Denns

Wouldnt you just be removing the positive and negative and connecting the new battery with comms cable? Or did you change the DC Isolator/Breaker also? I dont see where the complication is if you had an exisitng install. Is it a replace battery situation or added a new battery?

Can just add a simple buck/boost converter in between without having to modify the board. The converters are super cheap also. And he just scales accordingly.

I think this is it. My rails run right through. His arent from the pictures. I suspect the installer didnt want to spend on the railing and took shortcuts cutting small pieces and just supports on the ends. And it looks like his panels are being supported on the short length of the panels. Mine are supported along the long edge with the rail going right through. And the fact that the panels are mounted with the edges touching, I cant imagine that is good with heat not being able to escape anywhere. There is at least 10cm (I can stick my hand under the panels) between the panel and the corrugated roof. And there is a gap between each of the panels along the rail so there is plenty of ventilation between the panels. I can see why the installer would have gone cheap, it cost me a bit over 3k to buy the rails and another 2k for the corrugated mounting brackets when I did mine. I could have saved 2k easily by doing it the way the installer did his but it would not be structurally sound for the panels. The slope of the panels has little to do with it in my opinion.

Not worth fitting these mounts at all. My panels are mounted with a 10 degree tilt facing SW. Not an ideal orientation but thats how the garage roofs are slopped. They are almost flat basically. I dont have water ingress and am off-grid. He would need 2 of those supports that cost as much as 1 Panel. Waste of money in my opinion. I am yet to see any datasheet say mounting them flat or at a slight angle with damage the structure of the panel. I think they were just not mounted properly (too close to the end as one user mentioned) and the glass cracked/was defective from the get go. Its not the angle/slope. Do you guys know how hot the surface of a panel gets? After rain the water evaporates very quickly. Water sitting on the panel for the night won't do anything to them. Thats just my 2 cents. I dont even have water draining clips and the panels are perfectly fine. Just on the edge there can be some dirt accumulation if its a quick rain but it always gets cleaned off if it rains for at least 15 minutes properly. Tilt mounts cost 1.1k excluding the bolts etc. to fit on the roof. A new panel costs 1.1k. Just add more panels. Even if real estate is a problem, he would need to space the panels enough to avoid shading them with the tilt. Not worth it to me.

@Bobster. Have you thought of getting a bigger inverter? It sounds like (from other posts also) that it is causing quite an inconvenience for you. You could be saving more on electricity and not have to worry about all of this load management stuff etc. And with COJ doing its funnies now with postpaid etc, seems the main thing stopping you going off-grid if you want is the inverter. A luxpower 14kW is just undeer 20k. A ECCO 11kW is about 9.5k. It might be worthwhile to just upgrade and not worry about all this changeover switches, watching your loads etc.

Yep, there is new 5kW inverters for 4k/5k these days. Spending 3.5k on a 5 year old one isnt logical.

As hloc has said. It is not possible. You cant possibly have the inverter capacity to supply the whole street. All the fridges, geysers etc being supplied with a residential inverter? Nope, not a chance. Even if you manage your neighbourhood by some miracle, you will feed past the breaker and past the transformer? The inverter wont make it that far, and if it does, it has the other neighbourhoods to supply. And also there is another problem, how exactly would your inverter feedback? Lets use a typical grid tied inverter. How exactly will the AC out go into the grid? If you messed up the install and succesfully did that, guess what would happen to your inverter? Big bang and lots of smoke. You cannot have 2 AC sources out of sync connected to each other. The smaller one (inverter) will lose that battle very quicly with the grid and blow up. The approved inverters that can export have anti-islanding. They stop exporting when the grid goes down. And if that mechanism failed somehow, they will still trip as they dont have the capcity to do so.

Basically, it needs to sync with the grid.

From a practical point of view, it is not possible to supply past your meter for over a second. Your inverter is far to small and will just trip immediately if such a thing happened to occur. But I do agree that it does need to be managed to some extent. And no, not just your specific inverter. Even the guy with a 20kW inverter will trip. If all 10 of the inverters in the area do the same, almost all of them will probably blow their capacitors etc as they wont be in sync with each other.

Sure but if they switch you to postpaid without you knowing are you going to take them to court? Have the money to fund the court battle? Because it is happening to people now as we speak where they are being converted to postpaid without being told.

And that has actually been a good thing. The problem has always been COJ it seems. Ever since they took over the meter reading I have gotten actual readings. Under COJ it was always estimated and would get atrocious bills which is what pushed me towards going off-grid in the first place. And guess who has helped me the most with the off-grid application? Citipower, not COJ. COJ were clueless.

I dont know about soon but It will definitely happen. I went to COJ to pay the quote but alas, it was not on their system. Went to citipower and citipower has the quote on their system. So the system at coj seems to be a mess. The lady at CP said she will send the quote again. Its one of those things where you have to keep following up or else nothing gets done The last step is basically the payment of that quote. Then they can come remove their equipment.

Yeah, you need to register by March this year or some penalties will be issued etc.

Exactly. The utilities have no interest in anyone’s COC if you aren’t connected to their grid. COC requirement for other things is something else. They ask for COC when you want to connect to their network. They don’t ask for it when you disconnect. Throughout the entire off grid application process they had no interest in my COC or how I generate my power. You can power your house off a rock and they won’t care.

Only if you want to connect to their network. Otherwise it has nothing to do with them. They have no say what’s inside your yard otherwise if you have no grid connection. Also goes with registration. Eskom clearly states that grid tied homes must be registered if they have PV installed.

As @Scorp007 said, when a load is connected, you should be seeing much more. Even at 50A charging you should see the full power of the panels.

Yeah, MUST and Ecco have local representation so I would only stick to brands with local support and warranty. I see they are offered with 5 year repair warranties so not too bad. Importing from Temu from example wont be a good idea. I bought mine from Solarwarehouse SA. The GELs are 1 year old now and havent lost any capacity. I accidentally used PM instead of AM on my pool timer when I was reconfiguring on Tuesday and my pool pump ran at night, using about 4.5kWh if I remember well. My battery SOC was about 60% so with a 700W load at the time the pool ran with fans etc, the batteries are still operating as 100ah. I have 12kWh in total from the 10. I am currently using the savings from solar to save for lithium. I will DIY an 2x8kWh 24V lithium bank with cells from cellsupply to replace it when the bank dies which I will later configure to series when I get a 48V inverter. Will cost about 30k to do.

That kind of sucks. So if you change anything on the solar installation you have to register again? I got my solar in Feb last year. I have saved about 20k in my bill to date. I have paid off my GEL battery bank (11k for the 10 batteries) and my inverter (3.3k I paid for it). I am already way on my way to paying off the panels and accessories used. It was a self install so the labor I saved on. This year, being off-grid without the fixed charges, I will save about 40k rand. My entire system with the solar geyser conversion was 78k. So by April next year I would have paid off my entire system. A 12kW inverter now (Axpert clone) is about 9 to 10k) from Ecco. I will wait for my inverter to die and get one of those. Mine has run for a year now (also a clone from MUST) and has been perfect. Even if it packs up in 3 years, it has paid for itself multiple times over. So I wont be buying the more expensive brands as I dont think a 12kW Sunsynk for example which costs 30 to 40k will last 3 to 4 times longer. So if one is willing, they can get a good deal on a 8kW plus inverter without breaking the bank.

Will do

Doesnt seem like it. They dont remove the cabling if i am not mistaken. Only the apparatus inside the box with the meter and the breaker. Similar to how your equipment gets removed if you had an illegal connection. And yes, the account must be paid up which fortunately I am good in that regard. All my readings were actual and have been 0kWh usage for a bit now.

Its a bit of adjusting thats for sure. I have a gas and electric kettle, 90% of the time my wife uses the gas one as she understands we have a small inverter. My kettle was a 2000W one but I replaced it with a 1100W kettle so if guests come over and want to make a quick cup of tea they run that. My iron was also replaced with a steamer. The steamer only draws about 900W and it was actually my wifes idea as she always wanted a steamer. She claims its quicker than ironing so I got a good deal there, less draw on the inverter and a happy wife lol. Dishawasher and washing machine during heating cycles use 1400W. Microwave, 1700W. Air fryer, 1100W on the small side and 1400W on the larger side. I can easily run 2 of any of these items in the kitchen without issue even with the pool running. My biggest power draw is the Oven. That draws about 1900W so when the wife wants to bake then care is taken to not turn any of the other high power kitchen applicances on. But the gardener can still run his tools, pool can run and people can be on their laptops and TV without the inverter overloading. If I replace the inverter with anything over 6kW i think it would be a night and day difference for us. The fact that our lives are well adjusted to the 3.6kW inverter, anything more than that would be a breeze for us.

I got my quote from CP an hour ago for them to remove my installation. 1083 rand. I will pay it tomorrow and then wait for CP to remove their installation. The whol process so far wasnt that bad. But I did get helped quite a bit by CP. They had to guide COJ on the process as COJ didnt even know it was a thing that can be done lol.

You will be amazed at how efficient modern tools and appliances are. My fridge for example is a 450 plus liter and draws only 70W. 75 inch TV only draws 180W. Etc. I am fortunate everything in my house is new as I only purchased it around September 2024. Benefited me a lot with my small system.

So there is multiple things to comment on here. one can always reconnect (12k) when they want to sell the house. I pay 16.5k in fixed charges to stay connected to the grid. The obvious choice is to go offgrid. Also, electricity prices and fixed charges are not going down. A person wanting to buy a home if they realise being offgrid saves them money might actually want it, especially if they already came rpm a solar home. Times are changing I South Africa and with most of Tshwane without power for days l, Roodepoort also being in trouble along with multiple other areas where substations are burning down, a solar home is definitely welcomed by most. As for your lawn mower, my dad’s place is offgrid also and he has a 6.2kW inverter. He runs his lawnmower with no problem. I suspect you have those old lawnmowers. I have a 3.6kW inverter and my Gardner runs the 2kW grass cutter without issues with the pool pump and TV running. But then again, it’s new so I guess that’s why it has not caused issues. Even the 2kW leaf blower runs fine also.

Yes, its 25kWh. Not kW if this is what he was implying. My inverter is only rated for a max of 4kW but I have 4.55kW installed.