

@Don your idea will work, depending on how the DB circuits are wired there might be a speed bump or two.  Check which other appliances work on the same plug circuit, usually the plugs for the microwave, washing machine and tumble dryer are all on the same circuit as the fridge/freezer (as well as toaster and kettle).  If you want to cut the power to those appliances you will also lose power to the fridge/freezer unless you install a separate plug circuit for it. 

If you don't want to split the DB you can always install an external contactor with the heavy loads connected to it and Eskom power connected to the coil.  When there is no Eskom power the contactor opens and all the heavy loads disconnect and the batteries last longer.  This works well when you have excess generation from the PV panels and set the pool pump to run during that time. The pool pump will not drain the batteries if you are not at home to switch it off during a power failure.

Give this man a bells! This sounds pretty effective solution!

Lightning will probably jump almost any fuse, so I doubt that any fuse will prevent a lightning strike from causing harm down the line.
Your best bet is to divert the lightning with the shortest possible path with the least resistance directly to ground, but even if you do that it is not guaranteed not to char few things down the line.

If you don't want to split the DB you can always install an external contactor with the heavy loads connected to it and Eskom power connected to the coil.  When there is no Eskom power the contactor opens and all the heavy loads disconnect and the batteries last longer.  This works well when you have excess generation from the PV panels and set the pool pump to run during that time. The pool pump will not drain the batteries if you are not at home to switch it off during a power failure.

If you don't want to split the DB you can always install an external contactor with the heavy loads connected to it and Eskom power connected to the coil.  When there is no Eskom power the contactor opens and all the heavy loads disconnect and the batteries last longer.  This works well when you have excess generation from the PV panels and set the pool pump to run during that time. The pool pump will not drain the batteries if you are not at home to switch it off during a power failure.

I have done installations where the systems work 100% until winter starts.  In some areas of CPT for example Camps Bay, Rondebosch, Constantia and Oranjezicht  the grid voltage tends to drop due to heavy loads from underfloor heating and heaters being used.  I have seen the voltage drop as low as 195v, with some very upset clients because their systems aren't working.  Some suppliers will help with adjusting the tolerance on the inverter to accept a lower grid voltage before shutting down, but then the inverter is not NRS compliant anymore.
I have had some clients where their electronic appliances got damaged due to high voltage and they where blaming the inverter.  On two occasions we found that the municipality did maintenance on the sub station and used higher tappings on the transformer, pushing the grid voltage up to 260v.  Another problem was with a faulty/floating neutral in the substation.  When testing between Live and Neutral the voltage was as high as 302v.

Once did an installation for a client in Hermanus with a Landis+Gyr  cash power prepay meter with the control box outside and the keypad/ display inside the house which plugs into a plug circuit. The meter display went into an error mode and would reset about three times and then just stay in error mode.  The client still had Eskom power but could not load any units on his meter if needed.
As all the plug circuits were connected to the inverter it seems the inverter caused communication interference in the line between the keypad and main controller causing the error.  So I installed a separate Eskom plug circuit next to the DB  and plugged the display in and the issue was solved.

Once did an installation for a client in Hermanus with a Landis+Gyr  cash power prepay meter with the control box outside and the keypad/ display inside the house which plugs into a plug circuit. The meter display went into an error mode and would reset about three times and then just stay in error mode.  The client still had Eskom power but could not load any units on his meter if needed.
As all the plug circuits were connected to the inverter it seems the inverter caused communication interference in the line between the keypad and main controller causing the error.  So I installed a separate Eskom plug circuit next to the DB  and plugged the display in and the issue was solved.