Hi all,

Last week Eksdom took five days before they found time to push back 2 tripped fuses on the transformer at our houses not far from town, after a lightning strike. Such a trip is common in summer and usually were fixed the same day. Fault reports were several times canceled as supposedly fixed! This lackadaisal attitude towards paying customers has now made us decide to move towards going off-grid on this account.

Gas stoves in use, solar geyser kits on site, some inverters and batteries in use. Scrounging what we can on a limited budget. Need more inverters (in the 5kVA range), lithium batteries, solar panel arrays (sun tracking) Learning fast!

Best regards, Abe53. (Yes, that is my year of birth.)

 

Welcome Abe ... at that age, you could not be my father. Still young man. 🙂 

Obviously Axpert would be the preferred choice, new.

Unless you use Gumtree and all that to look for 2nd hand Victron equipment. Sometimes they are there, other times takes maybe a while, but you can get gems at times.

Or maybe someone else has kit here that they want to upgrade.

I'll keep my eyes peeled.

@Abe53 I assume you have an adequate water supply/storage?  Five residences for 5 days is a lot of water.

And I see 5 residences, or rather the people that live in those residences as potentially the hardest part of your problem.

The best place to start is with a list of things you need to have, and then put them in an order of importance.

Then you need to know your budget.

Then look at which things are low-hanging fruit, and which things are absolute must haves etc. It'll clarify way forward and expectations.

But, unless you're "Jock" on South Fork in "Dallas".

That's not going to as easy as it sounds, if it's going to be solved with group contribution money then everything is going to be a committee decision.

That's not always a harmonious situation.

So maybe a consensus of the approach to be taken first, before any detail.

 

Hi Terrible Triplett,

Thank you for your encouragement and advice. Powerforum has been good to this newbie, I picked up Langman's system!

Now, due to the confining trees around our residence and wishing to keep the PV panels out of reach of avaricious re-allocators (previously named thieves, but this is no longer PC) I want to put the panels up on tall poles and swing them with the sun to eventually recover the added construction expense through higher efficiency.

I thus next need two sun-tracking frames for 6 panels each, or one with 12 panels. Single-axis will suffice. (The Canadiansolar 255W panels measure 2000 x 990 x 40mm and weighs 22 kg apiece.) Also need another 6 panels.

Then I need a charge controller for an Eaton 5KVA UPS (+EBM) I picked up cheap from the Broadband forum. (It was used in a no-longer viable Bitcoin mine) Cartage from East London cost almost as much as the purchase price, but I am not complaining. The problem is it runs on 180VDC nominal. (Floats at 208VDC)

Steep learning curve, but learning fast!

Abe53.

P.S: Phil, our water is thankfully sorted, pumped from our boreholes at www.hoogland.co.za and backed up by a 125KVA generator I had installed before I retired.

 

12 hours ago, Abe53 said:

(previously named thieves, but this is no longer PC)

Its called expropriation without compensation