Justice M

I am looking for a Sunsynk-approved installer to assist with trouble-shooting the integration of a generator into a Sunsynk Inverter and Battery solar PV system. The generator has failed to start automatically, after loss of City Power grid and the batteries going down to the SOC level at which the inverter is set to send a start signal to the generator controller. In the end the system shut down as the batteries reached the shutdown level of 20%. The client is in the Bryanston area, in Johannesburg. We are solar installers ourselves. I am on 082 805 5677

We recently had about 13 kWp solar panels, 2 x 8 kW Sunsynk inverters (in parallel) and about 2 x 16 kWh Sunsynk battery capacities installed in a home in Johannesburg, South Africa. The municipality does not pay as yet if one exports solar power to the grid. We wanted to prioritize the loads rather than the batteries and to allow excess solar production to feed the non-essential loads. To enable this we set, on each inverter, the System Mode as follows: Zero Export - ticked, Priority Load - ticked, Solar Export - blank, Limit to Load Only - blank, Grid Trickle Load - 20 W, Inverter Power Limiter - 8 000 W. Client experienced a grid fault which, which started at 2.00 a.m. By 9.00 a.m. the client did not have power anymore, meaning that the inverters shut down the system after the batteries reached the set Shut Down SOC of 20%. The batteries would have had about 25 kWh of power available and should have lasted a lot longer than 7 hours, if they were feeding the essentials only. My assumption is that the batteries also supplied the non-essential loads, which comprise a geyser which was used in the morning, plus a pool pump. My question is could my assumption be correct? Would the above settings allow the batteries to feed the non-essential loads, even though the grid was out of service? If answers to these questions are both "Yes", then how do we need to change the settings to enable excess solar to be used to supply the non-essential loads only when the grid supply is available but to ensure that the batteries do not feed the non-essential loads when there is a grid outage?