JaseZA

Your system is slightly larger than ours and we are very close to off grid while averaging 30-40kwh per day, so I think you've got good head room in terms of system size. Most inverters will have a dry contact switch for starting/stopping an auto-start generator. From my experience this is normally set based on SOC. So when battery SOC drops below a set point, the gennie starts and when it goes above another set point it stops the gennie. Your house loads would be carried by the combo of the battery and gennie. Most inverters have an option to set the maximum power you can draw from the generator, so choosing the generator's size comes down to how long you want it to run to recharge to your ideal set point. An example: Charge from 30%-80% (16kwh) House loads of 1000W 10kw Gennie It would take roughly 2 hours of generator on time, assuming no solar helping. Personally I think a 10kw generator is plenty if your average consumption is around 25kwh. And the beauty of a hybrid inverter is if you do suddenly need to use 16kw from the inverter while running off the generator, the excess will be pulled from the battery. And it's highly unlikely that you'd see sustained 16kw loads at home. We have 10kw of inverter capacity with a household of 4 and a flatlet and I can count on my hand the number of times we've been above 10kw. We have no gas appliances and two geysers (admittedly with smaller 2kw elements fitted).

Received my 10kwh battery yesterday. It is indeed big! I was surprised to find all the connections are underneath the battery, if I mount it on the floor as planned! That obviously provides a logistical headache, so I decided to open it up to see if there was any reason I couldn't just have it sit with the "top" of the battery on the floor. So if anyone is interested, here are some pictures of it. Also can confirm it is a Pace BMS. I was silly and didn't get the actual model number of the BMS. Spec sheet says it's 100A though. The 200Ah is made up of two 100Ah cells in parallel. Seems they've all been tested with most having values around 108Ah. Looks very nicely made though, even if it's not particularly compact. For size comparison, it's standing next to my 14kwh Magneto battery... which is admittedly heavier!

Correct - all the estate agents and buyers were informed when coming to view that the solar system wasn't included but could be negotiated over. I knew that I'd have enough time to get it off between the signed OTP and us moving out if the new buyer did not want the solar system. Didn't want to sit with no backup while waiting for the house to sell. And it ended up taking 6 months during peak load shedding so we were very grateful to have it still available!

Best option is to sell it to the buyer and leave it in place. Moving will cost more than what you paid for installation in all likelihood. We managed to negotiate with our buyer 3 years ago that he would buy the system at a discount to what he would pay for it to be installed himself. In the end it worked out that what we paid for it originally, minus the electricity savings and minus what we got for the system, came to zero. So effectively we got to be free of loadshedding for 3 years for free. We also negotiated this separately to the house sale. He paid me in cash over 3 months. The biggest advantage of this is you can tailor the new system at your new house to suit that house. We moved from a small flat to a big home so the old system wasn't really suitable to the new house. I know I would have accepted less than what I got just to allow me to get new at the new house. You also start with new equipment and new warranties etc. All of this is assuming you have an inverter, batteries and solar panels all currently wired in and approved.

Have you got graphs of the PV voltage and current - might reveal a more obvious clipping. But that change in the graph at 12h15 definitely looks like clipping. Below shows my PV current and you can clearly see the clipping - I have 5kw Sunsynks with a max PV current of 13A and panels that can do 13.5A. The mesured clipped current here is 12.8 so slightly below 13A but close enough that I live with it.

Yes, the 8kw has two MPPTs. They don't specify max current anywhere I have seen but max power is 5500W per MPPT.

I see all the pages have been taken down again 😂

I think the newer Luxpower SNA6000 comes with a CT coil and is available around R10k. I don't think any of the Voltronic inverters have the option of a CT coil, but I haven't researched this much recently.

Correct - that feature was added around 2018 if I recall. My Voltronic VMiii had it in 2020. I believe some very budget models don't have it still but most do, so I'm hopeful it can blend. It's not the end of the world to not have though - just means you cycle your battery a bit more. I can all but guaranty it won't be able to push back to non-essential loads.

Convinced my brother to buy the 8kw/8kwh as well. This is a serious bargain, provided the inverter isn't total garbage. But sold be builders so I imagine warranty will be honored. But basically add another R15k for panels mounting etc and you have 8kw/8kwh/3.6kwp for R30k! It cost me that to install just one Sunsynk 5kw without battery 3 years ago!! You can't even buy 16x150ah lifepo4 cells for much less than R15k.

This website looks too good to be true - plus only EFT payment option. Highly likely a scam.

To me the only reason to use aux is if you don't have the option to remotely control your load. Just leave things as they are and set your minimum SOC to the safe value in case there is a grid failure. Whether the grid is powering your geyser or other appliances in your house makes no difference. So use your battery to supply the geyser and the rest of your house until you hit your minimum SOC and then grid will power everything until the sun comes up or you hit your next safe SOC time. Here is my SOC schedule - you can see the decreasing SOC as the night progresses, with each being how much stored energy I need to make it through until morning. This has taken some fiddling and changes with the seasons but works really well. We have everything except our oven on essential.

OVP = Over Voltage Protection SCP = Short Circuit Protection UVP = Under Voltage Protection

I find the idea of TOU fascinating just from an optimization point of view. Surely at that crazy high rate it makes sense to charge your battery beforehand (even from grid) and use only battery during peak times? If you can minimize peak usage then you must have close to the cheapest electricity overall cost. TOU makes the most sense to me in terms of encouraging good grid behaviour but obviously the major issue is the cost of infrastructure (meters and monitoring etc) to implement it.