Bobster.

Hmmm.... one can currently get new 10/8s for not much north of 40K. EG https://powerforum-store.co.za/collections/batteries/products/freedom-won-lite-home-10-8-lifepo4-battery-n

The inverter can't handle this really. Charge limit for the hardware is 100A, and the Goodwe agents won't set it past 80A as per - they say - an instruction from FreedomWon. Though if the hardware can't go past 100A, there's not a lot more that can be done. The bus bar is the main piece of the puzzle though. Batteries connect to this, and the bus bar feeds the disconnect. The two batteries would have to talk to each other as well. FW want a minimum distance between the batteries, so I need to measure to see if I can meet that requirement.

Hmmm.... this tempts me. But it's going to need some work on my side. What's required here? A network connection between the two? How do the batteries get connected? Does each need a disconnect? And I need to figure out what that little lot is going to cost me.

This is a request that British consumers may get this summer. They already have what we are moving towards: multiple suppliers, emphasis on renewables,one grid. And that grid and the available power needs managing. I wonder what sort of leas time they will give. I know that my family in Spain will run the dishwasher on a timer to take advantage of low prices during the early morning. But what is foreseen in the UK looks a bit more dynamic. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/14/uk-households-power-renewables-soar?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Did you stipulate this in the contract? It's not unreasonable for a buyer to expect to take ownership of what he saw and inspected. So if there were panels on the roof then either he can say "where's the panels and all the other stuff that goes with them?" or there's a stipulation made in the contract. I get what you're saying, but a house can be on the market for a while, and I would not disconnect the PV and take everything off the roof and out of sight whilst I'm waiting for a buyer.

You are free to choose anybody you like to produce the test report, though they should have the appropriate qualifications. One of the gripes OUTA had with the registration process was that it required an ENGINEER to sign off on the report. OUTA argue that an electrician should be able to sign off. I have no idea about the merits of OUTA's argument, but when I asked my regular electrician if he'd do this for me he said no, it's not the sort of work that he does and he thinks I should get somebody who knows what they are doing and what they are looking at (one of the reasons he's my go to guy is that he doesn't promise to be able to do any sort of work for all people). But still.... you can shop around for somebody to do this and you can make the choice on whatever basis you see fit. All that said, the utility may do their own checks. In my case - City Power, not Eskom - an engineer from City Power came out and pointed to various things on the line drawing that is part of the report and said "please show me that". City Power didn't charge a cent for this, nor for the eventual registration. As you'd expect, I did have to pay the guys who represented me and produced the drawing and the report. Another possible cost is if the engineer you appoint inspects and then says you need extra things to bring the system up to code. This will be for your account. In my case it was warning labels. I suspect the cost of making good some cowboy's short cuts is the source of some of these stories about it costing twenty grand to get registered. My registration was handled by a company called Pure Energy Consulting. They did EVERYTHING. I signed a document appointing them to represent me in the matter of SSEG registration and then they took over, spoke to the various offices at City Power, did the line drawing, got the test certificate and everything else that City Power required. They also liaised with City Power to set the date and time for inspection, and were there for the inspection to answer any questions that City Power had.

The inverter test certificate is routine and made available by the manufacturer. Somebody has to get it but they don't have to do any testing. The manufacturer should have had the system tested (probably in the EU) and there will be one certificate for all instances of that make and model. When my system was registered the guys who did it for me downloaded the certificate from .... somewhere, I'm guessing from Goodwe. There are a batch of tests that must be performed by a reputable laboratory under controlled conditions. You will not have to do the tests that produced the certificate - a laboratory did them already. My system is registered with City Power as that's who supplies the area I live in. They did reserve the right to check for compliance, though unless you've been fiddling with things you shouldn't fiddle with you should be OK (because everything has been tested by a certified test facility). I mention all of this to give an idea of the sort of things that the certificate deals with and that the inspector may verify. What CP decided to test was that the inverter must NOT reconnect to the grid the moment that power is restored. It must wait. The wait period is randomised. The idea being that if an area loses power and the power is then restored, the inverters do not all connect and potentially start demanding power at the same time. So this requirement mitigates against surges at restoration time (it also means that if there is such a surge, your inverter is likely to be disconnected from the grid anyway). The certificate also tests things like islanding to make sure that the inverter doesn't try to export when the grid supply is down. My test certificate specifies NRS 097-2-1:2017 Edition 2.1. The actual testing and certification for that make and model was done in Germany. The test report for the installation is basically to check compliance with safety requirements. So you must have properly earthed solar panels, you must have a way to isolate the inverter from the rest of the house's wiring, you must have appropriate warning labels so that an electrician is warned that there are multiple power sources for the property. One of the installers who frequent this forum would be able to give you a fuller list of what is required. I imagine that there is a core set of requirements, and maybe local extras that the utility may impose.

You may have to re certify. If your system is registered then you would need to de-register it and register at the new address - a system is registered as an inverter (identified by serial number) at a physical location, and the registration covers all the electrical connections. You'd probably have to "un split" the DB (cost) and may have to patch walls where the equipment is removed. Those costs are unlikely to be close to the cost of a PV system, but you should still figure them into your costings.

You don't say where you are. If in Randburg / Sandton / Midrand then check out https://www.maidenelectronics.co.za/ Batteries are what they do.

Thanks. I have no solar geyser to compare against, but since I put in some CBI smart controllers I can track my heat pump. We used 46.63 kWH for the month of January, 46.92 in February, and 65.87 in March. Hmmm.... I need to try and factor in weather to see why the big increase in March. So on a bad month we are using about 2kWh a day to heat electricity - still double what you report with the VAC. Our situation: Two adults, each showering once per day. Dishwasher does its own heating, washing machine is always run on cold cycles. Geyser is clad with isotherm, and all hot water pipes between the geyser and walls are similarly clad. The pump runs twice a day. First run is 6:00 to 7:00 in the morning. Second time the timer switches on at 12:00 and off at 15:00, but the pump will not run for all of that (typically 15 to 20 minutes in the summer) and may not start at 12:00 on the dot.

I would start either with the installer (if that's not you) or with Solis. Solis will have a way to connect to the inverter and check all the settings, check log files on the inverter and tell you if they see anything concerning.

Electricians have more options than the likes of me. One is to use a two part switch with levers/button on a plate over the box, and the actual smart part up in the roof where there is less electrical noise and no surrounding metal box - IE more reliable WiFi communications.

This is not unusual. If you were to start buying IOT light switches you will find that many models specify that you don't need a neutral wire in the switch box. In this sort of wiring scheme the neutrals are in the roof, connected directly to the light fittings, and the actual switch is on the live connection between the DB and the fitting(s). You say "one gang", but how many separate fittings are being switched here?

They have already installed the latest firmware.

They do have a lot of installs, but they also have multiple products. Some commercial, some domestic, and in the domestic space they have at least two product lines. I have the FreedomWon LiTE which I like a lot, but FreedomWon batteries are not all the same and the E-Tower has a different BMS and the cells are sourced from a different factory. So I would say that if you are looking for reports from owners, check which FreedomWon they are using. There are reasons that you pay less for E-Tower than for LiTE.

This thread, and my recent experience with Goodwe SA, lead me to ask what a BMS actually does. Does it not have the ability to protect the battery against overcharging? My first batteries were Revovs. There was a statement from one of their technicians that I had overcharged. I countered this on various grounds, including that they have a BMS that is supposed to protect their batteries. More recently Goodwe SA restricted the charge current on my inverter, saying that they were acting in accordance with instructions from the battery manufacturer. They at first assumed for some reason that I was using Pylontechs. When I said, no, it's FreedomWon then they produced a document from that company that instructed them on charge rate settings. Both those brands of battery have a BMS that they can configure as they see fit. Either they don't trust the BMS to do the job of protecting the batteries, or I don't understand what a BMS does. When that FW LiTE was installed the technician set the Goodwe inverter into "default lithium" mode and plugged the comms cable in. The BMS then took over and set everything. If their BMS can do that, then why are FW asking for hard limits to be imposed on the inverter side (and at least than the 1C their batteries are supposed to be). The setting they gave me when they thought I had Pylontechs was well below 0.5C. Again, why?

Lol. Normally the people who refer to me as a "gentleman" are the police.

Word!

Thanks. As I said, I considered this normal behaviour - or at least I was used to it. I appreciated Goodwe's concern, but I thought they might be making a mountain out of a molehill. You saved me the cost of calling out an electrician. But now what happens with off-grid systems? In the circumstances @Kalahari Meerkat describes there is still power to be dumped, and now the only place to dump it is into the battery.

This is the way it seems. A common time for a burst of power back to the grid is when the heat pump turns off. Also a steam iron - at least 2kW and turning on & off all the time - drives the inverter crazy. This seems similar to the inverter drawing from the grid if load suddenly increases. It's the quickest way to get the juice it needs.

We went through a couple of rounds. The situation originally had been that the BMS set the limits regarding charging. Since it's a 1C 10kW/h battery, and the hardware in the inverter can't go past 100A, the inverter can never charge that battery at 1C. Looking back through the history, the charging seldom went past about 80A, which turns out to be the absolute hard limit that FreedomWon allow - on a 1C 10kWh battery, go figure. But Goodwe showed me the documentation from FreedomWon. Since 80A pretty much matched what had been observed in real life we eventually agreed on that. They had initially set it to 20A (they thought I had Pylontechs, and they have a document from Pylontech recommending no more than 20A). They then set it, as you suggest, to 50A. They dug their heels in at 80A, but as I said, this pretty much matched the most I got in real life. They are under pressure from battery manufacturers to adhere to their recommendations, but I also felt that this should be my problem: They could caution me, but if I told them that they should let this be between me and FreedomWon then surely that allowed them to wash their hands of the matter. I usually have about 50% at sunrise, that's after the heat pump has made it's early morning run. I would start getting grumpy if I didn't have 100% SOC by midday (and usually would have it by 11:00), to not be fully charged by 15:00 would mean pretty foul weather or unusually high loads. To have to wait until past 15:00 on a day with good sunshine was way beyond what I was used to.

Recently Goodwe SA were looking at my inverter (at my request). They tweaked some settings, and they also called me and asked me to check the CT coil. I declined. I am know enough to know that I don't want to be putting my fingers inside the DB, and even less to be moving things around in there. No. Not a good idea. Anyway, they said that my inverter is feeding back into the grid, despite the appropriate parameter being set to not export at all. I knew about this. As with other things on my PV journey I've accepted that things are just like that. I don't think the export per day is very high, and overall the systems imports more from grid (also a bit every day) than it exports. So I might get an electrician in to have a look (and then what?), but it's not high on my priority list. I will post some data from the Goodwe portal, with exports highlighted, but I also found myself wondering what the CT actually does. I don't believe (but I'm open to correction) that it has any ability to stop current flow in one direction or the other. I think it's just an input to the inverter. If the current starts flowing out towards the municipal meter then the CT detects this, sends a signal to the inverter, and then the firmware on the inverter can decide what to do. But then the POSITION of the CT is also important. The Goodwe happily (and IMO correctly) allows power it generates to to to the non-essential circuits. The CT is electrically very close to the meter, and the idea is to prevent any power flowing out of the property IE through the meter. Am I right? Here's that data. Power to and from the grid is the orange trace, and I've circled some points where you can see the system exporting (orange trace goes above the axis). Blue trace is PV, yellow trace is load, purple trace is the battery (above the axis is discharging, below is charging). Green trace is SOC.

That diagram goes to a point that I recently disputed with Goodwe. I'd ask them to look at my inverter. They said they wanted to change some settings, I said OK. Ha! They set the maximum charge current very low. It was taking 7 to 8 hours to charge the battery on a sunny day. On an overcast day (and we were having those at the time in JHB) no chance. I am not used to this. They then said that they set the charge current limit as per an instruction from FreedomWon. This is related to the two tier warranty on batteries being sold now. My 10/8 does not qualify for this. But the two tiers are based on how the battery is charged. If you charge at 0.25C then they will extend the warranty - more charge cycles. Otherwise the original warranty that my battery has (lower number of cycles) applies.

One method that has been suggested to me is to look at what's being sold second hand. The theory behind this being that if people are getting rid of them it's because they are unhappy with them. You could refine this by finding what brand of inverter the seller has. I used to have Revovs, they didn't get on well with my inverter, so it's a good bet that Goodwe owners are more likely to dump Revovs than Victron owners are. This isn't scientific, but it may reflect real world experience.

Let's hope the City doesn't suddenly remember that they miswired that meter and come to fix it.