Ajdebeer132

i can but like i said i want to make sure now and know i wont have any issues.
 
i almost fell out off my chair when i read this
 
i just want to say thank you again everyone here that helped me my decision change alot these last days of stuff and im starting to learn atleast what is going on

There is a lot of support for Victron, exactly. That is largely why I ended up going with it. I know someone with an Axpert and someone with a Goodwe and they are both very happy. However, when I was struggling with my Growatt, I couldn't get an answer from anywhere. No one seemed to know how to fix any issues and everything looked to be a guessing game.
There is so much documentation and support available for Victron. I was at ease from the get go. Everything worked like it was supposed to.
@Ajdebeer132 can't you still go with the Dyness power box (if you really wanted to)? I understand that @plonkster mentioned earlier in the thread that Victron and Dyness are compatible?

Ì do get that with a 5year warrenty you are set but how good is that warrenty and that is not the only problem i spoke today with dc rebel i saw on the group dan there knows alot of growatt. They are the importers and he even said stay away their stuff was good but not anymore you get alot off error and struggle alot with them. Will it work? I think so but you going to struggle alot and to get the batterys to communicate with the growatt is a pain in the .... acourding to what i read. I understand they are cheaper but the thing i want is something that will last 1st main priority then something that i can plug all the stuff in and just know it will work withough problems. The last thing is support will you still get the spares for growatt in 5 years how many people are out there that can really help you acourding to what i saw now not alot on the growatt. With the victrol there are loads of support and few people that struggles with it thats the reason why i wont go growatt. Im sad to go with the pylon and not dyness power box cause its alot more pretty but i want to stick with the stuff i know will work without a problem that is the big thing for me.
 
Someone can correct me if im wrong here but after all the people i cann and videos i watch and stuff i read. I came to this conclusion.
You can do a whole house off grid for 50k but you must know its going to last you if your lucky 2 years the n you need to rebuy and your efficiency is going to be bad.
Or
You can put away 60k - 70k just for an inverter and batterys and add even more stuff later but you know it will last you 7 to 10 years and if something breaks you will get spares and help
So its up to you to decide which is the better system to buy.

Ì do get that with a 5year warrenty you are set but how good is that warrenty and that is not the only problem i spoke today with dc rebel i saw on the group dan there knows alot of growatt. They are the importers and he even said stay away their stuff was good but not anymore you get alot off error and struggle alot with them. Will it work? I think so but you going to struggle alot and to get the batterys to communicate with the growatt is a pain in the .... acourding to what i read. I understand they are cheaper but the thing i want is something that will last 1st main priority then something that i can plug all the stuff in and just know it will work withough problems. The last thing is support will you still get the spares for growatt in 5 years how many people are out there that can really help you acourding to what i saw now not alot on the growatt. With the victrol there are loads of support and few people that struggles with it thats the reason why i wont go growatt. Im sad to go with the pylon and not dyness power box cause its alot more pretty but i want to stick with the stuff i know will work without a problem that is the big thing for me.
 
Someone can correct me if im wrong here but after all the people i cann and videos i watch and stuff i read. I came to this conclusion.
You can do a whole house off grid for 50k but you must know its going to last you if your lucky 2 years the n you need to rebuy and your efficiency is going to be bad.
Or
You can put away 60k - 70k just for an inverter and batterys and add even more stuff later but you know it will last you 7 to 10 years and if something breaks you will get spares and help
So its up to you to decide which is the better system to buy.

1 Million cycles at even 3 cycles a day is way more than 45 years. You can get 45 years with 50 000 cycles 🙂
My personal opinion about those so-called super-capacitors is that it is a borderline scam. I get into trouble for this a lot... but I will state my case. It is most likely a Lithium Titanate battery, which means it is not a complete scam (there are some cool things about that chemistry). But it is a scam in the sense that it is not a super capacitor battery, and here is why...
The largest super/ultra capacitor in the world is made by Maxwell Technologies. These guys are the market leaders. You can look it up. These caps have a energy density of maybe 8Wh/kg. A Lead Acid battery has 4 to 5 times more than that, and LiFePO4 battery has more than 10 times that. If this was an actual super capacitor battery, it would weigh moer than twice as much as the equivalent lead acid bank.
If it really is a supercapacitor battery, it means that somehow, this manufacturer made a massive breakthrough, kept it completely under wraps, nothing leaked out in academic papers or anything, and it made it all the way to market, leaving Maxwell tech completely in the dust... I'd say that's a bit thick for a Dutch coin (te dik vir 'n daalder) 🙂
 

I posted something in the dyness vs pylon thread about the warranties. The manufacturer is one side to it. I do wonder whether distributors/retailers do not perhaps have a role to play to make the warranty terms a bit more clear as opposed to just "Warranty: 10 Years".... the pylontech warranty exclusions for instance list as an exclusion:
"5.  storage, installation, commissioning, modification or repair of the Product that has been performed by a person other than Pylontech or a Pylontech’s certified installer".
This would suggest anyone who bought a pylontech through their friendly online retailer and hooked up their batteries one afternoon after work could have a voided warranty...

Warranties are marketing tools. There is some correlation with the actual quality of the product, but it is not one to one. The company expects a certain amount of returns, and all they do is cheapen the product until they hit the acceptable failure rate. Then they simply budget for replacements 🙂
As the warranty gets longer though, and the equipment gets more expensive, I'd say that deliberate cost-savings tends to take a back seat and they do design something that would last at least that long. I'm fairly convinced that an LiFePO4 battery will last at least 6 to 7 years even in a worst case scenario.

There is so much fine print in the warranty that I would not be swayed solely by the warranty period. I would however still opt for the hopefully newer/better matching cells.

If definitely going the 48V lithium battery route and planning to cycle the batteries (discharge and recharge) every day for more than a year I would close my eyes and hope the more expensive new batteries (pylon or dyness or whatever) will live up to their claims of 6000 cycles. The Mecer batteries are so called second life batteries (reclaimed from E-vehicles etc) and when combining 4 them to get to 48V I think you are adding to the gamble of cells not being balanced etc. 4 x mecers probably R28000 (?) with roughly double total capacity  of 2 X 50Ah Dyness/pylontechs at R30000-R35000(?). Mecer warranty 2 years with expected cycle life of 1500 cycles. Pylontech/Dyness 7/10-10 warranty with claimed 6000 cycle life. So unless the total capacity is the make or break factor I am not sure the mecers represent that big a bargain for this application where hoping for longevity in the expected design life?
If not yet done, get something like this and just confirm your load (often is lower/higher than the appliance label indication) and look for ways to reduce load (do what you can with the laptop and try to minimize the PC etc)... maybe you can get away with one of the 75Ah lithiums (R21000-R25000?) for now and upspec on the inverter/solar.... you can add more batteries later if needed.

or come to a stop..... to fill-up the petrol tank again...😬

And this gentlemen (and the odd petrolheaded lady), is also the difference between power and torque on those pesky car spec sheets. Power has a time component to it. It affects how quickly you can get to 100km/h or overtake a taxi.
Torque on the other hand has no time component.
Loosely speaking, power = torque times rpm (and there sneaks in the time component in the "pm").

The plan I came up with to explain the difference to people is using a car analogy. Cause I'm male and all that 🙂
Power is analogous to speed. It has a time component. If I ask what speed you drive to the office, you might say: Oh, I average around 45km/h.
Energy is analogous to distance. It has no time component. If I ask how far the office is, you might say: Oh, it's only 30km away!
In electical terms, power is measured in watts, and energy is measured in watt-hours. Which is already weird cause the SI unit is Joule, but using Wh makes the math easier. A Watt-hour is 3600 joules if you really want to do conversions.
But now you might say.... well how is there no time component in Watt-hours!? You wrote "hour" right there in the unit!
Well yes, but that is because we need to cancel out the time component in the Watt unit. A Watt is a joule per second, so to cancel out the time component and make the unit "timeless" again we need to multiply by time. So by multiplying the watts by a time component we cancel out the "per second" part and we get back to energy.

I think you may be mixing up some concepts or your neighbours are hooked up to your electricity supply and they are miners (bitcoin or zama zama).
My entire house (including electric geyser, electric oven, electric pool pump, etc) use about 400-500 kWh in a month. If your TV uses about 100W, PC 300W, Lights 50W, Router & Laptop 50W, your combined power draw is 500W, which for 1 hour will be 500Wh , and for 6 hours will be 3000Wh or 3kWh per day between 4pm-10pm. (the just Watt (W) part is probably a bit more relevant for the inverter size and and Watt-Hour (Wh) for the battery size... based on your looking at 2 x 50Ah batteries you probably meant to type a 500W load ...you got the right numbers just not the correct units (which can leed to very different and waaaayyyy more expensive advice).
The problem you have is that the lithium batteries are fairly new in South Africa (Dyness probably a bit newer than PylonTech) so the chance for people to have had lots of problems and report it on forums like these have been limited. Looking through the forum it seems like there are more problems in setting up the batteries with different types of inverters than any clear problems of batteries breaking. That is why you also need to look carefully at the inverter and what that support is like (firmware upgrades etc). 
About setting up a system that should last 10 years... no one locally has had these batteries installed so long and with the way the world is going the best we can hope for is that the companies will be around even 3 years from now.
In your situation (municipality issues), if it was me, I would try to take a bit more time and seriously look at a plan to get as much as possible off the grid - so a smallish generator might not be such a bad idea for now (gives you power while the municipality and eskom hopefully sort something out and you have a backup no matter what system you decide on for the future).  

I get it. What everyone wants is bang for buck. We don't mind paying more, but we do mind paying a premium for an ordinary shirt just because it has a Nike (TM) logo on it 🙂
I do believe the Voltronics provide bang for buck... but only because they are as cheap as they are. Once you realise that you will replace them a few times during the same time span, they cost the same if not more than the others.
I realised this almost 20 years ago when a Sabat battery was R300 and a Bosch battery was R500. The more expensive battery is expected to last 5 years vs 3 for the Sabat... so you may naively calculate "R600 for two Sabats vs R500 for the other one... hey I'll take the cheaper one!"... but you're forgetting that 3 years from now the replacement is going to cost more... and it will leave your wife stranded at a mall in the middle of a rain storm... which means no quality time tonight!
Don't do it man! 🙂
 

that sucks big time
Is this your average monthly electricity bill or daily?
Someone at home during the day cleaning house/cooking? Fridge/freezer running? When getting home at 4pm do you then need to cook with electricity or is it mainly to have some light, tv and keep fridges going?... any of the things that heat up (kettles, stoves, heaters) will drive up what you need for battery use, so looking at things like gas cooking could also be worthwhile.
If the load on the batteries during the day is very low or non existent and depending how much you take out of the batteries between 4pm-10pm you may not need solar to charge the batteries.. 
My bad
I cannot speak to who honours their warranty easiest but keep in mind the lithium warranties do not mean the battery will last 10 years. The warraties generally mean that if the battery is used in a certain way that it should still have about 80% of the capacity that you started with.

My suggestion:
forget about what you can get (makes and names) and first figure out what you need.
Are you without mains/grid/(eskom) power every day for 12 hours or is this for when there is load shedding or do you once every couple of weeks not have mains/eskom eletricity for a day and then it is back for 2 weeks?
If you are without electricity everyday is it always during the day?
you need to know how big the maximun and average load is that you need to power... do you want to power a whole house (business/office) where you power the kettle, oven, TV, lights or do you only want the TV/computer and a couple of lights to work?. There is quite a bit of difference in price and what you can do between 5kVa and 3kVa inverters. If you put 2  x 12V batteries is series (like the mecers) you end up with 24V battery which should make some 3kVa inverters options but for 5kVa you will need 48V batteries... if you only want to power a TV and couple of LED lights you might not even need 3kVA...
You need to know what the average power draw will be on the batteries and also what the minimum time is that you will have available to charge them again to know if the inverter/charger can charge them quickly enough... you also need to check if the battery will allow to be charged as quick as you need.
just because a battery can charge at 50A does not mean it is a good idea...especially if you want the battery to last as long as possible
Cheap and quality very seldom go together. The inverter and solar panel part probably have the potential to last longer if nothing bad like lighting/hail etc. happen. Batteries (lithium or any other kind) are less likely to see 10 years.

for R50k a backup system is your best investment.
add panels as some funds are prioritised and expand until offgrid.
but backup for no power situations is in my opinion best bang for buck.

Then don't buy the Kodak. Unless you're okay with replacing that item a few times in the next decade.
PV modules generally last 15 years minimum (up to 30 years, but production decreases over time). But inverters usually don't last 30 years (not even the better ones), and if you want ten years a Victron inverter (with 5 years warranty) is the least you should look at. Otherwise you're looking even higher up (SMA maybe... Fronius have long warranties but they don't really make battery inverters...).

Which 2 panels are you getting?
Look at the voltages required by the MPTT

I don't think 2 panels will be enough?

The first one is clearly  rebadged Voltronic. Talk to @jykenmynie, he swapped his unit out as he was not happy with it.
The second one speaks of a high voltage DC input, but from the pictures in the manual and the menu items, it appears to be a Voltronic too... just the one with the 450V input. You're going to need at least 4 x 72-cell panels in series for the high voltage unit to work properly, and ideally even more.
So both of them are rebadged Axperts, so they are much of a muchness in my opinion.

Like @plonkstersaid, you will need at least 4 panels wired in series.
You can mix panels, but you'll need to make sure they're closely matched.
Mixing panels has some disadvantages.
 
 

Those will work, and as been mentioned you'll need at least 4 of them wired in series to work with the inverter you're planning on buying.
On mixing of the panels, I am no expert but this is what I think is happening:
I installed 10 x 260w Yingli panels a while ago and wanted to add to my array.
Those 260w panels are no longer available and I had to look at the next closest thing which was JA solar 285w.
Because I'm now mixing the 285w panels with the 260w panels, my 285w panels are performing at the same level as the 260w panels.
So they have derated.
Maybe someone else can advise?

@Ajdebeer132 I just read this thread (my previous reply was before I did): Please send a PM to @Jaco de Jonghand ask for advice. He sells parts and ships at a very reasonable fee. He helped me immensely even though I couldn't end up making my purchase from him (had to work through the guys I was returning my previous goods to). He gave me great advice on parts (him and @plonkster). Going solar/battery backup is MUCH more than just looking at kW/kVA on the inverter, Watts on the panels and kWh's on the batteries. You need to carefully spec a system so that all the parts work well together and you don't create a bottleneck somewhere. The speccing of the cabling being pulled and the breakers are important, especially with a Victron system.
Depending on where you stay, I've had an extremely positive experience with electricians and can highly recommend them if you might end up going the Victron route.

As @plonkster said, I had the first one. I'm not an expert on these things, so I would speak to my experience of the Growatt inverter in question:
1. It did not bond neutral and earth when the grid was down. I had about 80V between neutral and earth and the balance between live and earth. I understand this is against SANS regs. Note that it might simply be an issue with mine as I'm in no position to say, from a technical perspective, that it'll be the issue with all of them
2. Some have managed to get it to communicate with Pylontech batteries, as far as I understand. It could not communicate with the Shoto that was sold with it as a package to me. I did return the battery as well, because it can't communicate with any inverters at the moment. However, it seems like a solid battery which will be a great option once the inverters can communicate with it.
3. It isn't a "hybrid" or whatever these inverters are called: I.e. it can't "push back" into the grid to attempt to zeroise the draw from your non-essential circuits if you have excess solar power. I don't have solar yet, but this was a big item for me, because otherwise I definitely see myself "wasting" a lot of solar power during the day.
4. Do not expect anything to be well documented or that the manuals you get with those inverters, or online, will be resembling what you see on the version of the firmware you have.
5. Don't expect the apps to be useful, and you also can't remotely manage it from the app. This was a big drawback for me.
Other than the above, it worked fine. Kept the power on when the grid was down... I'm just not one for building an expensive system (batteries, panels) around an "inexpensive" and poorly supported inverter. I'm a big computers guy, and will never skimp on the PSU, even if it doesn't directly influence the performance of any of the parts, simply because it has the ability to mess up everything.
I wouldn't recommend the Growatt to someone, because from my perspective: 
Point 1 above is a non-negotiable.
Point 2 isn't that bad. I think many people would be fine to manage their lithiums on voltage, but I'm a numbers guy and want to know the SoC of my battery so I can do calculations.
Point 3 depends on your use case. In my case, I am going to generate significantly more power during the day than my essential circuit and batteries would demand, so I need it to help my pool pump, geysers, aircon, kettle, whatever else wants to draw power during that time and which I didn't put on my essential circuit.
Points 4 and 5 are personal preferences.
I've exchanged my unit for a Victron Multiplus II. This is a more expensive system, no doubt, but it works. It has heaps of documentation to read up on to help you understand what you bought and how to get it to work. The software is great. You can download lots of data, set up alarms to email you on event (like the grid going down), it bonds neutral and earth (as if this should be a surprise). If anything goes wrong or you just require a little help in understanding something, the Victron community is extremely helpful.
Honestly, I've been so impressed with the system and the flexibility it offers and I've only had it working since Friday. Still lots to play around with and lots more when I get panels. At the moment it is allowing me to monitor the whole house's usage by source so I can start to draw graphs and understand how my solar setup should be positioned and potentially split up between more than one MPPT for efficiency.

Hi small side note here, but few of the dyness guys that were with pylontech left the company and made their own brand and labeled it Dyness. Same batteries few tweaks here and there but difference in batteries is as follows 
1: pylons can mix and match 2.4 and 3.5 modules 
2: dyness cannot mix and match so ur forced to stick to battery stack eg 2.4 to 2.4 or 3.6 to 3.6 and so on 
3: the dyness is 3.6 vs the pylon 3.5
4: price! price! price! Dyness are a fraction of the pylons with 10year warranty on the dyness
Just my 5 bob worth ✌