Hi Everyone,

 

I'm going to have solar installed at our house.

 

Our average KWH consumption is between 550 -600KWH per month with winter months being the highest.

Determining the size of inverters, Battery storage, PV array etc. is a bit of a headache for me.

Previously I considered growatt inverters but have since changed my mind to go for Sunsynk or Deye instead.

My Wife and I both operate our businesses from home. My Wife has a hair salon and I do IT related stuff remotely from my office.

We consume most of the KWH between 5pm and 8pm the following morning that average on some days 8KWH between those times when wife switches on the salon geyser, have the washing machine and dishwasher on at the same time. The geyser for the salon gets switched off at 3pm in the afternoon only to be switched on again the following morning.

We have a solar geyser with Flat panel for the main residence that only uses electricity after 5 if the sun did not heat up the geyser to 50 odd degrees Celsius.

 

I've been thinking of going the following route at approx. R200k for hardware and installation:

Begin with:

2 x 5KW sunsynk inverters

1 x Felicity 8.7KWH lithium ion batteries

18 x 460w Solar panels

 

I would then like to add additional battery capacity later this year when I have more money available for instance

 

1 x felicity 8.7kwh battery (17.4KWH of storage total with no modification to the PV array)

or

2 x felicity 8.7KWH battery's and adding an additional 4 or 6 460 watt PV panels.

 

What would you guys recommend and on what possible configuration to get as much savings on my utility bill as possible but to also have enough battery power to carry me us through load shedding?

I have a 6800 something odd Ryobi generator with avr that I would like to tie into the system aswell but I'm not sure if that's a good idea?

 

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 13, 20224 yr by TiaanSmit

Hi Tiaan

The Felicity battery seems a very good choice, well priced and good specs.

Did you find somebody who has stock or getting stock soon bc all suppliers I see seem out of stock?

An inverter I like very much is the InfiniSolar 4kW, it is true gridtied but can run Hybrid and Standalone also.

It is well priced with good specs and can run up to 9 in parallel.

Why does that seem like a lot of capacity for very low consumption. Please share your thoughts in the calculation process, even if you think they are flawed.

Felicity 8.7KWH none of the big reputable suppliers sell those and all the prices I see are on dodgy websites.

Be careful, there are many many many scam sites and if prices are way lower than the averages on reputable sites then it is most likely gonna get you burned.

On 2022/07/16 at 11:28 AM, Rogan said:

Why does that seem like a lot of capacity for very low consumption. Please share your thoughts in the calculation process, even if you think they are flawed.

We use most of our electricity at night

20 minutes ago, TiaanSmit said:

We use most of our electricity at night

If you use most of your electricity at night, you were right to consider growatt at first, because you would have had enough cash to get more batteries. 

On 2022/07/14 at 11:21 PM, Quirinius said:

Hi Tiaan

The Felicity battery seems a very good choice, well priced and good specs.

Did you find somebody who has stock or getting stock soon bc all suppliers I see seem out of stock?

An inverter I like very much is the InfiniSolar 4kW, it is true gridtied but can run Hybrid and Standalone also.

It is well priced with good specs and can run up to 9 in parallel.

Thanks for mentioning the infinisolar inverter I will look into this.

 

One of the reputable suppliers are receiving stock sometime this month.

I'll hang tight till then.

On 2022/07/16 at 11:43 AM, WannabeSolarSparky said:

Felicity 8.7KWH none of the big reputable suppliers sell those and all the prices I see are on dodgy websites.

Be careful, there are many many many scam sites and if prices are way lower than the averages on reputable sites then it is most likely gonna get you burned.

Caprisolar , solarwaysuppliers and jcsolarpanels sell these. All of them are well known.

 

 

 

On 2022/07/14 at 11:21 PM, Quirinius said:

Hi Tiaan

The Felicity battery seems a very good choice, well priced and good specs.

Did you find somebody who has stock or getting stock soon bc all suppliers I see seem out of stock?

An inverter I like very much is the InfiniSolar 4kW, it is true gridtied but can run Hybrid and Standalone also.

It is well priced with good specs and can run up to 9 in parallel.

Just a heads up. Solarwaysuppliers informed me they will be receiveing stock on the felicity battery 8.7kwh on Monday in JHB and sometime next week in CPT.

 

Take note the battery is only rated 0.5c but

 

Hi , Im.new to solar and recently installed a Must PV1800VHM invertor with 8 *360 watt panels and a pylontech up 5000 battery.I need help with programming the invertor since at the moment when its connected to the grid it goes into bypass mode so essentially its just using grid to power the home instead of using the battery and then charging battery from grid if it gets to low .So basically i want it setup so that in the day the home is powered by PV and excess charges the battery if its cloudy etc then battery must be charged by grid and at night it must use battery and if battery gets to low charge battery from grid and power via grid.Hope this makes sense.The installer does not seem to be familar with setting up the invertor.

Edited July 29, 20224 yr by Kratos

@Kratosyou probably need to change your source priority from utility (Utl) to Solar-Utility-Battery (SUB). That will run from solar first and then utility when there's no sun and save the battery for load shedding. You could use SBU, but run the risk of having a flat battery during load shedding.

Thank you @jumper will definiatly check this out can you please share what are the ideal settings so for example if its SBU which charge source should it be i.e OSO .. And then in terms of battery settings i.e bulk, float and charge voltage as well as battery stop charging and battery stop discharging voltage .Sorry im a complete noob here so hope my terminology is correct.

Edited July 30, 20223 yr by Kratos

1 hour ago, jumper said:

@Kratosyou probably need to change your source priority from utility (Utl) to Solar-Utility-Battery (SUB). That will run from solar first and then utility when there's no sun and save the battery for load shedding. You could use SBU, but run the risk of having a flat battery during load shedding.

I'm not so sure that the SUB is available on this inverter. Normally on the 450V models or the King versions.

SUB has the disadvantage of keeping the battery full for LS and at times of no LS like no no power is supplied by the battery but all by UTIL in the evening. One can do the mode change in order to cycle the batteries.

1 hour ago, Kratos said:

which charge source should it be i.e OSO

You can try OSO first to only use solar to charge the battery and that will save electricity, but you could run in to the times when the battery might not be charged enough before sundown in which case CSO would be better to use solar charge when there is sun and top up with grid when there is a rainy day or two or at night when there is no LS. You may need to play with these 2 settings to see what suits you best as there are no settings to suit all possible scenarios with LS involved. You kind of need to decide if you want to save the battery for in case of load shedding or if you want to just use it all the time like you are off-grid and maybe get caught out by load shedding with a flat battery at night or you need to switch between the settings manually to suit the situation as suggested by @Scorp007

2 hours ago, Kratos said:

battery settings i.e bulk, float and charge voltage as well as battery stop charging and battery stop discharging voltage

Unfortunately I am not overly familiar with the pylontech batteries, so I hesitate to give values here, just search around the forum, there is plenty info on them around.

 

Like @jumper

says try his settings to see how well solar only can charge. You can look through the battery section for actual settings for to grid and back to battery.

A lot of variables and settings will be as per each household load profile. Some of us using like 350kwh a month could have a small battery an panels. The next guy with large batteries and PV and totally different settings and discharge levels.

Their is a lot of information and setting ranges in the manual. That is a good starting point. We all learn once we have a system installed😀😀😀😀

4 hours ago, Scorp007 said:

Like @jumper

says try his settings to see how well solar only can charge. You can look through the battery section for actual settings for to grid and back to battery.

A lot of variables and settings will be as per each household load profile. Some of us using like 350kwh a month could have a small battery an panels. The next guy with large batteries and PV and totally different settings and discharge levels.

Their is a lot of information and setting ranges in the manual. That is a good starting point. We all learn once we have a system installed😀😀😀😀

Thanks @jumper and @Scorp007 for all the valuable information really appreciated 👍So for now I set it to SBU and CSO , the battery is set to LI but I noticed its taking reeally long to charge and even once charged its still using grid power so the bypass indicator still remains and load not shifting to battery at night.The default settings are 

Bulk: 56.8

Floating: 54.4

Low dc cut off: 48v

Field 20:Stop discharging when grid is available :46v

Field 21 : Battery stop charging when grid available :54v

On 2021/03/30 at 9:23 AM, Coulomb said:

Just press the up or down button near the LC Display unit you see U1 or U2 at the left (or the top if you have a modern display). Report the other pairs of numbers.

 

On 2022/04/22 at 12:32 PM, FixAMess said:

Have you checked what the max Amps your inverter can charge at?

My Goodwe can charge at a max of 100A, even if the BMS reports that it can take 148A max.

Also, the inverter may be providing the house with power and then only the reminder is sent to the batteries.

Usually the pylontechs only charge at C/2...

 

 

Edited July 30, 20223 yr by Kratos

3 hours ago, Kratos said:

I noticed its taking reeally long to charge

This is probably because you are now charging from PV only during the day and also powering the house from PV during the day, so it will take longer to charge depending on your loads.

 

3 hours ago, Kratos said:

Low dc cut off: 48v

Field 20:Stop discharging when grid is available :46v

Field 21 : Battery stop charging when grid available :54v

These 2 fields brought to my attention that this is not the same as the axpert types I know. I've read the manual and I see that these affect the way SBU and SOL settings work. I'm not familiar with this menu, but at first glance it looks like field 20 will never be reached as you have the DC cutoff at 48V, try changing field 20 to 48V also. You may have to tinker with these 2 values to get things to work as you want, but that's all the help I can offer unfortunately.

@jumper tx a mil for the help I will try these settings.🙂