naeemZA

Hi guys. I just installed batteries this weekend and lo and behold city power is down this afternoon. The Solar power charged the batteries and fed the house with power, once the batteries were charged it still fed the house around 500w (total) of power. Nothing from the batteries. I then wanted to test how it would handle a load like running a kettle which is on my essential circuit, and most of the power came from the batteries, like 90%. Once the kettle switched off, the solar did not turn on again and my house load was being fed only from the batteries. How do I get it to use the solar first and then the batteries?

Thanks for the reminder on the insurance. I definitely plan on spreading the load, I’ll probably be creating a roster and adding some timers.

Hi I still need to read most of the posts, but i'm excited to start this journey. As I'm writing this, the guys are busy installing an 8kw SunSynk invertor with 16 * 410kw Canadian Solar Panels. I've opted (didn't really have a choice) for no batteries as I would like to start saving money first and then get the batteries in for our dreaded load shedding situation. I'm hoping to run all my heavy loads during the day, the biggest contributors are geyser, pool and heat pump and washing machine. Any important gotchas that I can ask the installers to make sure they have done?

@ManiLowHi, Looks real cool. Are you planning on open-sourcing or sharing what you've done with your dashboards. The guys are busy installing an 8kw SunSynk as we speak. I think I need to get a stronger pi to run something like this and my Unifi Controller.

Will it charge the batteries from the PV while it’s in this bypass mode?

Hi I joined the forum recently and I'm impressed with the knowledge and setup that most of you have done. Currently I plan on just retro fitting my geysers to use EV tubes, and hopefully after saving in a year or two I plan to go full solar. I still need to cut a few trees in the process. Please help me for now with any JHB installers to retrofit geysers, my one set of geysers is currently running in series. Thanks