Hi. My name is Jay, and I'm sort of a farmer. I'm also sort of an academic and have been sort of an electronics and IT guy as well.

We have two dwellings on our farm. We put in solar heated water in both of them about 15 years ago. Then we solarised  our lights when the first round of loadshedding happened. Then I split the main hose phases, put one set of plugs for lower power use onto solar, and put the heavy duty stuff (washing machine etc) on the other.

Now I've got a Sunsynk 5.5 with a Hubble AM2, and am close to getting our hose off the farm. Still trying to work out whether I want to "export solar" and all the other stuff, and misunderstood the "secondary load" stuff entirely. So now I'm thinking dishwashers and stuff on non-essential supply, but freezers etc on essential. Time will tell.

I've also found, now I can monitor performance, that our house faces more NW than I realised, meaning we lose most of our solar input around 3pm. So, more panels facing west. Sigh. (PS I'm 69, and every installation requires a two week holiday after I'm finished).

I can do the same on the other house when (if) I have the money, but my big query now is on pumping water with solar. We have to lift all of our irrigation water from about 40m, and then pump it to our fields. Technically not a challenge on the face of it, financially a HUGE challenge, but that bloody in-rush current into motors is a killer. I haven't seen anything on this group yet, but if anyone's tackled this I'd love to hear about it. I know the ideal is to have DC pumps with the solar stuff right by the pump, but in the case of the borehole, out in the middle of a field, it would get stolen in days. (I've just heard that our emergency radio system is down again, because the batteries have been stolen again.)

Anyway, it passes the time, and it's kinda fun to watch everybody else's lights go at out and keep ours on.

Jay

Hi @farmer barnes,

Welcome to the forum. Your scenario is probably not unique. 

I think the main issue is the size of your borehole pump. I'm no expert, but use to run my 1kW borehole pump @ 58m from my 5kW system. I suspect that anything bigger than 2kW (3ph) would create a challenge for a 5kW inverter. The Sunsynk is particularly good is handling (up to)double it's capacity, provided grid, solar & batteries are available. You only have 1 x AM2, so you may be limited to 50A (x 49V)= 2.5kW in any case. The balance of in rush current can/will come from Grid (assuming you have grid available), as the PV (assuming once again you have PV, and sufficient there off) reacts far to slow, it only catches up after a few seconds.

Being a farmer, I'm sure your pump is >2kW, so you would need a higher capacity inverter to cope with the loads (either in rush or load).

Maybe look into "soft start" motor solutions, maybe that will/could softer the blow when the motor starts up.

I would give it a go,(to start the pump from the inverter, even if just temporarily. Worst that can happen is the inverter will shut down, and restart itself after a short rest period. If you have monitoring software like ICC or Solar Assistant, you will soon see if you actually need more batteries, PV, bigger inverter or a combination of the 3.

Fortunately, you current investment is not in vain, as your system is easily expandable.

If the pump effort does not pan out, then you can at least try an add some (controlled) heavy loads, (washing machine etc) to fully utilize your PV.

I don't want to say "Forget about feed-in", but in some cases, the current regime, irrespective who supplies your grid, is so tied up in unnecessary red tape, that it's not worth the effort. Rather focus on consuming all the power that you generate, specially after your batteries are fully charged. Just takes a bit of planning and getting used to. We do lots of baking / oven based food prep from 2pm till 5 pm. Try and automate a few heavy loads, like geyers with Astute Wifi relays. Ovens, washing machines and dish washers are easy to control, provided someone is at home during the day at times.

Somehow the food tastes better, knowingly that Eishkom/Muni etc didn't contribute in it's creation.

Thanks for that Sidewinder. Trouble is, of course, that my pumps are three phase, and my inverter isn't. I do have a couple small single phase irrigation pumps that I'm going to try to solarise, as you say probably with a soft-start device.

I'm an old ITer, so UPS technology is well known to me. I put up my first solar systems with UPS effects in mind rather than power generation per se. Now I've got a bigger better system, and reading this website, I'm beginning to realise I can do much more. And I have time to play - it's not like I work for a living

Jay