Goedman

Thank you Coulomb, Your response and expertise is much appreciated. I did restart the batteries a number of times with no change. Now I am going to replace the cable and see what happens. Regards, Goedman

I have an Axpert (Mecer) 5000W inverter running on two batteries as a back-up for loadshedding. Now I got 10 Canadian 420 W panels and want to space them at 90 degrees (four panels to catch the morning sun and six panels for the midday sun). If all the strings go to one connector box and then to the inverter how will they effect each other. Will the morning panels be pulled down by the other six that are still in the shadows? Similarly late afternoon will the morning panels moving into the shadows, have a negative effect on the six midday panels? How serious is this effect and what can be done to mitigate the problem?

I have an Axpert (Mecer) 5000 W, with two batteries working perfectly for many months now. Suddenly this morning the alarm sounded and it flashed code 61. I switched everything off, checked the cable between the inverter and the master battery but everything looked fine. When I restart, it doesn't take long before the same warning comes up again. Any suggestions?

Thanks S, Think I am going to start with a good battery, charge it from ESKOM and use a 24V inverter to supply a 3 point plug for now. Hopefully the battery and inverter can be used when I add panels and a charge controller later. What do you think of two 12v 100Ah "Solar Deep Cycle Gel Battery" that they sell on Takealot for R2300? I would like to keep as many of the components as possible when I upgrade to a bigger system later. Any advice is more than welcome.

Thanks Q, Yours is a good example of what is available. My first questions to the forum is: 1. Which of these kits are good value for money? 2. Can I do better by simple buying the separate parts and combining them myself? 3. Your requirements often keep growing. How many of these kits allow extra capacity to be added to the system? I would definitely benefit from guidelines given by the older hands on the forum and so will some of my friends and family. Thanks for all the good information on the forum.

Hello guys, I am also interested in using some of my rainwater for the toilets, dishwasher and washing machine. My question to @Surge is whether you filter and drink the water from your rainwater system. How do you treat that water before it is drinkable? Thanks for the information.

Good job @Coulomb, this is what makes our forum so special.

Wow! That is amazing stuff! Tried it out and it is very nice to play with. Thanks and enjoy the weekend.

Spoken like a master. 👍

Thank you for the help. Would you suggest that I first look at the batteries and maybe replace them first? Unfortunately my "birthday money" won't cover both inverters and batteries. I will have to choose between the two for now?

It will be my birthday soon. Now I can't help wondering what inverter to buy for myself? I am a pensioner and need to get something that is good value for money. Any suggestions?

Thank you guys. The main thing that I learnt today is how little I know about all of this. Maybe I should follow your advice and get one of those BMV's. @plonkster also made a good point about my old clunky inverters. Thank you.

Thank you sir, I would love to have three days of backup power in the near future. We do have pretty reliable grid power at the moment and I will figure out how to get the inverter to switch to grid below a good SOC (maybe 50V?).

Sorry, it sounds silly but I don't know what kind of inverters I have. It is called a PowerStar LW (picture attached). On sunny days my system seems to cope, it is just the cloudy rainy days like today. @plonkster will know because it must be raining by him as well.

I have a newbie question for the forum: My 48V system loses steam on these cloudy Cape Town days and some mornings I find that one or both inverters have just shut down. The Victron chargers are very expensive and I was wondering if there was a cheaper option. What would happen if I connected a 48V power supply to the batteries to "trickle charge" the batteries at night? I am sure that the power supply would "charge" the batteries once they drop below 48V, I am just not so sure what would happen when the voltage is above 48V. Maybe @plonkster, @Coulomb or one of the masters can set my straight. Thank you for a great forum.

I have an extra 48V PowerStar LW, 3000W inverter/charger, that I connected to help charge the batteries on a rainy day in the Cape. The attached picture is one of the inverters operating normally as an inverter, just to show what it looks like. The extra inverter/charger worked fine for a while but now it gives me an alarm (audio and red light) if I switch it on. Any ideas or suggestions in this regard? Maybe I should just invest in a "charger only" option to supplement the charging on cloudy days. Any suggestions on what kind of 48V charger I should consider?

Thanks @gabriel, for your comments and advice. There is so much information out there on the internet, I just find it difficult to decide who to trust.

Thanks for all your hard work.

Being in the Western-Cape, I was also thinking about a wind turbine to help charge the solar batteries at night and on cold rainy days when the wind will be blowing... Thanks to your comments, I have put the wind turbine toy on the back burner. I must admit that I am also wondering about that vertical axis turbines. They look cool and are very quiet. There are two big ones at the Verde Hotel near the Cape Town airport and you can hardly hear them. I have a 48 V solar system with two 3000W inverters that power most of the house. Unfortunately on cloudy days I might wake up the next morning and both invereters just shut themselves down. I am not sure why (maybe the batteries dropped too low). So far they just reset fine and carried on working normally. This brings me back to supplementing the charge to the batteries. I do have ESKOM power available (some times) and was wondering about what kind of battery charger I should look at. 1. Any suggestions about the type of charger that I should consider? 2. Would you connect that directly onto the batteries or route it through the charge controller? 3. Is anybody else doing something like this and do you perhaps supply the 220 V for the charger via a timer in the DB. That way it can charge at night for a few hours and I don't have to worry about running out of juice on cloudy days?

Thanks @gabriel, I checked out some of your other diagrams as well (with the 2 x 10000L tanks). Thanks for all the good ideas. It is so much easier to see it from a diagram. What do you suggest for filtration? Because of the rainwater from the roof (no first flush diverter yet).

Thanks @gabriel, don't feel bad, this is such a steep learning curve for most of us. That is why a forum like this helps a newbie like me avoid some of the most expensive mistakes. I catch water from the roof and balconies and up to now only used it in the garden. We have been spoiled with dependable clean water from the town council but lately there have been some unplanned disruptions in supply. Now I am doing some research to learn how to pump the rainwater into the house on those days that we don't have any water. When we get lots of rain (mostly in the winter for us), I might want to use that from my 10000 liter tank when it gets full enough. As a pensioner it is also important to save some money wherever I can. I am still looking for a nice diagram to show how a system like that could work. Thanks to you and everybody else on the forum that shares so generously for the benefit of others.

A newbe question: Why do you have two pumps? Those yellow things on top of the pump, (guessing it might be digital pressure control valves), did you buy that separately? How are they working for you?