We've had some decent rain the past week or so, and I see there's more to come next week as well. Today is quite misty and I see that my inverter keeps switching between Eskom and Solar - perhaps I should add a couple more panels or upgrade to a GTI, have yet to decide, but first we need to finish our house renovations and some other new projects I'm starting in February. For now we just scale down a little bit and all it well

But, how's everyone else's solar systems coping in this weather?

Quite badly! Solar production averaged about 2-3kWh per day over the last few days. When the rain arrived with some wind the wind generator helped a bit overnight, otherwise it was genny power. On the upside the rain finally filled up my pool. I was collecting rain water from the gutters and pumping it to the pool with the firefighter. I am going to install another 4x300W panels this week to bring my solar array up to 3kW so I can run a pool pump. Also managed to get fertiliser onto my lucerne fields just in the nick of time, first drops started falling as I finished. We had about 90mm over the last week or so.

Had to keep the base low but we survived the bad weather reasonably well.I only needed to start the genny on Sunday eve to heat up the geaser to 50 deg.  @DeepBass9 that extra panels will make a world of difference even if it is just to maintain in the day time.

 

Definitely. They will will power the pool pump in summer, but the 1800W that I have currently is a bit small for winter, so I should be able to make about an extra 5 or 6kWh per day during that time.

Having commissioned my system on 14th Dec., I had no real time to finetune yet, as holiday interfered :-)

On the early morning hours of 7th, Midrand got dumped by about 48 mm, during which my supply to house disappeared. After rain subsided, I found the Expert all ok, but the input and output had tripped. I suspect that it rained so hard that some moisture must have gotten into one of the security LED light(cabling?)caused the split DB to trip, feeding the fault back to inverter.

Will have to look at it when i'm back home. 

41 minutes ago, Sidewinder said:

After rain subsided, I found the Expert all ok, but the input and output had tripped. I suspect that it rained so hard that some moisture must have gotten into one of the security LED light(cabling?)caused the split DB to trip, feeding the fault back to inverter.

Will have to look at it when i'm back home. 

Moisture might cause the Earth Leakage Relay to trip, depending on how severe and exactly where the leakage occured, but should not be able to trip a circuit breaker. Please give more info on exactly what tripped on the input and output. 

I ran out of time before going to the coast, and installed 2 x earth leakages. Will replace with CB's when back.  A few drops of rain did ingress where my solar cables come in from the roof, but fuses etc were all ok. need to seal where the p2000 comes into the battery/inverter room(horizontal). Pity the RPi didn't recover 100%. I will download the new image and start from scratch. Usingssh and uptime to see if all is ok. Daytime load is very low, so not too worried about the very low solar radiation we have been experiencing over Dec and Jan so far. Hope that improves going forward.