Jump to content

Tbird

Members
  • Posts

    8
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Tbird's Achievements

  1. What price you asking, im in the market for 2 panels.
  2. Oh yes and will i need to unplug from eskom or can i leave it plugged in, will the solar take priority over eskom during the day automatically?
  3. Good morning, I have a Dynex (Ceil) 1450va 24v inverter running off a pair of Royal lead acid batteries. With no end in sight for load shedding, i want to add a solar panel to the mix to run my laptop and wifi 'off grid' during the daytime load shedding to prolong the life of the batteries. The batteries are about 6 months old, the load uses less than 20% battery for 2 hours but lately the power takes longer to come on and i dont want to run the batteries lower than 80% so they last. My plan is to get a single 550w panel (this is more than sufficient, 2-3 times what i use), i can get the below through my wifes company for pretty cheap: Longi Solar 550W Hi-Mo Panel, half cell, 144 cells (6 x 24) – Rubicon Partner Portal (rubiconsa.com) and then run a solar charger like this: Solar Charge Controller 30A | Buy Online in South Africa | takealot.com Is this doable? or am i making it seem alot easier said than done. My thinking is charge/use power via panel and unplug from eskom power.
  4. I am looking into it, i reckon for the short term, they should last 4+ hours on the small load. We mainly get load shedding early evening so having light is a priority for me. Im ok with no tv and can cook on gas cooker or braai if needed.
  5. Good morning, I have an older Dynex/Ceil 1450va 24v pure sinwave inverter running off 2 deltec 1250 high cycle batteries. Batteries were purchased in Feb 2019 so they are pretty used and no longer holding a proper charge, with just my wifi router plugged in (around 10-20w load), its ok for a 2-2.5h load shed. if i even plug a cell phone in to charge, the voltage starts dropping rapidly. Unfortunately they did drop below 50% a few weeks ago when we were out and the power was off for 4+ hours so im pretty sure batteries are finished now. We dont use more than a 150-200w max load at any given time, its usually less than 100w max unless we have the TV on. I have a 12k budget to either go with 2 Hubble s120 batteries if i can find stock or 2 lead acid 105ah batteries with 2x 300w solar panels. I can run my office/tv from just solar during the day time load shedding and rely on the battery back up at night time load shedding. After a year or less once ive saved up a bit again i can probably relook at hubbles or other lithium replacements. Should i go for lithium straight off and add solar later on or should i go lead acid and solar now and save for lithiums later on. Need some advice on what the smarter long term solution would be.
  6. Thanks for the advice, yea I plan to do this in stages as and when funds become available. We do not plan on making debt to be able to afford it now. Even if this takes a few years of research and saving, then so be it. Not rushing into anything, will do as much research as possible before we make any decisions. Our geyser is on for around 50 minutes per day max, I manually switch it on at around 4.30 or so, the wife gets up this time for gym anyway so it works for us. I get up at 5.20 and by then the water is more than hot enough and generally stays hot the whole day. I do plan to get a kill a watt device to measure usages and see where we can first of all try cut down a bit on electricity usage and then once we get that right we can start calculating exactly what sort of solution will work for us.
  7. Thanks Wilfred for the reply. wow sounds like you have a decent system. From the little bit of research ive done, I will definitely start with a decent inverter that can do grid tied and off grid for later on when we have the battery back up for it. Once we have the inverter I will do the solar panels, once we have enough to run the household from sunrise to sunset I will then start building up a bank of batteries for overnight, overnight all that will be in use is the alarm system and the geyser for 45 min to a hour max early morning which shouldn't use a lot, its a small 150l geyser, I think its an energy saver one, was replaced late last year after the old one burst.
  8. Hi everyone, Been in sustainable living/off grid etc for ages. Implemented a few sustainable living things into my daily life and looking to go more into it. So im thinking of going semi off grid to fully off grid, obviously over time due to costs involved. This is more for self sufficiency than Eskom being useless because to be honest for some reason we don't get load shedding that often 'touch wood' , I think in the last 2 years we have had load shedding maybe 6-8 times max that I can recall, besides maintenance outages and once we had no power for 2 days due to a cable issue. We don't fall under city power which probably helps and we stay next to an industrial area (not sure if that is part of the reason, I don't complain) Its just me and the wife in a small 2 bedroom house. We on average use less than 300kw/h per month, some months closer to 200kw/h and we are looking at going gas for cooking, maybe a solar oven or just braai a lot. We meal prep in bulk also so that helps with not using the stove/oven often, washing is done once a week and in general we are looking at ways to reduce electricity and water consumption in general. So in terms of solar power and storage, what kind of solar panel setup and battery bank size should I be looking at overall, I know running a microwave, washing machine etc will require a larger amount of power to run so id need something sufficient for that but for now we can use grid power for that until we have enough storage and solar to run that also. Any advice or guidance on where I can get this kind of info would be appreciated.
×
×
  • Create New...