Paulcupine

Would be useful to know where they are... shipping them would be expensive.

I have to ask why you're heating water at 10pm... is someone bathing/showering at midnight? You have excess solar available during the day that isn't being harvested. You will be better off if you can move some of that night time water heating to the day time. The alternative is to get a bigger battery, but that isn't nearly as cost effective. EDIT: I see you're only using half your battery. There is no load shedding at the moment... why not allow the battery to cycle down to 10%?

Sheesh - how many people are taking long luxurious showers in your house? Your water bill must be face-melting. We are a household of 4 and use electric geyser for about 8 months of the year (free off PV), and gas geyser for about 4 months a year. In those four months we use about one and a half 19kg cylinders of gas. Also, the national retail price for LPG is currently R33/kg. How are you getting 19kg cylinders for R290?

Those GRID tick boxes do not mean "USE GRID", they mean "CHARGE FROM GRID IF THE SoC is below the configured value". The rows marked 100% are not going to take the battery to 100% if there isn't enough solar.

Crying in Capetonian @ R3.91/kWh, and R4.75/kWh after the first 600kWh Luckily I only bought 800kWh in the last 12 months.

Actually switching off things like game consoles and media PCs can make a significant difference overnight. I can always tell when the kids have been up late playing games. "Base" load goes from 200-300W to 500-600W. It's also interesting to see how the duty cycle on things like fridges and freezers is reduced in the winter. The 5 or 6C lower ambient temperature in the house makes quite a difference. My full height fridge and freezer use about 1.5kWh/day in summer but only around 1.1kWh/day in the winter. Of course, you lose again on water heating in the winter. Input water temperature is much lower especially around late July/August, so energy spent heating the geyser is much more.

I agree. Battery prices have come down and these are nearly "half" used. Seems like they should be going for under R10k each, all things considered.

My geyser had a 4kW element which I downgraded to 2kW. It now runs anywhere from 2 to 5 hours depending on how cold the water is to get fully hot, so interpolate for less PV available. Imho, 1kW is too little. Since I upgraded my solar I'm actually thinking of upgrading it back to 3kW.

On Paloma gas geysers you can set the water output temeperature and it regulates the flame size automatically. I feed mine with water preheated in the electric geyser with whatever PV I have available. The result is that a 19kg gas cylinder lasts us around 120 - 160 days. There is enough PV for me to bypass the gas geyser entirely for about 8 months of the year. I therefore only need to buy one 19kg gas refill per year about.

Cycling from 100% -> 10% -> 100% is totally fine. The Freedom Won warranty is reduced from 10 years to 5 years if you *regularly* discharge below 10%, as an example. On the other hand there is little point in cycling your battery lower then you have the ability to charge it with solar the next day. Also, degradation of the battery happens just as much at high cell voltages as low ones. Go and watch some of Off Grid Garage's battery testing videos on youtube. This guy makes excellent content.

Nobody?

It wasn't quite as bad in our house but the filling of a 2L kettle everytime to make one cup of coffee made me go out and buy a 1L camping kettle. It also has a smaller element, so now nobody is willing to wait for it if it is full. Problem solved, and the cleaner got the old one for free.

SUN2000G3-EU-230 were available on takealot a while back at under R7k. They are no longer listed and the other listings I can find in South Africa are all around the R10k mark. On aliexpress they are R5k. Where can one find these locally at a more reasonable price?

They're not strictly single use. These devices can typically take several (even many) small surges by becoming conductive L/N -> E, but will pop if a single significantly large surge occurs. The indicator should then go red and the unit needs to be replaced. This looks like a 3 phase setup..? I do not know if it is ok to connect on of your phases to a neutral on the SPD. AFAIK there are 3 phase SPDs for the purpose.

Type II SPDs have a varistor that becomes conductive above a certain voltage. It basically shorts the live to neutral if the voltage is exceeded. Depending on the size and duration of the surge, the device could survive many incidents if none of them are big enough to fry the SPD. However, since the SPD is not in line with the loads, if the SPD fails only your protection goes away - your power to your loads is not cut. Since you may not know that there has been an incident, you need to check the SPDs regularly. Most have some sort of indicator of whether they are still working. Type I SPDs use a gas capsule, which again can survive many small incidents but would need replacement of the gas capsule for a bigger strike. I'm reasonably sure these are inline with loads, so if the SPD fails you have no power. Needs verification however.

You are paying for your neighbours power - stuff up in the meter box?

On mine the three heat cycles are main wash, rinse and dry. It does not heat water for the prewash. The "eco" cycle uses only 0.7kWh and only heats the water to about 50C, but it runs for nearly 5 hours. We nearly always use this cycle.

Some panels cables are long enough that you can connect every second one to each other. In my case, I wanted to feed my string of 8 panels from one end, so I connected the odd panels to each other from left to right, and the even panels to each other from right to left, with the two right most panels then connected as well. I had to flip the even panels around to get the positive and negative connections from one panel to the next close enough together. In the end the resistance is determined by the total length of the wire from mppt, through all the panels and back to the mppt. I managed to save about 9m of wire being in the circuit by doing the above.

Email [email protected] They will need your solarweb profile name and a picture of the serial number plate on the side of the Fronius. I bought a used unit from someone who forgot their service password. Fronius support helped me get it onto my SolarWeb account and the service password reset.

Last update from him was about two weeks ago. The testing on the new meter is behind schedule and they are now aiming for Q1 2024.

There's a whole school of thought on the two dishwasher system in modern kitchens now. Dishwashers are remarkably space efficient in how much you can store in them. It turns out it actually makes sense to give up the cupboard space. You pack one dishwasher with dirty dishes until it's full, then run it. You use the clean dishes from the one dishwasher and pack them directly into the other one when used. When it's full then you run that one etc. Some small amount of dishes still get stored in the cupboard - perhaps only the last few before you want to start packing the not quite empty dishwasher again.

Yes you can do this with scheduled charge with the most recent GX firmware update (about 2 months ago iirc). Set your overall min SoC to the lowest you want your battery to go at any time while the grid is available (40% in your case). Then set a scheduled charge from sometime in the afternoon near the end of your PV generation time for the number of hours to cover until you are willing to go below 75%. In the scheduled charge set 75% as the charge level and enable self-consumption "from PV and battery". Note that the scheduled charge will ALSO charge your battery from the grid up to the 75% level, if it is not already above this. Since you don't want the battery below 75%, this should be fine and only actually charge the battery from grid if you have had too little PV yield that day. As an example, set the scheduled charge to start at 4pm and run for 10 hours. Your battery will discharge to the 75% level during the evening, then you'll switch to grid until 2am, whereafter the battery will discharge again down to 40% potentially. Adjust times and levels to suit.

I have a friend with a similarly oriented roof. The panels on the WSW side will do very close to nothing in the winter. They help for late power in the summer because of where the sun sets. If your battery is big enough, everything on the ENE side would give you biggest yield, otherwise maybe a 80/20 or 70/30 split might be better. I would definitely not go 50/50. Use https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/ to run some simulations...

Also, they don't understand that boiling one mug of water is faster than filling the kettle to the full 2L.

Where are you located? I am in Somerset West. I have 6 x CS6U-360Ps. I wasn't planning on changing them, but I could...