With all the confusing talk of new eskom tariffs with R900pm fixed fee from next year, my wife and I have decided to trial going fully off-grid for the month of august using our modestly sized DIY solar system.
For the next 6 days till the start of August I will be doing some trial test runs just to fine tune timings of everything.

For starters I am running Loadshedding from 9am till 9pm.
My crypto mining rigs will now only run from 9am till 3pm everyday to give the batteries a fighting chance

 

 

Edited July 25, 20223 yr by WannabeSolarSparky

Awesome thread and Idea. Promoting

Sincerely

Jay

Ok, so only an hour into this exercise and I already have a "minor glitch" 🤣

I need to rewire my geyser as it is not on the transfer switch to move onto my non-essentials side when off-grid.
This was all fine for normal loadshedding, but for off-grid it is no good.
Now 1st need to go buy a breaker and then redo the geyser wiring.

That's why these "trials" are so important

On the plus side, I already have 6amps going into the batteries and it's only 10:30

Edited July 25, 20223 yr by WannabeSolarSparky

Following. Will be interesting to see how this goes

Is it still feasible to mine Crypto lol? I mine monero using spare server resources that arent being utilized.

1 minute ago, TiaanSmit said:

Is it still feasible to mine Crypto lol?

Very much still feasible
At current prices I am still making over R100 per day with my small 300MH/s ethereum rigs.
Rigs already paid off and electricity is pretty much free with my excess solar.

Such a satisfying thing to watch, nothing coming from eskom

 

 

I love aircons in summer. Will it work? :>>

Jay

Gotta have some cuppajoe's too

5 minutes ago, Energy-Jason said:

I love aircons in summer. Will it work? :>>

I have a 1000Watt aircon and it has no trouble starting up, may just hit the limits if it starts up while the geyser and kettle are running at the same time.

2 minutes ago, WannabeSolarSparky said:

I have a 1000Watt aircon and it has no trouble starting up, may just hit the limits if it starts up while the geyser and kettle are running at the same time.

Thats about 3000BTU? Thats awesome. Will you be able to run him at night?

Jay

7 minutes ago, Energy-Jason said:

Thats about 3000BTU? Thats awesome. Will you be able to run him at night?

Its one of these: Portable Aircon
14000btu, it could probably run a few hours at night along side your baseloads, but definitely not all night as the 200ah will deplete too quick.
You need enough energy left for that 1st cup of coffee in the morning
Maybe with 300AH you could make it all night.

Edited July 25, 20223 yr by WannabeSolarSparky

Awesome Thread. Will follow.

Jay

Some Info Of Daytime Usage Profile

Coffee and Toast! 

 

Hi There, been reading through the forum a lot over the last few weeks. i am in the process of having a 5kw sunsynk inverter, 12 x 400w(4.8kw) jinko panels and a 5kwh lifepo battery installed. just looking for an opinion on this setup. the company i am considering is called Alumo. anyone used them? what will be the drawbacks of this set up? will i be able to run most of my household during the day with this? 

Battery Bank Fully Charged so crypto miner can run at least till 4pm instead of 3pm.
Will see what happens tomorrow when I have the geyser rewired correctly for off-grid use.

1 hour ago, ZCS said:

will i be able to run most of my household during the day with this?

@ZCS
That would mostly depend on your household requirements (base Load).

My wife and I are low energy users and we very rarely use our stove (Braai tastes and works better)

Edited July 25, 20223 yr by WannabeSolarSparky

31 minutes ago, WannabeSolarSparky said:

Battery Bank Fully Charged so crypto miner can run at least till 4pm instead of 3pm.
Will see what happens tomorrow when I have the geyser rewired correctly for off-grid use.

This interface, is it the solar assistant interface that I keep reading about? does it integrate with home assistant?

4 minutes ago, TiaanSmit said:

This interface, is it the solar assistant interface that I keep reading about? does it integrate with home assistant?

Hi there @TiaanSmit
This is my own custom dashboard with some major input from @Bloubul7
Here is the link:
https://powerforum.co.za/topic/12146-sunsynk55-simple-local-data-monitoring-no-cloudinternet-needed-setup-guide-step-1-the-software/

Crypto Miner Switched off 4pm
Still plenty solar power coming in, though wife is ironing a small load quick so that may use a bit of the power so will keep an eye on those battery  and solar stats.

3 hours ago, ZCS said:

Hi There, been reading through the forum a lot over the last few weeks. i am in the process of having a 5kw sunsynk inverter, 12 x 400w(4.8kw) jinko panels and a 5kwh lifepo battery installed. just looking for an opinion on this setup. the company i am considering is called Alumo. anyone used them? what will be the drawbacks of this set up? will i be able to run most of my household during the day with this? 

You need to get your head around a few things, preferably before spending money on a solar system.
1) How much power your house uses in a day
2) What can you do without?
3) If possible, try to break up the answer to question (1) so that you know that your geyser(s) consume X, your stove Y etc
4) Are there loads that you can move into the sunny hours (EG run your pool pump during the day by resetting the time, only running your dishwasher during the day)?

For me a 5kwh battery is a bit on the light side. I have 10kwh. That will get me through from 15:30 to about 6:00, providing we don't go crazy with appliances. What happens after 06:00 depends - in our case - on how long our heat pump runs and whether or not the sun starts shining so the battery can recharge.

Also we reserve a portion of the battery. IE SOC will not drop below 40% as long as there is grid power. Since the batteries shut down at 10% left, doing it this way we always have 3 kwh in hand in case of an outage.

If you use very little between the time you stop getting useful PV and the time you start getting PV in the morning, then maybe a 5kwh battery can work, but I don't think you'll have a lot in hand.

Remember that one morning it will be overcast. When that happens your panels don't produce as much and your battery will take longer to charge and may be drawn from for longer.

I have less panel power than you, and we seldom use more than 14 kwh in 24 hrs, and our battery usually gets fully charged on a sunny day.

Thanks for your reply @Bobster.. we currently use around 40kwh per day. i estimate about 60% of this is during the day (pool pump, dishwasher, geyser microwave etc..) i plan on installing a cbi astute timer for the pool pump and geyser as i only need the geyser to warm up for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. budget is always the deciding factor and i am not looking at getting off grid. i just want to be able to get through loadshedding with minimal interruption to our lives and also to be able to reduce my eskom bill( in order to justify the capital expense). ideally, i am hoping to move most of our heavy loads (washing, ironing, pool pump, dishwasher) etc to be used during the day to try and maximize the pv. i know the battery is a bit small but the budget doesnt allow for bigger/more right now. i will most likely leave the geyser and oven (gas stove installed recently and use gas kettle) off the inverter (or can i have these connected as non essential?)at night it will mainly be a few LED lights, 3 fridge/freezers and a LED TV that would need to run. not much else significantly being used after 6pm. i am hoping this setup will at least make loadshedding non existent, get our fridges through any unexpected power cuts and also be able to save a reasonable amount on our eskom contributions...

6 hours ago, WannabeSolarSparky said:

 

Ok, so only an hour into this exercise and I already have a "minor glitch" 🤣

I need to rewire my geyser as it is not on the transfer switch to move onto my non-essentials side when off-grid.

 

Why don’t you keep it on the essentials side but put it on Astute smart controller and program it the way you want?

8 minutes ago, PowerUser said:

Why don’t you keep it on the essentials side but put it on Astute smart controller and program it the way you want?

It is currently on the non-essential side, that's why I said I need to rewire it to the essential side. Already using tasmota to control all the timings