Gerrie

Thanks Marius for providing that document, looking at the document from CoCt at point 1.1 D - Off grid (Seperated and not interconnected with electrical installation) Would this mean not interconnected with the CoCt installation up to the meter or could it mean the installation on the users side of the meter. To my thinking a off grid installation will in any case always supply a electrical installation but they say it must be separated how would this work? It does not make sense or is there perhaps a better definition of Off-grid?

True, my wife brought my 5KW home and she said I can go fetch it in the car boot, for a moment I thought she got the wrong thing when I saw that big heavy box. I can just imagine the 8KW, guess guys better think where they gonna mount that beast. 😂 It’s still very early days for me to judge the Sunsynk but having worked with lots of cheap crap in my life this was not one of those moments.😅👌

The DB is bit cramped because of lot of circuits but still good

Just replaced my Axpert with the Sunsynk 5.5 situated in my garage, It is powered up and everything seems to work first time, still a bit of reading and experimenting to do with settings and WiFi dongle that I need to figure out but “WOW” what a machine. Everything about it feels and look like quality. It was quite easy to fit as most of my wiring was already in place except for the CT coil wiring that was a bit of a mission because my grid main cable is about 20 meters away from the inverter and I had to extend the CT coil wires to reach all that way and than changing my PV panels from parallel strings to series. Than fitting the earth bond relay easily inside the inverter, Also my DB in the house was previously upgraded and split into three sections when I first installed the previous Axpert. I did’nt use the PV string connectors on the bottom of the inverter but rather entered the PV wires through a sprag pipe in bottom of inverter.

Thanks Tariq, I did get the dongle with the inverter but I have not yet gotten that far to install it, I’m doing that over the weekend but I was wondering about a permanent screen mounted on next to the DB in the house so that I don’t need to use a laptop or phone. Might have to fit a Rasberry pi connected to WiFi with a touch screen unless Sunsync has a separate readymade screen. Any thought on that?

Hi guys I don’t mean to disrupt this thread, I’m busy installing a Sunsync in my garage where my Axpert used to be and would like to know if Sunsynk has a remote screen that I can install inside the house, or what similar options are there?

This is one of the biggest issues I also experienced with my inverter. I ended up fitting a sonoff switch that switched a relay on and off with timer settings. I switched off the grid supply instead of the PV. I forced the inverter to stay on battery mode until it was completely dark and only then switched to grid with the sonoff timer. This could also work for you but you need to know your batteries can handle the task. My system worked perfectly for more than two years like that but two months back I decided to install ICC and than stopped using the sonoff timer and thought I could rely on the ICC to control the modes but on Saterday with the cloudy weather in Johannesburg my inverter made the famous Axpert popping sound while it was switching between modes, so now the Sunsync is on its way.

SSEG used to stand for Small Scale embedded generation. When was this changed?

I’m sure most inverters will have a slight dimming or brightening of lights when the inverter switches between modes due to the voltage difference of grid and inverter power as well as that milli-second switchover duration. My own system been going fine for a few years now and I see the switchover every night with my led lights as my system switches over on a timer setting. The problem however of flickering could be a result like Coulomb mentioned if the relays in the inverter had some excessive wear and tear. I think that type of flicking on and off could possibly cause damage to hard drives and equipment sensitive to surges.

I don’t think flickering of lights is normal, my own lights make a slight flick when changing over. I noticed the 60A is your inverter set to charge the pylontech at 60A? if so, I think it’s to high for a US2000 it should be set at 25A the same as recommended discharge current, otherwise you might shorten the battery lifespan.

In my case I do use grid as well but it is not shown on the graph, the graph only shows my essential loads that are mostly powered by solar and battery and they are things like the WiFi, cctv, electric fence, lights, fridge, computers and TV’s. My non-essentials are grid-feed only and those are the dishwasher, oven, geyser, microwave, and some heavy loaded plugs in the kitchen, these are powered before the inverter and is not seen by the inverter.

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.