SilverNodashi

2" is PLENTY! Put a hydro turbine in it and see what it does. And then build a system like this, but you'll need two days, one downhill where the water can flow to at night, and one uphill where it can be pumped back up freely during the day.

Are those prices per single panel, or on a crate of 25?

That's a good question. Can you share the documents or links to the spec sheets?

EDIT: I see the BN26V-144-3.7k only has 3700W usable power. That's 185W over 20 hours. So I would then actually need the BN52V-144-7.4kHC @ R85,172.82. So that's R780/pm for this battery bank. No losses, power factor or loan interest has been calculated at all. This is just raw numbers.

And Lithium Ion is dangerous. And people know it. So a Samsung note battery blew up and set a Jeep on fire. Cellphone manufacturers have been at this for many years and have pretty much perfected the "art" of safely charging and discharge lithium batteries. Imagine if one of these big batteries explode. In your garage! BUT, if their products are stable, the math looks GOOD!: BN26V-144-3.7k cost R52,069.5 (incl VAT). At 100% DOD you will get 9.8 years our of it. At 20 hours backup time (let's be generous) you can get 240Wh out of it. At 9.8years that's R442 per month. At R1.75 per eskom unit, that would have been 252 units. Let's take the 48V units, BN52V-72-3.7kHC as example: It cost R52069.5 and will last the same 9.8 years at 100% DOD. At 20hours backup you'll get 384W @ 48V and also cost R442 per month. In my case, I would break even on this battery bank, as I'm spending R500/month on prepaid to keep my el-cheapo (48V/445Ah bank @ R12k!) battery bank floating during the night. And the 2Kw geyser runs off eskom as well at this stage - still need to fit a 1Kw element in order to use solar electricity to heat-up the geyser Next year I would probably save 12% of that investment, if eskom escalates their price by 12%. This year they escalated only 9%. So, my payback on this would be 10 years, if I purely work on my existing eskom bill as example. Our base load at night runs between 120W and 350W. sometimes 450W. And every 3rd Friday we use the eskom-connected stove to bake pizzas. This also makes me believe that I probably wouldn't drain the batteries down to 0% every night and could possibly get another year or two out of them. But the Kenwood mixer for the pizza dough and oven means that a 160Ah battery bank would be too small for our occasional high usage. I would probably have to use the BN52V-230-12.0 kHC batteries which cost R130,758, just to accommodate once-a-month pizza baking.

I don't have stats to share so it makes it very difficult to compete, but it would be nice to see what others come up with.

damn! 100KL! That'a boat load of water! And a big storage vessel. Pity I live in the city where something like this would be neatly impossible to implement.

But, depending on cycles, it might be more economical.

Ironically a client of mine needs to charge 40A, but I'm not sure how well the 2x 20A's would behave on a single battery bank. How is / was yours configured?

ok, so please share your information then?

The only way to do that would be to have an alternators / generator that could generate 2 it's original power. Which in turn means you would need bigger blades. And a stronger base. And a bigger charge controller. So it's easier to just use a bigger wind turbine

Perhaps you could share it via Google Drive, if you have a google account?

in 2008 we spent, on average, R1500/pm on petrol for the 6900VA generator. Back then the malls close to us didn't have backup power. 2011 they did.Now, our mall has a small PV farm on their foor, I'm guessing about 2500 panels, judging by how many times they dropped of truck-loads of 30x300 panels.

yea. uhm, whatever.

Is a solar energy system really only there to save electricity cost over a x-year period? Every time we had to drive to Spur to use their electricity, and in turn pay for unwanted foodstuff, or everytime I had to start the genie, I spent money on something with almost 0 return. Installing solar panels + inverter + battery bank meant my wife didn't loose money due to eskom failures. And I had to stop replacing electronics which got fried due to surges. A mate of mine lost a couple grand's worth of stuff in his house a few weeks ago when their substation had issues and pushed 440V over the lines!

Sure, I know what you're saying. I meant, my investment paid for itself immediately.

I had some cash at hand so everything was paid immediately. That, and the fact that my wife's office is at the house and the money she saved by not having to drive to Spur, in order to work during load shedding, means my kit is / was already paid-off two years ago.

Well, if your panels are insured then you could at least claim from your insurance if need be. Dioded cost a dime a dozen and can be replaced easily. And, the bigger the array, the "smaller the damage"

haha, no, but 20 years from now I'm sure the tech would be awesome! Imagine if they could solve the problem of panels only producing about 17-22% energy in the next couple years and we could actually get 40%!

I offered the panels

There's no 260W in stock. 260W isn't very popular so they don't generally bring them in, unless someone has a special order / need for 260W and there's some left.

Back to the OP, no matter where you go and who you speak to, their chosen panel or two will always be superior. Go ask any solar supplier and installer. "Brand X is not as good as our stuff. Let me show you why...". On the grading side, the general consensus are that an A grade panel is free of any deficiencies, while a B-grade panel might have some solder "blotches" on some of the cells. You need to look at the panels total output + rated / claimed efficiency, and price and then decide what works for you.

From what I have seen, they generally produce 9 - 11% more than the popular Poly panels like Renesola, Yingli, etc do

Just Batteries in Benoni does those batteries.

@PaulF007, please post your panels specs, i.e. Voc, Isc, etc so we can compare them.In theory you might loose 5W per panel. Or slightly more, or less. But if you have / had two MPPT trackers, you could put different PV groups on different MPPT trackers.