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Hyarion

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Everything posted by Hyarion

  1. I can't speak to whether it'll work with your version of geyserwise hardware, but in terms of loadshedding, my geyserwala is on non-essential and loses power during loadshedding. I havn't had any issues with home-assistant integration in this regard. It just means I don't have temperature data for the loadshedding time period. But I can still go look at what the temp was before loadshedding kicked in if I really need to know. I would recommend not worrying about trying to power the panel during loadshedding. It's not like you can do much with it during that time.
  2. I second Tailscale. It works beautifully. And very user-friendly. Free for up to 3 users. Install the plugin for home assistant, install the app on your phone/laptop and whenever you want to connect just connect on tailscale and then access home assistant as if you're at home on your wifi.
  3. Have you tried changing the "Grid trickle feed" value yet? I'm not sure if that's what it's called on Deye, that's the name in Sunsynk inverters. I think the default is 20W, basically it tries to always pull that minimum amount from the grid. When you have a big load that suddenly turns off there can be a brief period where the inverter sends power back to the grid. The trickle feed helps buffer against that. If you don't have big loads one can often get away with 20W or less. In my case I have a pool pump and an old aircon, I've had to bump mine up to 70W to prevent the prepaid meter turning off. Try upping that value by 10 or 20W at a time and see if it helps.
  4. Yes. I installed one a few months ago and it's been awesome. Also great to be able to configure multiple timers with more precision. From the website FAQ: "It has been tested to work with the Geyserwise MAX, Delta-T, TSE1 and the legacy TSE models"
  5. I currently have 2kW of solar panels and a Sunsynk inverter (panels existed when I bought the house, the inverter is new). After many months of waiting, I finally got my certificate in Feb this year to say the system is approved and all is good. The installer who replace the inverter was the one who did the application for me. He has since closed his business and gone to work for a much bigger company. Now I wish to add another 3kW of solar panels, but I'm finding it difficult to figure out what is required to apply/register for this. I started filling out the CoCT solar application form, ticking the "Change to System", but realized by the end that nothing changes on the form. Nowhere does the form ask for number of solar panels, wattage or voltage. It only asks about the capabilities of the inverter. I have all the documents the installer submitted for me previously, and it appears the only place the panels are listed is on the diagram. I'm assuming then that I probably just submit an identical application and a different diagram? I tried emailing the city department, but it's taken them 4 weeks to reply with a standard set of links about installing a new system. Has anyone in Cape Town had any experience with how to deal with adding additional panels?
  6. I can recommend looking at the inverter trolley options on Geewiz, making sure to pick a lithium battery option and not lead-acid. Less portable but you'll typically get double the capacity of a similarly priced ecoflow unit. A single 100A battery trolley will probably last you just over 2 hours if you're gaming (more if you're just using it for web browsing, documents, etc). A 2 x 100A battery trolley will most likely last you fine through a 4.5hr loadshedding slot.
  7. I had a neighbour ask me to review their contract and have looked into them for friends. Most important detail some people miss: GoSolr is rent-only. i.e. you never pay off the system, you never own it. The main take-away is that at the moment it seems their initial sales and installation are great, the equipment they install is great, but once it's installed it's very very difficult to get hold of them, especially if they need to make any changes/fixes to the system. Hello Peter will give you a lot of stories along those lines too. 2 different neighbours who have them said the same thing. Having read through their terms and conditions, I highly recommend you read any contract in detail. There's quite a few 'gotchas' that may or may not be of concern to you. In particular these stood out for me: The monthly cost will increase "based on CPI". It's generically worded enough that they could abuse it with pretty high increases annually if they wish. They reserve the right to at any stage switch to billing you based on the kWh the panels produce instead of the fixed monthly fee. If they do this, you have 30 days to _notice_ they've done this and demand they change the billing back, if you don't notice it, then you're stuck with being billed for the power the panels produce regardless of whether you use it or not. If they ever decide to connect the system to export power, they get the full financial benefit of all exported power. i.e. you sign away rights to that "income". If you cancel the deal - including e.g. if you sell your house and the new owner doesn't want the system - they will come and remove the system but will not do any maintenance on the building such as filling holes or anything like that. I get that it's to protect them from owners demanding they repaint walls and excessive stuff, but the way it's worded makes it sound like they'll do the bare minimum when removing and leave you with the effort of cleaning up. On the bright side though, the penalty for cancellation and even early cancellation is not high, something like R10k (I can't quite remember amount, but I know it was way less than I thought it would be) Doing some maths, if you plan on living in your house for more than 5 years, you're better off finding a rent-to-own solution or getting financing. If, like my neighbour, you plan on selling in 2 years time anyways, then it's not a bad solution.
  8. Don't forget to add the cost of the new prepaid meter required to support feed-in. Currently R12k. They are working on reducing this cost to around R5k-R6k. I also did the maths, and basically unless you have a full 5kW of _unused_ solar panel power to feed in, it's not worth it. Your average 3.6kW or even most 5kW installs that are using most of their solar power - would take 6+ years just to recover the cost of the prepaid meter installation.
  9. Naming threw me, this appears to be the 5.12kWh battery: https://www.sunsynk.org/ip65-battery Up to 32 in parallel for 163kWh
  10. According to their website, it's either 8 or 16 as max: https://www.sunsynk.org/532kwh-battery (this isn't the exact model you have though) At the top it says In the specs listed it has: I suspect it's 16 as this is quite a common number for the communication protocols.
  11. @Samsed, I emailed [email protected] with details of my issue. It did take them a couple of days to reply, but they sorted the issue out.
  12. I went digging for more info and did some maths when they announced it. Quick summary of changes and unknowns for anyone interested: CoCT will pay R1.04/kWh Net-consumer rule is apparently being dropped They are busy testing a different prepaid meter, if it passes all the tests then it will reduce the cost from R12k+ to around R5k (near the end of the interview: https://omny.fm/shows/the-john-maytham-show/cash-for-power-cape-town-gets-treasury-exemption-t) What's unknown: Is there still a monthly fee to be allowed to feed in? i.e. the R160 mentioned in this thread (I found a R200/month mention in another thread). Is there still a limit on size of residential system to be allowed to export (i.e if I understand correctly, most residential houses are limited to 3.6kW of solar panels if they want to export?) Doing some napkins maths, based on 2kW of spare solar power to export: If the monthly fixed fee is dropped: You can recover the cost of the prepaid meter in just over a year. If the monthly fixed fee is not dropped: It'll take 3-5+ years just to recover the cost of the prepaid meter. With the fixed monthly fee, in order to recover the cost of the prepaid meter in under 2 years, one needs to reliably export 14+ kWh per day (year round - so approx. 5,000kWh per year). If there's also a limit of 3.6kW of solar panels allowed in order to export, then that means you need to be exporting 70%+ of your solar production.
  13. For anyone else who encounters this issue, if the previous owner is unknown, you can also log a support ticket on the Solarman website and they will remove the device from the old account for you (after they've verified it hasn't been in use for some time).
  14. That is the dodgiest site I've seen in a long while. I would not trust them to deliver a R100 item. Domain is a whole of 2 months old. The wordpress theme is horribly broken, spelling errors all over the place. Black friday specials in Jan. And most importantly, the prices are too good to be true. Your average 5kWh lithium battery is around R20k-R25k. No-one is going to be selling a new 7.2kWh battery for R15k.
  15. I was looking into this a few months back. The version of the dongle is important. The newer dongles have changed the protocol and caused a lot of headaches. If you browse the 'issues' section on github you can see lots of threads about it. The end of this thread seems to indicate someone might have cracked v5 of the protocol: https://github.com/XtheOne/Inverter-Data-Logger/issues/37
  16. MQTT would be ideal. I personally would only want something that can do a direct connection to the dongle, if it requires connecting to an API on the internet then I wouldn't use it. I think it would be great if it was possible for a limited set of settings that could be changed as well. In particular the 'System Mode' time slots. This would allow for creating automations involving loadshedding or things like adjusting settings based on clouds or day of the week or such. Being able to change _any_ setting is perhaps a bit risky, but it would be great if at very least the less critical settings were possible to change.
  17. Thank you all for your replies and assistance. I had a solar installer inspect the system last week and indeed it is wired as 4S2P. VOC of the panels is 38.1V, so it's hitting overvoltage even easier than expected. He picked up some other glaring issues with the system as well. I'll be using him to sort out all the issues as soon as possible and then things should run smoothly.
  18. @Coulomb Thank you for your response. Inverter firmware is 72.40. I will look into upgrading it. It's possible my graphing was not catching the voltage soon enough. Existing libraries for monitoring the inverter didn't quite suit my needs so I've been building a custom one but havn't had time to work on it properly, so it's only been recording every 2min. I managed to work on it this morning and is currently recording every 15 seconds (and could record more frequently if I wish). Looks like it's a combination of voltage and temperature. Going back a few days I can see that: On days that it spends more time on eskom than solar, the voltages are sitting around 140~144V, due to my 2min intervals at the point, I'd say it was switch to Eskom due to overvoltage. On days where it runs mostly on Solar (and voltages are around 136V), the temperature slowly rises until it hits 67deg and then it drops back to Eskom until the temperature is back to < 60deg. I will update once I've had an installer take a look later this week.
  19. @Jay-Dee Thank you, that is very interesting regarding the over-voltage! I should have someone coming to inspect the setup in the next week or 2 to quote me on a few changes, I will get him to check how the panels are configured and quote for altering the setup. While the previous owner was meticulous in keeping documentation on everything in the house, the installer he used gave minimal details. The invoice from the installation a few years ago just says "8 x 250W Solar Panels". No brand or model number, no details about how they are configured or anything like that. I'll get them checked out and hopefully can have them reconfigured in a better setup. The inverter is an older Axpert 5Kva (Mecer Branded): SOL-I-AX-5M @Calvin Thank you for the update, it's a pity it's not doable using the stats from the inverter. A pyranometer sounds pretty interesting, sounds like something I need to add to my list of projects with microcontrollers.
  20. Thank you Calvin, I'd prefer a method that uses the actual data from the inverter though. I'm as much interested in what the estimated output should be as much as I am in what the out currently is. For example, how does the inverter know there's sufficient solar power to switch off from the grid? Does it require more info than is made available over the serial connection or can it be calculated?
  21. I've bought a house recently which has an Axpert inverter, solar panels and batteries. I've programmed one of my raspberry pi's to monitor the stats on the inverter and have been watching the graphs with interest. So obviously there are times where the inverter decides to stay on Eskom or switch back to Eskom (e.g. morning sun rising, clouds, sun setting). What I'm curious about is whether it's possible to calculate how much power the panels could be outputting when it's running off Eskom. To give an example: Between 12:00 and 13:00 the PV Voltage was around 114V, PV Current was 24A and everything was running off Solar. Approx. 1.2kW load. At 13:00 the inverter switched back to Eskom and continued to 14:00. PV Voltage was around 136V, current was 1A. Approx. 1.2kW load During that time period of 13:00-14:00, is there a way I could calculate how much the panels could have produced? Or worded another way, could I calculate what load would have been supported?
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