Gabriël

primitive yet efficient, cheap no-name brand pc fans have been running continuously for 13+ months sucking air on both sides of the inverter and dropping average temp by 10 degrees C ... KISS 🤩

primitive yet efficient, cheap no-name brand pc fans have been running continuously for 13+ months sucking air on both sides of the inverter and dropping average temp by 10 degrees C ... KISS 🤩

hi @NickM and others here - rainwater harvesting, interesting topic and, like all others out there, often misused and abused to further certain agendas. i've been doing it for ten years, our grandparents and whoever before them had to do it over the millennia, so to make it complicated is way over the top if it is intended for personal and small scale use.
yes, rainwater is acidic - but how long will this take to corrode your copper pipes? in other words would it be cost effective to replace your piping? i do not know, neither do i know if you will die from it; but rest assured, die you will from something 🤣
is static rainwater in your tank going to go bad?... yes, if you do not do something like treat it with ordinary household bleach or something containing sodium hypochlorite or another method, see below.
we have one 5000l tank getting water from a section of roof and just a roll of chicken-wire mesh to keep out the worst as filter. it has NEVER been cleaned out BUT it has a simple electrolytic sanitizer and after 10 years the water is free of bacteria, organisms and slime and looks pristine, does not smell and above all tastes great. i myself and many others regularly use the water for drinking purposes ... no ill effects yet 😉
before we get to the simple mechanism please note that copper, by virtue of its oxidation, has a 'natural' antibacterial effect; for instance modern steel and aluminum door handles are far worse than the old copper used for handles when it comes to harboring bacteria etc.
ok, the 'gadget' is a solar-powered anode and cathode , one piece silver [small, cent size will last about 100,000 years plus] and copper as in pic - voila, image attached
the who instructions for sanitizing water [attached]  are somewhere on their web site but it boils down to 250ml jik per 5000l water in reasonable condition, i.e. if the water comes from your roof into your tank a cup of jik per 5000l every month [obviously this will be influenced by the rate you use it] should be more than sufficient to keep it potable.
a very interesting site is here https://www.lenntech.com/
God bless
g

who chloride.pdf

Yay.  All official!
Thank you to @Rautenk, @Mike, @Carl, @Jaco de Jongh, and tons of advice from the ou manne of the forum and lots of others besides.
What an interesting project - I learned a lot in the process and so far not a single shock!
On a day when we face Stage 6 shedding I feel like very clever to have  this system in the house!
Thanks,
@Elbow / Steve
 

I'm constantly surprised by this. Maybe there are things that are assumed to be so fundamental that nobody bothers teaching them anymore. "Oh EVERYBODY knows that", and so it drops out of the syllabus. 

By the time I was 12 I knew about, for example, process of elimination, and I use that nearly every day in my job. I have taught the principle to youngsters and you see their eyes light up in wonder that such a method exists.

Same generally in my line of work - computer programming. Nobody flow charts any more. Nobody draws up truth tables. Boolean algebra (what we young wags, encouraged by a lecturer, referred to as "booles**t)? What's that?

I used to work for a man who was a chartered accountant by training, although he made his money in software. He asserted that in any activity there are fundamentals, and if you master the fundamentals then you can meet all future challenges. EG he said that THE fundamental of all accountancy is double entry, and that if you truly understand double entry there is no accounting problem that you cannot solve.

He also expected people with job titles to know certain things. We once had a customer phone and tell us what a pile of rubbish our system was because the trial balance didn't balance. He asked what the discrepancy was and immediately said "you have transposed two adjacent digits when you captured one of the entries, please check what you captured against the source documents." They were not happy and insisted that he send somebody out to fix it.  He made a deal that I would go to their offices and check, and if it was he had had told them to check then they had to pay for my time.

Off the phone he explained to me that the discrepancy was a multiple of 9, and every accountant/book keeper should know that if your error is a multiple of 9 then the most likely cause is that you transposed two adjacent digits EG the amount is 1234.56 and you entered 1235.46.
He was right, and they were out of pocket and chastened.  He had no mercy on them because the guy who called to complain was a CA with 30 odd years experience and so, in my boss's opinion, should have seen the error and realised what the problem was and got his staff to recheck.

It definitely is.
As the saying goes: Everyday I know more and more about less and less.
 
Edit: I just realized now, I only mentioned the Mandelbrot set, the video covered : the logistic with its connections to fluid convection and neuron firing, definitely worth a watch.

hahaha, it was called 'pakslae' 🙂

you are enticing me to be reprimanded again on this forum... all i can say is it is great to have answers to the most important questions...
which reminds me, who might be able to help me with back to utility voltage settings for the pylontech in order to not exceed say 50% soc?

Well, in context here he's probably speaking more about that thing Arthur C. Clarke said that anything that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, to which you can add Plonkie's corollary, that to anyone sufficiently uninformed everything seems like magic.
But yeah... isn't it wonderful how the world is so beautifully regular that we can describe it with mathematics? That is something that many people don't even question, only the crazy philosophers seem terribly concerned about that one... 😛
 

I know a lady who lives in a township and who pre-buys for the year every December. Which is a very expensive way of doing it. I've shown her the numbers. I've said that she should take what she would have spent and stick it in a savings account and buy a little each month and in the meantime earn some interest.  But no... Though I suppose there is some value in knowing that's done and you can forget about it for the rest of the year.

COJ's cheapest bands used to be the first 500 units (now reduced to 350). I used to buy 500 on the 1st of the month and most months we wouldn't use it. I soon built up a multi-month credit - which I still have.
Last week I bought 200 units just so that they would take a break from turning up at my front door to ask why I hadn't bought electricity in the last 6 months.

 

You need a difference between settings 12 and 13; at least 1 volt, possibly 2, more if you want your battery really full ready for load shedding.
Try 52 or 53 V for setting 13 ("back to battery" voltage setting).

Hi guys,
let me share my current solar LAB setup with you:
PV modules
The only installation option was the roof,  which unfortunatelly has a bad orientation: one side of the roof is facing East while the other is to the West. So I decided to install panels on the both sides of the roof. Luckilly, the panels are not so expensive and are going to last for decades, especially when compared to price and endurance of batteries. It's 36x 275Wp facing West and 36x 280Wp facing East. All together it's almost 20kWp of solar modules, but because of the orientation, the maximum possible power is quite a bit less than that. Panels are wired in four high-voltage string,  each having 18 panels connected in a series. The actual voltage of each string is 600V. Inverters, that I use, have a maximum allowed DC voltage of 900V, so there is a plenty of room for voltage increase that is going to happen during cold winters that we're experiencing here. For the DC cabling, I used 6mm2 solar cable.
WEST:

 
EAST:

 
Photo from mounting the modules:

 
Inverters
All the high-voltage strings are connected directly to a pair of InfiniSolar Plus 5K inverters, that are paralleled together. So, there's no combiner box under the roof. Of course, there are fuses placed in each string, one fuse for positive and one for negative. Every string has a surge protection too (Citel). The inverters are set in OffGrid III mode, so they use ESKOM just for syncing their frequency with the grid, but the grid itself is disconnected (there's a grid disconnect relay in each InfiniSolar). Therefore no energy is supplied back to the grid, nor can it be physically supplied. When a power spike on the AC output of the inverter occurs, the inverter sends the excessive energy to the battery. Such a spikes occurs whenever a strong appliance is turned off, for example geyser or kettle. If the battery is completely discharged, the inverters can automatically switch to the bypass from the mains. In such a case, solar energy is used only to charge the battery until the battery voltage reaches an acceptable level again. So far, it has not happened, but since winter is comming, I'm awaiting this to happen soon. If the grid fails, nothing happens, the inverters do not need the grid to run. Synchronization of both Infinis with the grid is drawing 4 Watts total. Well, I'm looking forward to see the invoice from the ESKOM The combined power of the inverters is 10KVA, so it can run ANY appliance that I need, even some combinations are not a problem. So I'm running a washing machine, geyser, fridge with ice maker, tumble dryer, induction cooktop, etc. Not counting numerous computers, laptops and TV's.
InfiniSolar Parallel:

 
Backup
Just to be safe, the LAB is backed by 3kVA UPS and the 8kVA genset with electric start. So I left the UPS to supply the light circuits, internet routers, firewall, DVRs, surveilance cams and other crap. The genset is wired in a way that it can supply the AC to the InfiniSolars in order to power the LAB and/or charge the batteries in a case of a real emergency. To be honest, I'm running a genset just once per month to do a regular "fire-drill", since it's cheap and loud as hell.
Battery bank
The battery bank is a 48V 200Ah LFP box that I've purchased as a product built to order. There's 16x100Ah Winston cell. So far, it works great, but my LAB has a night consumption of about 6kWh, so the battery is small in the long run. There's 16x 1A balancer, coordinated by a central BMS. The BMS has a small OLED display, so you can check the SoC, AmpHours, charging current etc. directly by looking on the box.

Monitoring
BMS cyclically send all it's status and all the values to the UART interface. So I hooked UART with Z-Uno and pass the values through Z-Wave wirelles network to the home automation (Fibaro). The Fibaro is already monitoring all electricity meters that I set up on AC in/out. It's also monitoring and controlling a number of electrical appliances I have. And sice I wanted to have everything in the one place, I'm monitoring the RS232 interfaces of both InfiniSolars. Thanks to this, with just a cellphone I can see how the laboratory works while I'm on the other side of the world. For example, I can turn any appliance off/on or change the temperature of the heating in each room separately. Well, I hope that this supercomplicated system won't kill me in somewhere in the future. BTW, the geyser is operated in the same way - Fibaro turns it on when the batteries are full and there's a lot of sunlight. Values from Fibaro can be easily transferred to EmonCMS, so I do in order to keep a history charts. In each InfiniSolar, I have an SNMP Web Pro Card installed, so I do not need the SolarPower and SolarPower Pro software at all. Built-in webserver on SNMP cards is quite usable, and in fact you can also set up parallel mode with it's help. The downside is that after a few weeks the SNMP card got stuck - obviously the watchdog circuit is missing. At first I thought that one of the cards was faulty, but after the second card experienced the same issue, I realized that it is "a feature".
 
36x PV module delivered:

 
 

If the battery protection disconnects the batteries while the inverter is supplying load the inverter can be damaged . Best to always switch off the load first, then switch off the inverter before disconnecting the batteries .

That is a one helluva increase? I presume you meant 12$ to 13.5$

The blue sticker in the middle is still there and Leoch sticker 🤣

indeed richard, you are technically correct - especially in light of the opinion [no pun intended] that blackout could be construed to be non-pc, or worse it could be indicative of a medical condition 🙂

hi @NickM and others here - rainwater harvesting, interesting topic and, like all others out there, often misused and abused to further certain agendas. i've been doing it for ten years, our grandparents and whoever before them had to do it over the millennia, so to make it complicated is way over the top if it is intended for personal and small scale use.
yes, rainwater is acidic - but how long will this take to corrode your copper pipes? in other words would it be cost effective to replace your piping? i do not know, neither do i know if you will die from it; but rest assured, die you will from something 🤣
is static rainwater in your tank going to go bad?... yes, if you do not do something like treat it with ordinary household bleach or something containing sodium hypochlorite or another method, see below.
we have one 5000l tank getting water from a section of roof and just a roll of chicken-wire mesh to keep out the worst as filter. it has NEVER been cleaned out BUT it has a simple electrolytic sanitizer and after 10 years the water is free of bacteria, organisms and slime and looks pristine, does not smell and above all tastes great. i myself and many others regularly use the water for drinking purposes ... no ill effects yet 😉
before we get to the simple mechanism please note that copper, by virtue of its oxidation, has a 'natural' antibacterial effect; for instance modern steel and aluminum door handles are far worse than the old copper used for handles when it comes to harboring bacteria etc.
ok, the 'gadget' is a solar-powered anode and cathode , one piece silver [small, cent size will last about 100,000 years plus] and copper as in pic - voila, image attached
the who instructions for sanitizing water [attached]  are somewhere on their web site but it boils down to 250ml jik per 5000l water in reasonable condition, i.e. if the water comes from your roof into your tank a cup of jik per 5000l every month [obviously this will be influenced by the rate you use it] should be more than sufficient to keep it potable.
a very interesting site is here https://www.lenntech.com/
God bless
g

who chloride.pdf

Not at all! If anything it ends up rejecting everything including itself 🙂
(Note, I am talking about materialism as in the philosophical view that matter and energy is all that exists, not about the way of life where you make money the be-all and end-all).
To quote something from one of my favourite writers  (I really should go back and see what Joseph McCabe was on about to get the whole context, but here it is):
 

we already see the manifestation of this on this forum where the shift is to the 'power of the mind' hehehe 🤣

They will always need at least one human to 'cycle the power'!

..Posted twice for some reason

African wildcat as well. Even though the domestic cat came from the African Wildcat originally.
While we are on the topic, think about modern industrial scale meat production systems. Massive feedlots with animals full of antibiotics to prevent diseases, shot full of growth hormones and fed on GMO maize, urea and chicken crap. Delicious. 
Once again you will pay a premium for grass fed animals, but they are much more healthly than 'grain fed' feedlot animals. So stick to karoo lamb, game meat,extensively raised cattle, and free range poultry.

Yes.  Me.   mwhaaaahaaaahaaaaa! 

So back to the electricity topic. One women (from Zim) told me they had no electricity for 3 weeks now. I can only think how that must change your lifestyle. But they are only paying 11c US $ per unit.
hmmm