Am I thinking in the right direction?

Right, so a few weeks ago I had a question about running a pool pump and heater on a solar setup and the advice received gave me a lot to ponder in terms of what I actually need. As it stands we’ll be moving into our new house come February next year and one of the first big ticket items I’ll need to do is some form of “beat load-shedding” setup as our new house does not have backup power.

I’ve checked our power usage at our existing house which comes in at just over R3,000 per month or 35Kwh per day. At the current house I have a borehole, pressure pump, 2 pool pumps (only 1 runs daily), a heat pump (only switch it on selectively) and 2 geysers (one of which is solar). Stove is gas and oven electric along with the standard range of appliances: 1 Fridge, 1 Freezer, 1 chest freezer, microwave and kettle. All lights in the house have been replaced with LED inside and out. For backup power we could comfortably run the house off a 6Kw generator provided we switched the geysers off at the DB, even running the kettle when my wife wasn’t blow drying her hair.

My estimation is that our usage in terms of units in the new house will be similar or slightly less than the current place. This will be measured though before committing to an installation. The differences being: No borehole and both geysers are already solar and could actually be switched to piped gas. I need to go and recheck the lighting in the new place but, should it not already be so, I’ll switch everything to LED.

My main focus is to have backup power with the OPTION of adding panels someday. The area we’ll be staying in has Eskom direct supply so the tariff reduction in comparison to Ekurhuleni or City of Johannesburg has an impact on the payback period you’d normally expect.

I accept that my DB would have to be split between essential and non-essential, non-essential basically being the geysers, stove, pool pump and aircons. I’d like to be in a position though where everything other than those items could be run with just a bit of common sense ie. don’t use the blow dryer, kettle and microwave at the same time. If you use them individually though it should be fine.

All that being said I’m basically preparing myself to purchase:

1x 8kW Hybrid Inverter (Would appreciate suggestions on brands)

2 or 3 Lithium-ion Batteries providing 10-15kWh of storage which I hope will cover me for 4-6 hours of load shedding. (Suggestions on brands welcome again)

My expectation is that this should cost between R100-R150k installed depending on how many batteries I go with.

So, am I thinking in the right direction?

Would appreciate input on if I have overspecced or underspecced based on my current usage.

Is my expectation on what this may cost our of line?

Should I possibly be adding some solar from the get go?