Kory

What will you provide as proof that the installation location is residential? A proof of address? City of Cape Town bill?

Can anyone recommend a wall panel heater brand for my child's room? It is a small room, about 5 by 5 and I think a good panel heater will work well for a toddler.

Hi all, I have a bit of a dilemma. I currently have a solar system with 2 geysers in which pulls a lot of power. We are also looking for a sustainable means of heating and cooling a child’s room. I have read heat pumps are great for heating hotwater, heating rooms and also cooling. My question is will it be possible to install one heat pump that will do all 3 things; heat hotwater ie replace the geyser, heat my lil one’s room and cool My lil one’s room. The room is close to the bathroom so if something needs to be installed close that is absolutely possible and at the back of the house.

Nope, not like you already added 4. I am dreaming of adding 1 more battery to feel more confident, the sunk cost is already been done these addition while the do take the total cost up significantly decrease the marginal cost.

My 4 additional panels went live yesterday and already seeing the impact this morning. So usually at this time we will barely be making enough to cover the house use and charge battery. So the battery charges after the morning peak. Then it starts discharging after the geysers kick in. Today at 10:30am battery has already moved from 30% it started in the morning to 53%. Hopefully it will produce enough to ensure it doesn’t discharge while the geysers get on.

This is a great idea. Currently, people are still installing, so smaller maintenance jobs, i.e., maintenance for smaller systems, are not being paid attention to. In addition, small jobs including adding 2-4 more panels. My installer came to do mine, but it took several weeks. There is definitely a gap for that. I think as installation rates drop, most installers will start offering some maintenance of the systems they install or no longer find it such a huge inconvenience. My installer is nice and will come, but you have to wait and remind them. How many panels did they have to clean? I am guessing the cost will have to relate to the size of the installation.

Not going so well as currently we are a two family household. The flat is on electric stove and the main house is on gas. We running two geysers also and the flat is fully occupied by family who are a family so our consumption is quite high since winter started my SOC is always at 40% by end of day and in the morning we have to pull from grid. However, family is moving out just at the end this this winter, relocating. So I am not in a hurry to add battery capacity. As a guest room which is occasionally used for short term rental the consumption of the flat is very low. We average 30/39 summer/winter now but historically we are 18/25. That was when we had an electric hob I expect to drop to 15/22.

So we added 4 more panels on the west side. It is winter so I assume the only benefit will be just to make sure we get enough charge on those cloudy days and generally winter days. My question to all is in summer will we have enough to sell back to CoCT? In all we have 18 545w panels now 8 E , 10 W/NW. I read now the meter price is halved. This might mean registering and getting all the ducks in a row ready to go by next summer. In summer with our original 14 panels out 12kWh battery pack was always charged by 11am.

Given the current price of panels I would say solar pv install =panels +inverter will pay for themselves mostly in +-a few years say 3-5 if sized right for most homes. Batteries are the most expensive component currently and those are also mostly for convenience. Battery - the decision to buy a nice luxury car over a car that works. Some might pay for themselves but I take it there is no ROI needed when you spoil yourself. I don’t think electricity price will be controlled anytime soon - this is not unique to South Africa it’s a global phenomenon. Renewable is the way to go. Loadshedding, well I don’t know according to eskom and ANC it is already under control who knows?

Interesting, I have a flat and a house and had thought of 2 separate installations but later just decided to combine the 2 inverters and have them paralleled so that inefficiencies are accommodated for especially as the flat is not always in use or busy. I think a summary of the comments suggests; 1. It is quite expensive to do it if you have roof space available rather spend the cash on add permanent extra panels to the smaller system. 2. if you don’t have roof space and that is the only way it might also have long term effects on your system. it should be avoided if you can not a efficient solution. 3. If you still feel you have to do it (because you can or you have no choice) consider some alternative ways to make it safer.

Well same challenge as me, we added additional panels. The cost of installation was going to be too high if we bought panels ourselves and the project too small for the installer so we offered them to supply and installed. We have been waiting for 4 weeks already. Did you say your battery storage capacity is 7kWh?, I know batteries are the most costly part of the system but given the size of your other components might consider adding more batteries to help in winter etc.

Thanks everyone, originally what I would really have loved is another battery but I just realised when I pushed our dependence on the solar a little more and allowed our battery to discharge lower ie to 40% that the panels struggle to actually carry the full load of the house and charge the battery during the day with this Cape Town autumn weather. Meaning in winter it will be even worse. This explains the relatively high eskom cost despite the solar as the installer had set the battery discharge at 50% meaning 1 full battery capacity was always available in case of loadshedding. This meant my system kept depending on eskom instead of discharging batteries. With the prices of panels it makes sense to add more. Just a tad weary of doing too much before my “tenants” move out as the second geyser will essentially be off mostly when they do.

Is adding just two more 545w Canadian solar panels to our array worth? We currently have an array of 8 East and 6 West 545 Canadian solars, making 14. This is run on two 5kwh Deye inverters and two 6.14 Deye batteries. The intention was 20, but that will be overkill in the summer. We are averaging just over 30kwh daily, and a chunk of this goes to two geysers. I did tell them I intended to add panels, so it is set up to plug and play the additions, or so they said. However, instead of adding six like we originally planned, adding two more to make eight on each side should be fine. Our whole house is on the system. Our flat, usually reserved for guests or short-term rentals, is temporarily occupied by family who will move out later in the year. When the flat is used as a short-term or guest unit, the electric demands are minimal, but with a 3-person family, it consumes more than we do. Unlike the main house (gas), the flat has an electric hob, and occupants still need to adapt habits to solar. However, with panel prices at an all-time low, we could benefit from additional panels before prices increase.

I see it, but at a different chart time; I guess this is due to the inverter type or the monitoring system being used. The line chart is so much better.

This is just today.

Thanks, everyone, for the update and feedback; I am learning so much already. I think there is a lot of optimisation that needs to be done, but the installer has not done that yet. The pool pump and geysers are only set to work during sunlight hours, and so far, they have been quite good during those hours. My batteries are always fully charged by noon, and by then, I should not be using anything from the grid.

Either I need to be calculating it right or understanding it well, so I asked the installer to explain better. My main problem is whether the inverter captures the total power used in the household. the equation for consumption will be C=Purchasegrid+consumedbattery + Consumed solar. Is the consumption side of the equaltion correct?

The inverters are two by Deye 5kw. I don't know if they are set to feedback that the installer is coming through later to look at them. However, the issue is that if I use power at night or whenever, will the numbers not add up to the consumption? Why is my consumption so low if I have consumed that much from the city and that much from self-production? This gap is not accounted for by the amount stored in the battery. I am missing something.

City of Cape Town Home user Prepaid So, I am extremely confused about the cost of electricity at home. We switched to solar, and it’s even more confusing as it remains quite high, but the numbers used don’t point to that. In summer, our monthly electric bill was about R4000 and I always felt like this did not reflect how much we used. We monitored purchases, turned off devices, etc. and never had an answer, so we assumed it was truly what we consume which motivated us to switch to solar energy avoid loadshedding and also save electric costs with such a high bill. This is our first full month on a 10kW solar system with 12kWh battery power, and despite our reliance on the grid having reduced to about 10% in terms of actual use based on the inverters, our electric purchase is at around 50% or higher. Let me elaborate. This month, I started purchasing on March 1, and I have purchased 1500Rands already. Based on being in Cape Town and our tariff rate, that comes to a total of 456.3KWh. The breakdown of the purchases is below: March 1 500rand 162.1 March 11th 500rands 162.1 March 18th 500rand 162 units From our inverter from March 1, we have produced 435.30KWh and consumed 568.7KWh. This means we should only have purchased approximately 133.4. As you can see from our purchase history, we have bought more than three times the amount (456.3KWh) we must have used from the grid. I need help understanding this. What could be the problem, and how do we solve it?

Our system went up today and fully functional. But we appear to be having some connectivity issues initially the WiFi module will not connect and I had to create a dedicated 2.4GHz wifi network then it connected. Even then we had to reset the dongle. Now finally after the installer left the it appears the units is offline completely and I assume it’s because the WiFi is not connecting. I have a few questions; first what is the radius others are getting ? I have a WiFi mesh network at home and my phone and most devices get full bars in the garage which is barely 5 meters from the primary router. What WiFi solutions are you using if your system is not installed in your main home and are there any know issues with deye wifi dongle and how do you fix it. Installer is recommending a WiFi extender repeater but before I invest in anything I want to know what the actual issue could be.

Second battery came in so we up and running. Yay

Thanks for this. The final question is we have lived in this house for 8 years and haven’t changed the geyser or worked on it ever. I am not sure if there has been any significant improvements in geyser technology. The previous owner of the house wasn’t one for buying the very best of things, though the house was liveable we have spent quite a bit of time and money doing quality improvements. My question is over the past 8 years has there been any changes or improvement in geyser technology? Would we benefit from a more recent electric geyser in terms of energy efficiency? Yes our system will cover the geyser especially if we use a timer to ensure it heats during the day mainly. Ultimately, I am opting for oversizing our solar system to cover the geyser rather than buying a solar geyser. So the plan is to in the near future change our two geysers to the most energy efficient ones we can get and use the system to power it. Currently I know we have a 150lt geyser for our 1 bedroom granny flat- I plan to change that to a 100lt as the maximum occupancy for the flat is 2. We have occasional had 3/4 guests but that’s under special circumstances.

So I have a question. We seem to have a really old geyser that is using a lot of power. We are installing a solar system with 2X 5kWh inverters 2X 6.14deye batteries and 14 550 panels. I keep seeing suggestions to change element in geyser to 2kw. My question is what will that achieve I assume a smaller element will just take longer to heat a same sized geyser is the changing element supposed to reduce the pressure on the system by pulling less and taking longer? Also what is the most efficient electric geysers out there as spending about 30000 now for a solar one is out of question.

Everything went up today. Still waiting for the last battery to be delivered and all the cables ie a distance from garage to db means we couldn’t go live. Almost there.

Yes, east and west, to catch early and late sun.