36 minutes ago, ZCS said:

Thanks for your reply @Bobster.. we currently use around 40kwh per day.

OK... Try to get that down. I use about 13 to 15 kw/h a day. I was averaging 13 before we switched to solar.

36 minutes ago, ZCS said:

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...

If I define a "night" as "the time I don't have much useful PV" then that comes to about 16:00 to about 7:00 right now. I would usually use 40% of that that 10kw/h battery over that time, with a setup similar to yours (LED lights, 3 fridges, LED TV, electric fence, alarm, phones charging). So in my scenario a 5kw/h battery is going to get pushed to the edge of it's usefulness overnight, and if we had load shedding early in the morning then we might run into problems. At 7am (at the moment) our heat pump kicks in. By about 7:45 I'm getting some useful PV, but still less than the heatpump is drawing.

This morning we got down to 51% SOC at 8:40. A 5kw/h battery would now be useless for powering the house. If load shedding had started at 8, we'd have had problems for a while until PV came back on line. 

NB! We have a gas hob and oven, and we have a rule that we don't use an electric kettle between 16:00 and 8:00. 

So I think you will have to give up something here. Either set a reasonable reserve on the battery (enough to get the essential circuits through a 2.5 hour load shed) and use some municipal juice during the night, or try to get through the night and hope that there are no outages in the early morning.

You can leave the geyser and oven on non-essential. They will get no power when grid goes down, but if there is grid, and your geyser kicks in at (for eg) 06:00, it is going to have to draw from battery or grid (probably battery at first). You will need matches or something else to light your gas stove.

[EDIT] You should be saving money though. You have more PV panel power than I do, and on a good day I use a fraction of a kw/h.

Edited July 25, 20223 yr by Bobster.

Quick update.

17:20 Solar production still exceeding base-load and batteries still 100% full.

Dinner done and dusted, evening routine will add another 2 rounds of coffee and that should then get us to 9pm when my 1st day of 6 trial loadshedding ends.

Even though the geyser did not charge up today due to the "glitch - further up in the thread" there would have been more than enough solar production to do everything the same including charging up the geyser
Granted though, it has been a sunny cloud-free clear day in Cape Town.
I am sure that by day 6 I should have ironed out all the glitches and timings to be ready for the 1st August to start our 1 month Off-Grid Trial

The Sunsynk Portal Stats just don't do it for me anymore
Misses a lot of detailed stats. It is more for averaging than anything else.
Supposedly a premium brand but still the same chineesi style el-cheepo energy portal

All it's really good for is firmware upgrades.

Edited July 25, 20223 yr by WannabeSolarSparky

18 minutes ago, WannabeSolarSparky said:

Quick update.

17:20 Solar production still exceeding base-load and batteries still 100% full.

Dinner done and dusted, evening routine will add another 2 rounds of coffee and that should then get us to 9pm when my 1st day of 6 trial loadshedding ends.

Even though the geyser did not charge up today due to the "glitch - further up in the thread" there would have been more than enough solar production to do everything the same including charging up the geyser
Granted though, it has been a sunny cloud-free clear day in Cape Town.
I am sure that by day 6 I should have ironed out all the glitches and timings to be ready for the 1st August to start our 1 month Off-Grid Trial

The perks of living in a city that has sun until 11PM.  I am down to 50ish watts.

On a serious note though - In Cape Town, optimal summer conditions, until what time can you get PV production?

1 hour ago, Supergeek said:

On a serious note though - In Cape Town, optimal summer conditions, until what time can you get PV production?

Not yet had a full summer with my new system. Old (24v AGM+1000Watt Inverter+1000watt Solar) system did pretty well in summer.

12 hours go by so quickly when you having fun 😆
Day 1 of 6 Pre Off-grid Trial.

 

Here is the graph for Day 1 full 12 hours "loadshedding"
Will compare tomorrow with the geyser, also hopefully another clear day to make the comparison fair.

 

11 hours ago, WannabeSolarSparky said:

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.

Wish you all the success in your endeavors.  

Looks like fun, rooting for you @WannabeSolarSparky. Hope you manage to get through the month fully off-grid, and as the days get longer hopefully you can keep the mining rigs pumping out ETH.👍

Yay Geyser rewired to essential side now and just in time for day 2 trial run 9am till 9pm before going off-grid for the month of August.

Another beautiful sunny clear sky day in Cape Town, so will be a good comparison to yesterday

Almost 9am and already pushing 9amps into the batteries.

Edited July 26, 20223 yr by WannabeSolarSparky

18 minutes ago, WannabeSolarSparky said:

Yay Geyser rewired to essential side now and just in time for day 2 trial run 9am till 9pm before going off-grid for the month of August.

Another beautiful sunny clear sky day in Cape Town, so will be a good comparison to yesterday

Almost 9am and already pushing 9amps into the batteries.

Amazing the difference in solar input between Joburg and Cape Town at around the same time. Here I am already pumping 50A into the battery at around the same time

5 minutes ago, zsde said:

Amazing the difference in solar input between Joburg and Cape Town at around the same time. Here I am already pumping 50A into the battery at around the same time

Yeah, this side pushing 62A-ish (Centurion). But remember that he will probably be pushing 60A at 16:00 this afternoon when we are at 5A.

8 minutes ago, zsde said:

Amazing the difference in solar input between Joburg and Cape Town at around the same time. Here I am already pumping 50A into the battery at around the same time

Awesome...

You have 12 panels going, out of  my 10  only 8 are currently connected and they are 4 facing due east and 4 facing due west.

ALSO you are using a growatt spf5000 those inverters have amazing mppt conversion efficiencies to charge. Way better than what the sunsynks do.

16 hours ago, Bobster. said:

OK... Try to get that down. I use about 13 to 15 kw/h a day. I was averaging 13 before we switched to solar.

If I define a "night" as "the time I don't have much useful PV" then that comes to about 16:00 to about 7:00 right now. I would usually use 40% of that that 10kw/h battery over that time, with a setup similar to yours (LED lights, 3 fridges, LED TV, electric fence, alarm, phones charging). So in my scenario a 5kw/h battery is going to get pushed to the edge of it's usefulness overnight, and if we had load shedding early in the morning then we might run into problems. At 7am (at the moment) our heat pump kicks in. By about 7:45 I'm getting some useful PV, but still less than the heatpump is drawing.

This morning we got down to 51% SOC at 8:40. A 5kw/h battery would now be useless for powering the house. If load shedding had started at 8, we'd have had problems for a while until PV came back on line. 

NB! We have a gas hob and oven, and we have a rule that we don't use an electric kettle between 16:00 and 8:00. 

So I think you will have to give up something here. Either set a reasonable reserve on the battery (enough to get the essential circuits through a 2.5 hour load shed) and use some municipal juice during the night, or try to get through the night and hope that there are no outages in the early morning.

You can leave the geyser and oven on non-essential. They will get no power when grid goes down, but if there is grid, and your geyser kicks in at (for eg) 06:00, it is going to have to draw from battery or grid (probably battery at first). You will need matches or something else to light your gas stove.

[EDIT] You should be saving money though. You have more PV panel power than I do, and on a good day I use a fraction of a kw/h.

Thanks for your insights. Very helpful and appreciated. Yeah i am ok with using eskom for a while over night to reserve some juice kn the battery in case of loadshedding. Think i am going to pull the trigger and get this installed. Look forward to not having to deal with loadshedding. 

Off-Grid Trial preparation day 2 geyser wired and came on with the nodered tasmotized powr3 timer as scheduled

Saw this and thought of you hahaha

 

 

You should buy this....  You will need a bigger solar system though

 

 

https://web.facebook.com/marketplace/item/582406466949831/?ref=browse_tab&referral_code=marketplace_top_picks&referral_story_type=top_picks

52 minutes ago, TiaanSmit said:

You should buy this....  You will need a bigger solar system though

😆 yeah would need one in the karoo somewhere to power that.

Day 2 of 6 pre-off-grid trial to finetune stuff.

Mixed results today, 1st half of day started off nice and cloud-free, rest of day ended up being cloudy.

Also only realised too late my mqtt controller was off so the geyser and crypto rigs ended up staying on for longer than intended.

He He, I love it when the Kettle, geyser, fridge and miners are busy together without any communication. 🤣

5964W with no grid AC involved. SunSynk 5kW flexing its muscles.👍

Hopefully a full sunny day in CT tomorrow for test day 3.

11 hours ago, TimCam said:

SunSynk 5kW flexing its muscles

On The Inverter Side

IMHO - My preliminary conclusions so far is that it will NOT BE POSSIBLE to go fully off-grid with a Sunsynk 5kw inverter and still maintain a "semi-normal" way of doing things around the home.
The Sunsynk was not really designed to be an off-grid inverter. Anyone who wants to use their Sunsynk Hybrid to go fully off-grid would actually be wasting what the Sunsynk was designed for.

Fortunately I still have my Growatt spf5000ES that I should actually hook up into my system and reconfigure exactly how I have everything wired up.
Ideally for Off-Grid I should have 2 of the growatts.

I will continue this 6 day trial, but am already considering scrapping the August 2022 off-grid trial, at least until I can add more batteries(see comments below) and get the growatt added into the mix.

On The Battery Side

2x 100ah batteries are just not going to be enough to go fully off-grid.
Mine do make it through the night but only just and also only because I cut my night time baseload down to under 200watts.
One or 2 fully covered dark cloudy days in a row then those batteries would not make it through the night or even day.

On the batteries side you should aim for a minimum of 400ah to even consider a move to going fully off-grid and even then you would need to carefully manage your usage to have reserves for those cloudy days.

This exercise has however shown me I can reduce my reliance on eskom quite substantially and if anything I will be using a sh$@t load less units per month.

 

I'm starting off with 2 x hubble batteries 5.5kwh. will be adding 2 extra batteries next year.

Moving my geysers and stove to gas next month. Hopefully by mid august my solar will be installed....Battery stock is an issue atm.

On 2022/07/25 at 5:24 PM, WannabeSolarSparky said:

Quick update.

17:20 Solar production still exceeding base-load and batteries still 100% full.

Dinner done and dusted, evening routine will add another 2 rounds of coffee and that should then get us to 9pm when my 1st day of 6 trial loadshedding ends.

Even though the geyser did not charge up today due to the "glitch - further up in the thread" there would have been more than enough solar production to do everything the same including charging up the geyser
Granted though, it has been a sunny cloud-free clear day in Cape Town.
I am sure that by day 6 I should have ironed out all the glitches and timings to be ready for the 1st August to start our 1 month Off-Grid Trial

 

On 2022/07/25 at 5:45 PM, Supergeek said:

The perks of living in a city that has sun until 11PM.  I am down to 50ish watts.

On a serious note though - In Cape Town, optima

 

9 minutes ago, TiaanSmit said:

I'm starting off with 2 x hubble batteries 5.5kwh. will be adding 2 extra batteries next year.

Moving my geysers and stove to gas next month. Hopefully by mid august my solar will be installed....Battery stock is an issue atm.

 

 

I mainly run TV,cctv, alarm, lights, 2x routers, 3 wireless access points,charging of cellphone(will do this between 4 and 5pm)

 

At night.

 

 

I used to run a custom built nas but have since replaced that with a  raspberry pi and 2 external drives mounted to samba shares. That alone made a difference in kwh consumption throughout the night.

 

Mind blowing how little power these RPI's consume. Can run one off a 10 000mah battery for a whole day if not longer.

 

 

Edited July 27, 20223 yr by TiaanSmit

We also got into the habit of boiling enough water in the kettle to fill up a water bottle whenever water needs to be boiled for kettle. Kettle used to be switched on 6-10times per day. We reduced it down to 3 times per day

 

I'll need to revise a strategy for my rainwater harvesting system..... Water needs to be airated occasionally. My 1.5hp pressure pump sometimes run for 3 hours on summer days.... Will hate for it to drain my batterys at night

On 2022/07/25 at 11:44 AM, WannabeSolarSparky said:

Such a satisfying thing to watch, nothing coming from eskom