So in a perfect world my solar system would run perfectly on its own with no manual input from me. 

I currently have all of my big loads running from Solar. I run on battery through the night, and in the morning batteries are charging again at 7:00. 

As a fail safe I keep about 30% of my batteries in reserve should mains fail at night, and should it be cloudy my system taps mains to supplement the shortfall during the day. 

sounds pretty straight forward......but enter sustained stage 5/6 load shedding, with heavy cloud cover and my system is taking strain. 

I don`t have particularly fancy inverters and splitting my DB board into essential/non essential loads was not something I had even heard of before joining this group.

So essentially when I know we have load-shedding coming (The 4-5 hour slots) and we have had a cloudy day, I need to rush home and change my settings to charge the batteries a bit before the power goes out, or set to UTI to preserve the batteries for that "zero dark thirty" slot. 

Aside from this minor inconvenience I have not been hit by load-shedding once in the five months that I have had the system. With a certain amount of user interference required, I`m sure ill get it wrong at some point and land up in the dark, but so far so good. 

How are your systems coping with this stage 6 and are you having to do a bit of thinking for your systems, or does it just do its thing?

 

Use solar assistant... Remotely can change the settings for a temporary time period, after which it will revert to normal. Perfect for preparing for load shedding. 

4 minutes ago, Hansa said:

Use solar assistant... Remotely can change the settings for a temporary time period, after which it will revert to normal. Perfect for preparing for load shedding. 

I have Chinese SRNE inverters, I doubt they will be compatible with that. 

Agree with Hansa.

Contact them and enquire if your inverter are supported.

20 minutes ago, LCG said:

I have Chinese SRNE inverters, I doubt they will be compatible with that. 

Support for most important setting of Must and SRNE inverters.

 

https://solar-assistant.io/help/updates/changelog

 

 

 

Best to contact them

Edited September 21, 20223 yr by Hansa

Wow, thanks for that guys. Ill try and get in touch with them. 

5 hours ago, LCG said:

So essentially when I know we have load-shedding coming (The 4-5 hour slots) and we have had a cloudy day, I need to rush home and change my settings to charge the batteries a bit before the power goes out, or set to UTI to preserve the batteries for that "zero dark thirty" slot. 

What I done before when I still had a Axpert type inverter which is allot like your Must is, I installed a Sonoff wifi switch on the 230V mains “IN” to inverter. Set it to UTI . With this I could basically switch the Eskom to inverter on or off with my phone. So my inverter would run on battery and solar during the day (also setting the  timer) and when I suspect rain I would switch the Sonoff manually on with my phone which started charging the batteries. It worked great I also have CCTV at home and could see if its cloudy or raining even when I was far out of town. This is a very cheap option for less than R500 if you dont want to spend thousands.

What sonoff model did you use? I am assume the powr3 given the basic is only rated at 10a?

If you want to go that route you can in stall 1 of these. CBI ASTUTE SMART CONTROLLER WIFI ENERGY MANAGE/MONITOR.

The issue is you will still not know at what state your batteries are or what your Inverter is doing. You wont be able to change setting remotely if need be. 

12 hours ago, Lee2 said:

What sonoff model did you use? I am assume the powr3 given the basic is only rated at 10a?

Yes I used the 10A Sonoff, I forgot to mention it controls a contactor that switches power on and off to the inverter. See photo, don’t look at the untidy wiring. Jacques is correct you won’t know the state of battery but it will save you a driving trip to go change settings to charge battery. It done the job for me for about two years because I traveled allot and was away for weeks at a time and could not afford to have a trip because of low battery. It helped me to keep batteries charged even in rainy weather. I actually have two more Sonoff’s that controls my auto-changeover switches. I hardly use it now because I upgraded to Sunsynk and it doesn’t need all these interventions to make life easy. The Astute would now be a better deal as it can handle 30A and no need for a contactor.

So I recently purchased the Solar Assistant device as suggested here. Unfortunately it has turned out to be a spectacular waste of money. The device will only connect one of my two SRNE inverters and gives completely different readings to what is actually happening. it constantly says we are using grid power even when we are not.

Initially I was getting responses from their support guys but after we had been through all of the generic faults they just started ignoring my emails and now wont even have the manners to reply. I am quite astounded at how disgusting their service has been. Just a heads up for anyone thinking of using the device.

I see support for SRNE was only added late in 2022, so they're possibly still working out the bugs?

If it's not working as advertised, I'd return for a refund.

56 minutes ago, LCG said:

So I recently purchased the Solar Assistant device as suggested here. Unfortunately it has turned out to be a spectacular waste of money. The device will only connect one of my two SRNE inverters and gives completely different readings to what is actually happening. it constantly says we are using grid power even when we are not.

Initially I was getting responses from their support guys but after we had been through all of the generic faults they just started ignoring my emails and now wont even have the manners to reply. I am quite astounded at how disgusting their service has been. Just a heads up for anyone thinking of using the device.

Sorry to hear that - hopefully they can resolve the issues - their rolling software updates are pretty nifty in resolving bugs. Are you inverters installed in parrallel? If you're completely unhappy then maybe send it back

1 hour ago, madness_za said:

I see support for SRNE was only added late in 2022, so they're possibly still working out the bugs?

If it's not working as advertised, I'd return for a refund.

 

1 hour ago, mzezman said:

Sorry to hear that - hopefully they can resolve the issues - their rolling software updates are pretty nifty in resolving bugs. Are you inverters installed in parrallel? If you're completely unhappy then maybe send it back

I would be willing to wait for updates if they would just have the decency to reply and tell me they are working on an update. Im just getting effed off at the treatment im getting. 

The only thing the unit does allow me to do is remotely switch between UTI and SBU which has been very useful in avoiding load shedding if we have a cloudy day, but other than that its useless to me. So I need if for switching and cant be without it now. 

Yes, they are in parallel. Apparently each inverter needs its own USB cable for SNRE but it refuses to connect to the second one. 

1 hour ago, LCG said:

 

I would be willing to wait for updates if they would just have the decency to reply and tell me they are working on an update. Im just getting effed off at the treatment im getting. 

The only thing the unit does allow me to do is remotely switch between UTI and SBU which has been very useful in avoiding load shedding if we have a cloudy day, but other than that its useless to me. So I need if for switching and cant be without it now. 

Yes, they are in parallel. Apparently each inverter needs its own USB cable for SNRE but it refuses to connect to the second one. 

What version of Solar Assistant do you have running?

On 2023/01/24 at 5:34 PM, mzezman said:

What version of Solar Assistant do you have running?

I see my software version is 

2022-10-30  

Any idea how I would go about updating?

If the Pi is connected to the internet it should show that there is an update. That is the newest update available.

1 hour ago, LCG said:

I see my software version is 

2022-10-30  

Any idea how I would go about updating?

https://solar-assistant.io/help/updates/beta

 

Try the latest beta, 

So this is now turning into a bloody joke. I updated to the latest software version which made zero difference. 

I eventually got a reply from Solar Assist telling me that I needed a different cables for the SRNE inverters, Which I duly purchased for an additional R1100. The cables arrive and I am stuck with the same issues.

Numerous un-answered emails later I get told that those are also the wrong cables. They advise they will collect the wrong ones, and have the correct cables to me by close of business today, which was Monday.  They have collected the "Wrong" cables and the correct ones have never arrived! Again, my emails are just ignored.

If you purchase one of these devices and you ever need support on it you are stuffed! The worst part is they don`t even have a phone number to contact. I am eventually going to have to report this as fraud with my bank and try to have the charge reversed on my card! Honestly disgusting treatment.

Edited February 9, 20233 yr by LCG

On 2023/01/24 at 1:43 PM, LCG said:

So I recently purchased the Solar Assistant device as suggested here. Unfortunately it has turned out to be a spectacular waste of money. The device will only connect one of my two SRNE inverters and gives completely different readings to what is actually happening. it constantly says we are using grid power even when we are not.

Initially I was getting responses from their support guys but after we had been through all of the generic faults they just started ignoring my emails and now wont even have the manners to reply. I am quite astounded at how disgusting their service has been. Just a heads up for anyone thinking of using the device.

Pls tell me what SRNE have ? I need some tehnical infos. Thanks