Paul Greeff

Our solar installation at home went live on Friday afternoon, so we've only been on solar for a few days. I am blown away by how useful the logger on the Sunsynk is. We need some assistance in reducing the consumption. To give some context, we're four people in the main house where we have the solar solution (soon to be five), and then two in the cottage where my folks live. We've identified some wasteful loads that we can address, but others are a bit tricky to address. The main house consumption only deviates a little bit as we have a gas stove and geyser. During the day we try to introduce the heavy loads only when there is sufficient sun and battery capacity to handle the peaks. The cottage has an electric stove and geyser. 1. Stove / Oven - we're looking into a modern gas stove / oven (not the gas stove electric oven combo). We should have that installed in a few weeks once we've decided on a model so this isn't a major concern. 2. Then there is the geyser. I have a number of ideas I want to try, but for the most part, I don't know how to get rid of the thing. So far the best I've come up with is a thermal blanket as it's insulation is very poor. And then of course a timer to shift as much of the load to the day. I would have liked to install a gas water heater such as the one we have in the main house, but the old folks don't like 'personality' of the gas heaters and I don't want my solar hobby to become a point of contention. I would appreciate some ideas to solve this problem without diminishing their enjoyment and convenience of hot water. I also looked at solar geyser, but I know too little about this at the moment, and I am concerned it will just shift the power problem to the winter when sun is not sufficient to heat the geyser. 3. Small loads that add up to a lot of power. We still have to identify these little buggers. They're all over the place. For example, I have three fridges and a freezer, and then the fridge and freezer in the cottage, plus the fridge in the caravan. Just switching off the fridge in the caravan noticably dropped our usage over night but we're still hunting for other items to disable. We're between 450W and 850W the whole night (excepting the geyser of course) which still depletes the batteries way before morning. But we'll carry on hunting for these culprits. So my main concern at the moment is how to reduce and shift the geyser consumption as much as possible. Thermal blanket and timer are a start, but do we consider a solar geyer or heat pump? Or even a modern electric gas water heater with electric control etc.? I would very much appreciate your perspective on this. Regards Paul

Excuse my ignorance, I am not familiar with the Goodwe, what does US3000*4 mean? If it means what I would assume it does, four Pylon batteries, will it not get confused if it only finds two?

Hi everyone My solar installation finally came together this weekend. Sunsynk 8kW 15x 300W Canadian solar (4.5 kW) 2x 3.6 kWh Dyness. We're enjoying our first bit of spotty sun since going live on Friday the 5th. It is awesome to see this Sunsynk in action. It seems to just handle anything you throw at it without any complaints. And of course, having the house and cottage on battery power during load shedding was very, satisfying. I especially enjoy the dashboards made possible with the wifi data logger. This brings me to my question alluded to in the title. I noticed the data logger (LSW-3) has a tendency to disconnect from the network or time out. On the dashboard it looks like all the data is captured and reported, yet, I am concerned about the constant disconnects. The disconnects are severe enough that it resulted in the initial configuration taking over an hour instead of just a few minutes to get it on the wifi network. I have tested, it is not the signal strength. Regardless of whether I connect to it directly on wifi via my cellphone or laptop, or if I connect via my router on my local network, these disconnects, or should I rather say, these timeouts (since it still seems to be connected to wifi as far as my router is aware) occur. It is possible it is part of its normal operation, i.e., collect data, then connect to the network and send it to the portal, and then disconnect and collect some more data, but it seems unlikely. Has anyone experienced the same and is this normal? I also see the option to update the Sunsynk and logger firmware. I understand the Sunsynk firmware update has to be requested. Is this the same for the data logger, and is there currently a benefit to updating? Regards Paul