DeepBass9

Looking at your ICC settings, you batteries are not far out. I see the load is very low. I have 2 x HA02s on my bank, and I see on my BMV that the voltage difference is generally zero, except if there is a large load all of a sudden, or if the load or charge current is very low.

If you don't hear it, YOU MAY BE GOING DEAF!!!!!! LOL.

Chris imports them.

You can link the batteries across the strings and use one balancer, but if they are way out of balance, with 4 batteries, one balancer may not be able to pass enough current and blow the fuses on the interlinks (they are supposed to have a 5A fuse). Seems that not all people can hear this, but when you first connect up an HA02 to an unbalanced bank it emits a very high pitched whine until the batteries come into balance. Just FYI in case you hear it.

Show us a pic of the home. Sounds interesting..

With no load or charge and all in balance, they should settle at around 12.5 to 13V if charged, but there shouldn.t be more than about 0.1V difference between the individual batteries. This is pointing to a problem. I would charge the bank, and then disconnect it and let the batteries settle a bit, and then measure voltages. If one or more is much different to the others then that is your problem.

That also explains why everything on a farm if fixed with a bit of baling wire. The logic is either a 50km round trip to Magalies, where they may have what I need, or 120km to Kdorp or Rburg, or what do I have handy? Here we go, baling wire, sorted! (for the moment).

Try and measure the voltage across each battery when they are at rest (no load and not charging). If there is a big difference on one or a few of them that may indicate a damaged battery.

What was your load at that time, and which batteries do you have.?

What I am also going to try to do is manage the beds on a strip system, so I will use tractor power for any heavy work, but try and keep the soil disturbance and compaction to a minimum. I have laid out strip beds so that the tractor always drives on the same tracks. In that way I get a 1.4m wide bed, and then a 60cm wide wheel track followed by another 1.4m bed and so on. I will probably need to use a bit of chemical fertilizer to jump start the system, but once the plants are growing nicely, I will try and cycle the crop residue back into the ground that it grew from. The other challenge is planting though the crop residue. In v1. 0 I am doing it by hand, planting seedlings. On a large scale that will be too time consuming, so I will need to look at some sort of no till seed planter. I have a hand planter, bit that still only does one seed at a time, so I will need to get some sort of planter or drill. To that end I have bought an old row cultivator, that I am going to try and convert into a planter eventually. For those that are interested, lots of farms are using no till, vertical till, minimal till, row till and variations of these to miminise soil disturbance as part of a conservation agriculture system. Google down that rabbit hole.

For v2. 0 I'm going to expand and try on a bit of a larger scale. I have ploughed up and shaped about another 0.2 Ha, and the idea is to use this for summer tomatoes and other veggies, as well as some Indian corn and sweet potatoes. The first step is to cover the ground with straw to stop any further evaporation, and start building the soil. I have some assistants to help me here. I should have enough leftover straw from the feed bales to cover the ground completely by spring.

There is another thread on deep mulching, and I have been doing that for a good few years, and every year the soil gets better, and the plants grow better. Here is the current winter's veggies:

I just acquired 4 x 40Ah reconditioned batteries, so this weekend I'll connect it all up and take it for a spin...... I'm thinking that for the charging I'll buy a cheap pwm solar charger and charge from one of my solar arrays. I also have a few 10w panels lying around so I can use those in series to trickle charge the batteries when not in use.

I'm interested to hear what the solution is to this problem, when it is eventually solved.

What I had on my PD pump was a pressure release valve, which is actually essential if you have frost so it can release the pressure if it pumps against a frozen pipe. Its just a bit down in the borehole so the water goes back down the hole it it opens, and it doesn't freeze.

Getting back one of my original questions, how do centrifugal perform relative to positive displacement pumps at a high head. My solarmax used to trickle water, but it did it all day at 70m head. If you look at the performance curves for centrifugal they seem to drop off quite quickly with increasing head.

Rabid dogs and a machine gun should so the trick. 🙂

No, the 3 outgoing phases become one phase and run from a single phase inverter which you have on your diagram already. The only thing then running on 3 phase, on a separate circuit is the air conditioner, so you can cost that against the 3 phase inverter directly.

The pipe exists already. I've stopped burying pipes actually. For small pipes the cost of labour to bury them is the same as the pipe, but try and find a leak in a buried pipe! I just run the pipes along fencelines so you can find them easily and tap off from wherever. Its a bit of a conundrum. If I want to do some more irrigation I will either need to get a solar pump and panels, or get an AC pump, 800m of surfix and more panels to upgrade my solar system. So if the panels are out of the equation, then it is AC pump and 800m of surfix, or a solar pump. and that works out just about the same. If pump thieves discover the cable running to the pump they will steal as much of that as they can, which is the same cost as the panels for the pump. So I think I will take my chances with solar, and just try and make it theft proof.

Then there is no reason for a 3 phase inverter. Everything else can be run on one phase. My house was wired as 3 phase before I went off grid. You just bridge the 3 phases into 1 at the DB board and there you go.

Similar cost I think, maybe a bit cheaper. Can you just have surfix running through the veld? It will need to be buried in conduit as well surely?

Just run the 3 phase equipment from the grid, and put everything else on a single phase. Is the solar and batteries supposed to drive the air conditioner, because at 28kW that will not last long.

That can be it, those circulation pumps are not designed to work against a head, rather just to move water in a closed system.

OK, I though those valves worked both ways. Good luck on sorting it out! Is there an air release valve on the collector? Can it be an air bubble there?

Thinking about it, how are those 'vacuum relief valves' supposed to work? On my high pressure geyser I have on both the inlet and outlet as per spec, but It takes a long time to get all of the air out of the tank, and get hot water to the Mrs' bath. Not if the pump is trying to push air out of the way. There can only be 3 reasons why it doesn't work. Leak, blockage or air bubble. Must be one of them! I was doing some piping with copper pipes, and the one supplier puts little rubber bungs at the end of the pipes to prevent damage, one of them found its way to inside the pipe, and after soldering it all up beautifully, then cursing and swearing for a day, that there was no water flow, I had to pull all of the pipes apart again and eventually found the problem.