King_M

Just a warning. A heat pump is great and I have mine now for 14yrs. In winter with temps at close to zero the COP can be as low as 1 and in summer 3-4 times or more for a modern unit. Thus the heat pump does not help for winter.

Thanks for the input, I found the problem.
The system date and time on the inverter was wrong, for some reason it was reading as 9th August 2023 21h47. Don’t know how long it’s been off sync but probably explain why my electricity bill for the last few months made no sense.
Have synced it and immediately started pulling from battery and will monitor to see if it doesn’t default back

Thanks for the input, I found the problem.
The system date and time on the inverter was wrong, for some reason it was reading as 9th August 2023 21h47. Don’t know how long it’s been off sync but probably explain why my electricity bill for the last few months made no sense.
Have synced it and immediately started pulling from battery and will monitor to see if it doesn’t default back

I find that the 5kw is actually plenty sufficient for my needs, I don’t think I’ve ever come anywhere close to the 7kw max passthrough capacity . I do however wish I had added 4 more panels to get batteries full quicker and also help out on those cloudy days. 
Since I’ve got a solar geyser, even with load shedding, the PV collector still heats up the water so I’ll still have decent 50C water (in winter) for the evening showers. I now fire it up to 70C purely on batteries and PV, this now leaves me with enough hot water for the 2 evening showers and 2 morning showers without having to fire up the geyser again in the morning. Will see how effective this will be as we head deeper into winter. I’m not happy with over night temp loses on the geyser (over 15C on some nights).
I now average about 2kwh a day, and most of this is from the geyser run at midday (once 85% SOC is reached on the batteries - Eskom jumps is a little bit, I could possibly drop SOC setting to 75%, but I would likely not go into the night with full batteries if I did this or I’d have to sacrifice pool pump time). I imagine that in the summer months, I won’t need Eskom at all on most days,  except rainy days.
On average with this setup, by 16h30,  I’ve got my 2 batteries at 100%, a 200L geyser with > 70C water, a clean pool and often with a dishwasher / laundry load done. My house then runs fully on batteries over night.
Once I get a heat pump in the mix (a 3.6kw ITS  heat pump pulls about 800w), I’ll have plenty of capacity to run without so much sequencing and monitoring and will move the geyser to essential.
for now, I’m looking to get into Home Assistant to use some “intelligence” to run automation on the geyser and pool pump taking into account PV, weather forecasts, SOC  and that sort of thing.
For my current needs, If I had R45k to spend, and had to choose between a 5kw and 8kw, I’d take the 5kw and fund a heat pump with the difference, should headroom become a concern later, I’d then add another 5kw which also gives some redundancy should an inverter fall apart.
sorry for essay 😂