Bobster.

Yes, it's a Goodwe ES. My understanding, which may be incorrect, is that it can handle a steady 4.6 kw and then an extra 10% (which gives 5) for 60 seconds - on the backup side. Hence my concern. The loads I was seeing were more than the system could handle during a grid outage. So I wanted to address that. I didn't want my housekeeper inadvertently plunging the whole property into darkness. Which begs a question: What does the inverter do when that peak load is exceeded? Does it stop and need to be reset?

Lol. Yes indeed. One challenge remains for me. In the morning the system is using the panels for all it's worth so as to get the batteries charged. But SOC reaches 100% by 12:30 latest, and after that the panels just service the load. Which means I am not using them to the max. So I need to try to find something to use all that free power in the afternoons.

I'm interested in this because you've gone off grid with not much more firepower than I have. You have a bit more battery than I do, but apart from that... OK... small property, but you still need to keep it clean, prepare meals and so on. How's it working? And how did it work in the winter? Those panels look like they're at quite a shallow angle.

I get that too. Though I only noticed that feature yesterday. There is a way to get a bigger graph in the browser - but it omits the load trace. From the main page that you showed, click on Devices, then on Curve.

The app is working OK for me now. Earlier this morning it didn't want to know about July 17th, I couldn't select that date. But now it's OK. Maybe it wants a certain amount of data before it does any graphing.

Having access to monitoring the inverter has given me some insights into where the electricity in our house goes and when. And some surprises. I had been told by several people that refrigerators consume a lot of power. Well, that's not what the apps and web sites I have access to show. We have two fridges and a deep freeze that run all the time, and at night our consumption never goes over 500 w - that's with TVs on standby, with the electric fence running and other minor drains. Now is it possible that they cause a spike when they turn on, but it's so brief that the apps can't catch it? Our heat pump has become my sworn enemy, though tests I did on the weekend shows it uses substantially less than a geyser element. Anyway... that seems to use about 1.5kw when the compressor is running. This is where the playing of games starts. I noticed increased usage on the days in which our housekeeper is in. Not surprising, because she has to use appliances to do her job. But some of those devices chew up the power. In particular I was seeing a big spike about 2:30 every afternoon - sometimes up to 5kw. This worried me because it's more than the inverter can handle if we are running on batteries alone. Long story short: The heat pump (which is on a timer) was kicking in about the same time she does the ironing. I reprogrammed the heat pump and the load is now more evenly distributed time wise. (I checked the labeling on the iron - 2.4 kw!) So these are the games to play now. I suspect I have already solved the major problems, and our daily usage of municipal power now averages about 0.75 kw/h. I have programmed the pool pump so that it doesn't run when Mary is likely to be busy with vacuum cleaners and such. I have reprogrammed the heat pump and dropped the figure at which the battery must recharge from the grid from 50% to 40%. My inclination is to tinker endlessly, but people have to live their lives and do what they need to do. On one occasion I noticed the load drop all the way down to about 11w momentarily. Serendipity, I suppose, with all the fridges being idle at the same time. That suggests the electric fence doesn't consume much at all.

Working in Chrome this morning, but now the android app is broken. That will show me a beautiful graph of yesterday's data, but doesn't know today exists.

The weight is an issue here as well. I've a similar system at home, and the batteries make it very heavy indeed. Also, and going back to what Plonkster already said, try it ahead of time. Mine is not that noisy, but it's also not silent when discharging.

Hmmm. Tried using Edge rather than Chrome and it works just fine. In fact a little better, because it's using different, more easily distinguished colours for the graph.

SEMS portal usually gives me two views at the same time. One is a near real time power flow (from grid, from PV, to or from battery) and the other is a graph showing what has happened since midnight (state of charge, power demand, PV power used etc). This morning I get the former but not the latter. It is possible that I have clicked on something, but I saw the difference as soon as I logged in. My inverter is sending data. The power flow display is there, and the phone on my app shows the graph (but oh so tiny). Anybody got any advice on what I can select from a confusing bunch of menu options?

Well, it may be a golden era for arts and innovation and generally for creative thinking. One way to look at it is that people won't all be able to work. Another is to say that they won't all HAVE to work. Which may have the effect of allowing time for lofty thought, for creation and discovery. I don't know which way it will play out, but I can see an alternative.

This is the most obvious example. There are projections that by 2040 nobody in the USA will drive for a living (IE all public transport, taxis, haulage, courier deliveries etc will be automated). But it's not the only one. Legal firms are starting to use AI to check long, tedious contracts with lots of small print. Financial institutions have bots that can vet and make a decision on a home loan application far quicker, and with less error, than a human can. This is a tide that we can't hold back, and the long term result is that soon (possibly still within my lifetime) there will not be enough jobs to go around, even if people are wanting to work. This means rethinking a lot of things, including our attitudes to people who don't work, and a way to keep workless people involved in the economy.

It's way too late for that. Very few crops we consume are as nature intended. Man has shaped nearly all of them. It's also undesirable to eschew scientific intervention. In a world where the population is growing and jobs are disappearing, we need to increase yield per acre.

I don't think that matters. We already have plenty of things - like solar panels - that would not occur naturally. And we use them. The question should be if there is real danger.

That site illustrates another problem we have - sorting the truth from the misinformation, the science from the other stuff. It takes time, and time is a scarce commodity these days. To verify everything you read or hear takes up more time than we have.

Thank you all for an interesting discussion here. I had my panels installed resting on the roof. What's the pitch of the roof? IDK. Or I didn't until about 5 minutes ago. I have two arrays, each one being 6 X 3.25 kw Risen panels. The North-ish array is 27deg to the horizontal and faces NNWish - 322 degrees. The 2nd array is sort of ENE. 52 degrees and tilted 30 to the horizontal. I'm in Blairgowrie, so about 26 Deg south. So that lot should do better in summer (it's doing OK in the winter). So now I am keen on software that is going to give me an idea of the power I can expect. I started with Solcast, but I'm not sure about all the information it wants (like the effiicency factor). And I'm guessing I have to register the two arrays separately and somehow aggregate the data. Any advice on a website or piece of software to use?.

Well, SJW is just a term the right use to describe the left. Ditto "virtue signalling". The reality is that Trump, Farage, Banon et al are virtue signalling too, just to a very different audience.

The problem with the current system is that politicians first have to get elected. And the great "we" tend to elect politicians who tell us what we want to hear. And the great we doesn't know half as much as they think. A garden nursery near me was threatened with a boycott unless he stopped selling roundup. He caved in under the pressure. Or did he? The people who said they'd cause the boycott are happy and pleased with themselves because he's not selling roundup but A: The Builder's Express just down the road sells loads of it (but is too big a target for the vocal few) B: What he's done is get all the roundup of his shelves and sell another product with the same active ingredient that costs slightly more, and which the boycotters are happy to buy because the label doesn't say "roundup". Everybody's happy. Nothing has changed and nothing was achieved. Similarly with GM foods, with vaccinations, with immigration... Politicians don't tell us what we ought to hear, they tell us what we WANT to hear so that they or their party can get re-elected And we don't know half as much as we think we do, so you get governments and thus legislation built on nonsense.

Eskoms's new big problem is the Carbon Tax that was introduced effective 1st June. That is going to saddle them with 100s of millions of rands in extra tax. Though not such a problem. Auntie NERSA will recognise this as an unavoidable increase in the cost of doing business and pass it on to us. Good news: The payback time on your solar system has just been shortened.

That's what one company does. I recently saw a documentary about how scientists in Asia are modifying rice so that it will grow in salt water. This is because rising sea levels are starting to cause flooding by sea water of paddy fields. Sure, they could just give those paddys up, but then they reduce the area available for growing their staple. So the only way forward is to create salt water tolerant rice. Crops may also be modified to be resistant to certain pests.

Being insufferable (which he often is) and being wrong (not so often) are not the same thing. In one of Dawkins books there is a picture of the ancestor of the modern cabbage, what we'd still have if nobody had ever messed with the crop in the first place. It wouldn't feed nearly as many people per acre, and it looks like a weed.

Meh. I'm starting to think the middle class are the problem. I regularly eat the same breakfast cereal. The packaging proudly proclaims that there are no GM ingredients. I want GM crops. With population on the rise, and with less and less land available for farming, we need to improve yield per acre (or start eating soylent green). GM crops are good, and we need them to feed populations going forwards. But who is the big road block in the way? The middle class, who don't want their kids exposed to "chemicals" and who can afford to buy crops grown from "heritage seed" which produce less per acre and drive costs up for the short term gain of people willing to supply that market. OK... not just the middle class. Prince Charles, Britain's most high profile peddler of quackery, must help carry the can. The middle class will direct the markets because of their buying power, but they will likely direct us to low yield crops that keep farmers in poor countries from maximising the potential of their land and thus push up the cost of food in those countries. I'm inclined to open up a restaurant franchise whose speciality is that they use as many GM ingredients as possible. A sort of anti-hipster chain. Unfortunately I've just spent a chunk of my potential seed capital on a solar power system

Yesterday Bill Gates tweeted that the average Ethiopian will need to live to an age of 240 to match the carbon footprint of the average American, but also that sub-Sarahan African will face the worst consequences of climate change

THey mean NETT zero. They say that some activities will still generate CO2, so you counter that by doing more to remove CO2 from the air. Already companies are able to offset their carbon footprint by buying "carbon credits". These are actually contributions towards planting new trees in sustainable forests.

There are indeed people who sign off on a house they haven't even set foot in. I had such a problem when I bought my current house. What you can do, if you have good grounds for believing something dodgy has gone on, is call the Electrical Contractor's Board and dob in the person who signed off. I did that. Three things happened 1) The ECB said "thank you very much, Sir" 2) Some sort of disciplinary action took place 3) Now no electrician wants to know about my COC or even give me a supplementary certificate because word got out that COCs from this guy are not worth the paper they're written on. I am arranging to get the whole house certified from scratch again (by somebody I know to be rigorous).