Gerrie

This was today on a very small system consisting of a 4KW Axpert clone and 1980W of panels with a 3.5KW pylontech battery. At 13h30 the PV Watts dropped due to the battery that was fully charged.

Great info any idea what the the heat control is? or even the cfet and dfet? I’m looking to control the dry contacts on pylon.

Interesting information that I would like to have as well. I would like to have this information incorporated into a Rasberry pi to see maximum available PV. Any advise on irradiance sensors that is worth looking at?

It came with the geyser in the evacuated tube box, I think it can also be purchased at electronic shops.

Perhaps you could use two contactors to switch between grid and solar as the smart device. I am using a off-grid Axpert inverter and have two change-over contactors. The one feed the essentials and the other the non-essentials. They are controlled with two sonoff switches on my phone. These are set on timers to automatically switch on and off. The aim with this system is to never get the battery charged to 100% SOC because that will mean wasting PV power. My battery is normally full by about 16H00 than there is a bit of wastage for the last hour till battery slowly start discharging again.

I have a 200 liter hp 20 x evacuated tube self siphoning geyser it is at 15 degrees West from North at about 45 degree angle. On Sunday we did not use water the whole day and it went up to 76 degrees when I got home late the afternoon, today it sits at 65 degrees after the maid has been using water, the worst I’ve seen it was 44 degrees after a very cloudy day. One important thing with evacuated tube geysers are to make sure to apply the heat sink paste to the copper tubes otherwise it will loose lot of heat due to bad contact. I installed my own geyser and made sure and applied the paste thick.

My oven used to trip the earth leakage due to high humidity, the moisture builds up in the elements especially when it was not used for a few months. What I done is take it of earth leakage and let it heat up on full power than when done put it back on earth leakage and it would work perfectly again. I would not recommend taking it off earth leakage if you are not a electrician as that can be very dangerous but a electrician could do it safely as part of troubleshooting. I eventually changed the element and the problem was solved, I now have a similar problem with my dishwasher element because it gets used very seldom and stands unused for up to a year at a time.

One point to look out for is protection, are they installing breakers or fuses for each new string. I would assume 15A fuse or breaker per string on a 10.82A circuit. This might also mean upgrading your breaker depending on your setup, feeding PV to inverter as this can now go up to 64A.

I now have one lithium Pylontech Us3000. I had to removed the heavy loads like dish washer, microwave and oven to before the inverter to stay within the 37A happy limit of the Pylontech because I don’t want to overload it like I done previously with the gel batteries.

I have a remote display for my 4KW Axpert next to my DB in the house that worked for a few years but I now unplugged the display and installed a PI at inverter and my inverter only have 1 x RJ11 port where the PI is now plugged in. Is there a solution to get the remote display and PI working on the same port? I miss my display in the house.

I had Osaka 120/AH gel batteries they ran about 15 months till one of them failed. I used them without monitoring. Pushed them to the limits by occasionally drawing 80AH from them and going more than 50% discharge on them. They would probably of lasted much longer if they were used within limits. To me it was all about school fees.

Changing to a 25A breaker on the output side might let the inbuilt breaker on the inverter trip as I think that might be a 22A -25A breaker rated to protect the inverter. You are running the inverter load almost at maximum. Can you not rather move load over to inverter 2?

I had a similar shading problem on Sunday, I realized my six 330WATT panels were not performing to well in the morning, round about 9H00. I thought maybe the panels are dirty and on investigating found my small Telkom aerial making a small shade on one string of two series panels. When measuring the current to that string it was 3.4A and the next two strings was at 8.9A. I got on the roof and lowered the aerial and the pv jumped up with about 200Watt. The small drop in the graph was my shade passing the panels on the roof. Please ignore the time on the ICC graph as it was not correct at the time.

This probably require a battery monitor with a shunt to measure the actual current flow from 100% SOC. The moment a big load is connected there is a voltage drop that confuses the inverter and it will give alarms.