SilverNodashi

He's on 3phase already so he has a monthly fee of at least R1500 before he even uses any units.

Welcome to the forum Hopefully you get the right answers here. What kind of roof will it have? And what orientation will it face? You can retrofit a normal geyser with an MPPT charger and some solar panels. a 200L geyser will typically use 4x 250W / 300W solar panels, though you can add more if you feel it's needed. This would generally heatup the geyser to 70 degrees by late afternoon. The important thing to keep in mind, with either PV power or a evacuated tube type solar geyser is that it would loose heat during the night (known as standing losses). You can minimize this by installing some geyser blankets and "lagging" all the pipes around it. The important part to keep in mind, if we have 3 rainy / cloudy days like right now, both options will have problems. With an evacuated tube you can install a 220V element + controller to heatup on a rainy day. With the retrofit kit it's already included R300K might sound like a lot of money but if you want to go offgrid, it would be better to do it properly instead of on the cheap. Your biggest expense would be a decent battery bank + monitoring / management. It is also highly recommend to get a standby generator when going offgrid. Not a big deal. Do you at least have an idea of your expected power usage? i.e. will the new house be built with good insulation in the walls and roof to combat heat in summer and cold in winter, or would you need to rely on aircons / heaters during those periods? Will it have many, many lights throughout the house or can you get by with fewer lights if needed? With the right system this can easily be achieved. But we need to plan properly. In case you haven't read / heard about it yet, the City Of Cape Town has imposed new solar regulations, which will basically force us to limit the size of our systems, if we are grid-tied. Whether you feed back to the grid or not. IF you can go offgrid the limits don't apply. But, basically you will be limited to 6.9Kw on 40A breakers, 10.4Kw on 60A, 13,9Kw on 80A and 17.3Kw on 110A breakers, when using 3Phase. This equates to 2.3Kw per phase on 40A, 3.5Kw on 60A, 4.6Kw on 80A and 5.7Kw on 110A, per phase. So this limits your choice of inverters + freedom to what you can / want to run off solar. Yes. Your options are, on no particular order (unless you're OCD 😜 ) , InfiniSolar, Goodwe, SMA, Solis, Victron. The Goodwe and Solis inverters can't be stacked, i.e. parallel connected to give more power. With Insifinisolar, SMA and Victron you can stack the inverters to get more energy. This is tough, since you don't yet know how much energy you need or want to use. But many people will say a Victron based system with BlueNova batteries, battery management system (Venus or Color Control) enough solar panels to run everything + 30% more Panels and batteries then what you think and a generator for rainy / cloudy days. OR an Infinisolar based system with the same as above. It's slightly cheaper though. If budget wasn't the first objective, I would go the SMA route. SMA is considered to be one of the best brands. Both SMA and Victron has local support. If you take the limits that CoCT has imposed into account, going off grid might be a good option, and in many cases financially feasible. Probably cause many installers just want to close the deal but don't really understand DC based systems. Just cause they did a solar installer course don't mean they have the experience that one gains from working with the systems for many years. And many installers will try and sell you SystemX, cause that's what they know, and what their suppliers stock. Most electricians follow the same path: They install brandX and BrandY lights, fittings, plugs and circuit breakers cause BrandX and BrandY are the cheapest and most brand name hardware stores stock it. Sparkies who have been around the block will shop around for the best stuff that would last much longer than the cheap stuff.

Welcome to the forum. Do you have any monitoring installed? Lead Acid batteries which has gone bad are more often than not salvageable. There are some companies around who can revive a dead battery but you would have to try them out yourself as I've never used such a service. You can also get a Battery Desulphator Charger, which may, or may not revive those old batteries.

Yes, you can share a battery between inverters, but I want to caution this: You might run into a ground loop fault between the two inverters. Measure the resistance between each inverter's neutral and different battery terminals, as well as the earth and different battery terminals. If there's any reading other than 0, it could cause a problem

Those OmniPower batteries are rather powerful.

4mm2 can carry about 40A current so it should be fine.

I noticed about two weeks ago that my house uses about 80W more power during the evening and simply could not figure it out, bar switching everything off and turning them back on, one-by-one, as I have already done this in the past and know which absolute minimum devices we can leave on during the night. This morning I discover one of those plugs with the mozzi poison, plugged into behind a bed stand. Let's see tonight if this was indeed a rogue phantom device.

What do you mean by "turn key"?

Or the difference between AC and DC.

That 5048GK model looks like the Axpert King. Which I believe has some limited functionality in terms. Check page 13 on the manual: http://www.mppsolar.com/manual/Pylontech Lithium/Pylontech inverter setup SOP.pdf for the settings. I guess the dry contacts will also work with this in-case you want to switch on/off a relay or contactor

This was a few years ago so I can't remember all the details. A local electrical wholesaler had some new equipment on display that day and on the renewable energy shelves I saw a lot of "nice to have" solar equipment (tools, fuse holders, etc, and the Circuit Breakers). One of the local representatives of a big brand (I don't want to name and shame) said these would replace fuses. I took 2 different ones and tested them on a 750W PV array, and it didn't trip out at all. It just got super hot and I didn't try and leave it long enough to arc of explode. So they're nice to switch off a whole PV array, but not as safety devices. Fuses are still best in DC. And I think this is why you hardly find circuit breakers in DC applications

That is what I was referring to. I often see people skimp on the proper cable and buy the cheaper "alternative". Like speaker wire for solar panels. And @phil.g00 raise another valid point: the skill level of the installers on solar systems are on on the same level as those who are qualified to work on power stations.

Exactly! Just goes to show how many people know, or follow the regulations. You are allowed to go further than the minimum specified in the regs.

I have tested some DC rated CB's in the past for faults and many of them don't trip when you short the solar panels wires directly. So a fuse is still a good idea for a fault or (accidental) dead short.

SANS still prohibit it, so there has to be a good reason for it. Probably cause domestic installations often use cheap(er), and thus less insulated, cables then in an industrial setting? With IT, we generally avoid mixing the two as the AC wires cause "cross talk", which in turn cause all sorts of havoc on network and telecom's wiring.

This is, almost, exactly what I did. I used a 2Kw element though. And it works great

That only apply to certain newer models.

Well that's the thing. What this guy does, doesn't depend on export at all. It will work with a non grid tie inverter as well, but you need to know some coding and electronics to be able to do it. Basically the code will see if there's enough power available and activate a SSR to run the geyser off the excess solar energy. I purely just timed mine from 14:00 to 16:00 and we schedule our day so that heavy current items like the washing machine or dishwasher is finish by that time. And I don't have a grid-tie inverter.

I would assume it's microwatts. The ESP8266 runs at 3.3V and needs very little ampere for itself. Just wire up your load to be off while the relay is off, i.e. on the NO side of the relay and it would consume very little power as well.

You don't have to bring the inverter and batteries closer to the DB. Just keep the inverter and batteries in close proximity. My DB is probably 40m away from my inverter.

Good advice!

Great exercise. Perhaps you should build a few Sonoff managed plugs and program them all to switch off those phantom devices at specified times to save some energy. Pool pumps with manual timers shouldn't draw extra power since those old manual timers don't consume power. But the new digital ones could. Garage / gate motors could possibly also be switched off during the night, and switched back on so that the solar panels can charge those batteries as well.

That would be great!

Perhaps the owner rigged to get his wife off the couch

500 server error is often a coding error, or a server overloaded error.