Jump to content

Axpert MKS 5KVA Inverter - 48V


Johan Brits

Recommended Posts

2 hours ago, Mart-Mari said:

Life is not only about solar energy

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Vat so Chris. Cannot use OUR male logic with the ladies. They ALWAYS have a quip back that we seldom see coming. (ROFL)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

39 minutes ago, Mart-Mari said:

The Prez says: No more load shedding for South Africa. My reason for going solar has just disappeared, folks. :)

The Pres also said no government money was spent on the private improvements on his home and taking a shower is good way to end the day. Imbecile!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 5/7/2016 at 8:32 AM, Mart-Mari said:

The Prez says: No more load shedding for South Africa. My reason for going solar has just disappeared, folks. :)

YES, I can now remove all this solar thing, there is no word for that in Pedi either.

I now have SO much more confidence since he visited Eskom in person to see for himself (the guided Pressi tour) and on what he has seen, he told them that HE is now going to tell SA there is no more load shedding. 

Dankie my Pressi! You are the MAN!

 

SERIOUSLY!!! :P

When I read the article I though am I that child that he must go and check under the bed and in the cupboard to then come and tell me there are no monsters there?

SA with no more load shedding is in the same category as the ANC ruling until Jesus returns. Political posturing.

One of the reasons there are no more power failures is because so many businesses, mines, smelters and large manufacturers have had to close or scale down. 

Does anyone know what is going on at Me-Dupe-U? And at Kusile?

Koeberg is end of life so they are now only starting to look for suppliers to refuel it as Eskom apparently does not know who can do it locally. Where are the nuclear power generation engineers I wonder? All retired? Are there any new experienced ones ready to roll?

 

Stoppit TTT, the Pressi said no more load shedding.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My gas hob, old solar geyser, A++ fridges and energy saving bulbs help a lot. Weirdly enough, my smart meter payments are so far the same before and after my solar journey. (Can't understand this though, still figuring it out).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Mart-Mari said:

My gas hob, old solar geyser, A++ fridges and energy saving bulbs help a lot. Weirdly enough, my smart meter payments are so far the same before and after my solar journey. (Can't understand this though, still figuring it out).

Same here, till I used a Efergy meter to see what is potting.

I found the viper loads one by one. What amazed me was that on average, the house will draw +-300w 24/7/365 AFTER I 'cleaned' up due to stuff we want on for convenience.

So I said: Maybe switch the DB off when we go to bed?
SWAMBO said: Maybe switch husbands when I go to bed?

So I am still working the problem.

Point is, it is not the high loads for a few minutes, hour a day, it is the 24/7 loads causing the high load.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

17 minutes ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

Same here, till I used a Efergy meter to see what is potting.

I found the viper loads one by one. What amazed me was that on average, the house will draw +-300w 24/7/365 AFTER I 'cleaned' up due to stuff we want on for convenience.

So I said: Maybe switch the DB off when we go to bed?
SWAMBO said: Maybe switch husbands when I go to bed?

So I am still working the problem.

Point is, it is not the high loads for a few minutes, hour a day, it is the 24/7 loads causing the high load.

300W aint much. My neighbor uses about 2Kw/hr at night. And that's with LED lights, efficient fridges, etc, etc. Alarms, electric fencing, etc all add up. Our house runs between 120KW and 3Kw/hour at night, depending on when the freezer pump kicks in. I should actually fix the leak at the back at some stage, perhaps it will use less power. All our lights are LED and we leave the TV, microwave, router, etc all on standby purely cause it doesn't make that big a difference. But ultimately if one could get past these problems it would help. At some stage I had a timer on the fridge that switched off at 5PM and on again at 7am, but the food defrosted too much during that period so now I'd rather pay for the batteries than the food. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Jip, also tried the timer on the freezer, same problem as you. Have to replace it with a A++ version but after checking what it cost per month, I though naaa, not a priority yet.

The 7.2kWh that our house uses per day is what bothers me. It reduces when 2 members go on extended holidays because then the house draws 60w per hour when solar takes over, in winter. 

So I think I need to start inconveniencing the family again and find out what where and why, after the 2 members go on holiday tomorrow. Eish, it is going to be a shouting match again.;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

So I said: Maybe switch the DB off when we go to bed?

Similar boat there. The OWL meter says we're using a 700w - 1000w at night. I know the power factor on that is rather atrocious, so it's likely not that bad, but it's still too much. I want to go all Al Capone on it: I want it dead, I want it's family dead, I want to burn... uuhhh, not that last part.

I'm now thinking of getting motion-sensors on the security lights, for two reasons: More power savings, and so the damn things will last more than a year. They do pay for themselves in under a year (compared to the big old halogens) and they last longer than CFL spotlights, but LED lights really should last longer. I have now lost 4 of the 6 Afrison floodlights I bought in 2013. I repaired one (replaced the LED chip) only to have the driver fail within a day. With the downlights inside the house it's going a bit better, though the Uniontech lights turned out to be the worst of the lot. I expected them to be better. Overall, anything I bought that has the Ellies name on it seems to outlast everything else... I was not expecting that.

So getting back to switching off the DB. One night we ran out of electricity because I forgot to buy some. I jumped on the internet, and found that myprepaid was dead. Easypay was dead. Ibuy was dead. I drove down to the Pick and Pay Express, and they told me I have to pay cash for electricity, so I went down to the ATM (at 1AM), then came back... only to discover PnP was down too.

I had 1kwh on the meter.

So I turned off almost everything, and put the fridge/freezer on the inverter, sacrificing a bit of battery, then calculated that we'd run out by 6AM. At 4AM one of the kids woke us up, and the electricity providers were back up. We made it. We got through the night on less than 2kwh.

But... and this is the kicker: When I did my daily reading at 6pm, did I see a reduction for the 24 hour period? No. I did not. This rather makes me suspect that the geyser is working harder than it should...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

27 minutes ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

also tried the timer on the freezer,

The Defy A-rated model I have can go almost 32 hours before things get serious, it should easily make it through the night. I don't see much point though, it uses 1kwh a day, so at night it likely uses less than 0.5.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, plonkster said:

The Defy A-rated model I have can go almost 32 hours before things get serious, it should easily make it through the night. I don't see much point though, it uses 1kwh a day, so at night it likely uses less than 0.5.

Also replaced mine with one of these. They seem to have a thicker lid (insulation) to achieve this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 minutes ago, plonkster said:

I have now lost 4 of the 6 Afrison floodlights I bought in 2013. I repaired one (replaced the LED chip) only to have the driver fail within a day. With the downlights inside the house it's going a bit better, though the Uniontech lights turned out to be the worst of the lot. I expected them to be better. Overall, anything I bought that has the Ellies name on it seems to outlast everything else...

I have been told, a long time ago, LED's do last the claimed 50 000 hours ... in the lab.

We have 2 problems:
1 - Cheap LED's.
2 - Eskom power.

Eskom does not give us 100% constant of 220v @ 50hz. Apparently this causes LED's to fail prematurely.

I have the same outside lights as you Plonkster, got them for R80 a piece on a special. Been running now for +-3 years, with motion sensors and some without.

While back I checked out a UPS's stats on Eskom power, and it is quite constant where we live. Maybe you have more power fluctuations? Would be interesting to know IF that could be a contributing factor, proving what they say about power fluctuations and the life of LED's?

Also to mention, LED in the house, there was a batch that tended to fail within months. 2nd and 3rd batches have no more problems.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

Eskom does not give us 100% constant of 220v @ 50hz. Apparently this causes LED's to fail prematurely.

The SMPS in those units have a very wide voltage band, usually 90V to over 250V. Eskom would have to get things pretty wrong before that would become an excuse.

I think what I'm going to do is get a bunch of replacement 10W chips (really 9W, it's a matrix of 3 x 3 1W leds), and power them directly from the batteries using a 12W buck converter. What I'm going to do is drop the voltage just slightly so they are a little less stressed. I really don't need 10W, 7-8W will do. It's just so you can see what's going on in the yard at night... :-)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, plonkster said:

The SMPS in those units have a very wide voltage band, usually 90V to over 250V. Eskom would have to get things pretty wrong before that would become an excuse.

This reminds me of that camping light here on the forum, that is SUPPOSED to charge the batteries right, but does not.

If that is definitely not the case, then you got a bad batch maybe?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm using various different brands of LED downlights at home and (touch wood) never had a failure. They include Uniontech, no-name lamps from Rabtron (with really nice lens diffusers fitted), no-name lamps bought via BidorBuy and a few from electroniclights.co.za (some of the first ones bought at ridiculously high prices :( )

I've seen many partly failed LED downlights in shopping centres - they are not dead, they flicker and that is not the LED chips that has failed but rather the SMPS in the lamp. I think in most cases the actual LEDs chips are not the weak links in the chain, but rather the power supply built into the lamp.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, superdiy said:

I've seen many partly failed LED downlights in shopping centres - they are not dead, they flicker and that is not the LED chips that has failed but rather the SMPS in the lamp. I think in most cases the actual LEDs chips are not the weak links in the chain, but rather the power supply built into the lamp.

In my experience, when the downlight starts to flicker, it's a connection issue. I have that in a few places in my house, the contacts are a bit carboned up from the days when they used to have halogens connected and just wiggling it a bit solves the problem. I had this one light that I had to wiggle on a daily basis... so I replaced the connector. It still flickered and went dim, so I used the soldering iron and tinned both legs of the MR16 connector before sticking the connector back on. That was the end of it.

Except for the one outdoor unit, I haven't had a single SMPS failure yet. The LEDs fail. It has three LEDS in series. One fails and the light is dead. Once I had two dead Uniontech lamps, I repaired one by transplanting a LED from the other. Works just fine. When you disassemble them, you find that proper construction went into it, it even has some heat transfer grease in there, LEDs sit against a metalic plate of sorts to transfer the heat away, the entire construction is such that it's pressed against the aluminium body... I really cannot fault either the construction or the SMPS (which is a decent little buck converter). It must be the quality of the LEDs.

Then again, 2 LEDs out of 45 (if I multiply lamps by 3)... that's like 4%. Not brilliant, but not bad either.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

29 minutes ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

that is SUPPOSED to charge the batteries right

My guess would be that this statement is false :-) It was never "supposed" to do things right. What it was supposed to do is be cheap and outlast the warranty... :-)

Edit: Then again, the same might be said of almost anything we buy nowadays, including my LED lamps. Once again though, disassemble them and you see that on the better lamps, some thought went into it, but they still fail. On that camping light... the only thought that went into that was "what's the simplest thing that will work for a while...".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The A++ Bosch refrigerators and fridge-freezers are the most energy efficient fridges and they cool especially efficiently. Fruits, vegetables and other food stay fresh thanks to humidity control. I don't throw anything away anymore. They have retractable glass shelves for convenient loading and perfect view. They also have LED lights that illuminate the refrigerators evenly. These were my best buy ever.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, plonkster said:

In my experience, when the downlight starts to flicker, it's a connection issue.

Maybe I've used the incorrect word (flikker in Afrikaans is seker eerder "blink" in Engels). The flickering I referred to is rather blinking - the lamp gives a flash either at random times or at a constant rate - it is not a bad-connection type flicker. Sometimes you will see similar blinking / flashing on failing fluorescent tubes and even CFLs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The reason the LED's flikker is normally related to 12V downlighters.

The flikker is due to the power supply not regestering the LED correctly.

Best is to remove the electronic power supplies and replace with old school "magnetic" units.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The power supplies is normally rated 20W to 70W. Now you put a 5W LED on there and the power draw is too low.

Adding more LED's to a single PSU can work, but then the voltage can drop too low with some units.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, Mart-Mari said:

The A++ Bosch refrigerators and fridge-freezers are the most energy efficient fridges and they cool especially efficiently. Fruits, vegetables and other food stay fresh thanks to humidity control. I don't throw anything away anymore. They have retractable glass shelves for convenient loading and perfect view. They also have LED lights that illuminate the refrigerators evenly. These were my best buy ever.

Agreed. After I bought ours, I realised the same thing. You save money on electricity. Then you save more money because you buy in bulk, you have more space. Then you save even more money because the food lasts longer. I found that the German review which said that "ich habe wirklich das Gefühl Gemüse hält länger". That was no lie. Now we actually buy the more expensive stuff from woolworths, because it actually works out cheaper in the long run.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...