Hi everyone,

Let me introduce myself properly for a change. 🙂 My name is Frank, I immigrated from the Netherlands into SA in 2004 and I wouldn't go back for anything. My professional background is in electronics and IT (I came here as a website developer) but that drove me to drink and I became a brewer and distiller instead. I'm also a pretty good plumber and one heck of a pool boy.

Now I'm semi-retired and we've just bought a house that is a bit of a fixer-upper. As part of the reno we're putting in proper backups for electricity and water.

I'm starting with a Victron Multiplus 24/80/16 that a mate got me for my birthday a few years back and that I've just fitted with a BlueNova 26V 2.8KWh battery. It's currently running the TV, laptops, internet modem, ceiling lights/fans, fridge and backup water pump. The fridge has an inverter and I've measured the maximum power consumption of everything, so we're staying within the 700W/800VA capacity of the inverter.

The next step of the plan is to fit solar panels and a Victron SmartSolar 100V/50A MPPT, plus a Phoenix 1.2kVA/1kW inverter so that the latter can power a bunch of fridges and freezers for which we currently still need the petrol generator during lengthy Eskom breakdowns (and there've been a few).

The alarm is already on solar; the house came with a small 12V panel and attached battery charger (not an MPPT but just a voltage/current stabilizer). Initially I didn't use it but while the house was still standing empty some [censored] switched off the main switch in the Eskom box in the road, let the alarm battery run down and broke in, causing lots of damage but stealing nothing more than a bucket of paint. So I've put the solar charger onto the alarm battery (in parallel with the existing charger) and that works great.

As I understand it, the output of the 24V MPPT (properly set up for LiFePO4 batteries) should be able to do the same, i.e. be put in parallel onto the existing battery. The Mulitplus can be set up to favor charging by the MPPT and to default to island mode, only kicking in as a charger when the battery charge drops to below a certain point.

Meanwhile the biggest challenge before me is to puzzle out the wiring in the house, which is, shall we say, creative. It was initially put in properly but the previous owner made modifications that are a complete hack; stealing a wire here, repurposing one there, so that right now we've wires that seem to nowhere and some switches and outside lights that don't work and we haven't figured out yet why.

What is clear at this point is that the electrical CoC (required to transfer a property) is a bad joke in SA; you pay a few thousand Rand for an accredited sparkie to check you earth leakage switch and to make sure there are stickers on your DB board noting what is for plugs and what is for lights, but meanwhile the rest of the wiring is held together literally with sticky tape (a disaster waiting to happen) but nobody worries about that. Eish.

Initially we planned to install a solar geyser with evacuated tubes, with the existing gas geyser as an automated fall-back (using a thermal valve) but with the current price of PV conversion kits for existing geysers the latter makes much more sense; it works as well and is much easier to install. However, since then we've come to realize that we are using so little hot water (two people only having brief showers and occasionally some hot water in the kitchen) that an even more sensible solution, both logistically and money-wise, is to use only the gas geyser. We'll see how that goes; first we need to get all the plumbing out of the roof before something there springs a leak; in my opinion any geyser is a bursting geyser waiting to happen.

Anyway. Upward and onward!

// FvW

41 minutes ago, frankvw said:

Let me introduce myself properly for a change.

Good day Frank welcome and thanks for the intro.

41 minutes ago, frankvw said:

What is clear at this point is that the electrical CoC (required to transfer a property) is a bad joke in SA; you pay a few thousand Rand for an accredited sparkie to check you earth leakage switch and to make sure there are stickers on your DB board noting what is for plugs and what is for lights, but meanwhile the rest of the wiring is held together literally with sticky tape (a disaster waiting to happen) but nobody worries about that. Eish.

You can contact the electrician who issued the CoC or the property agent and request them to rectify the problems and provide a new CoC at their own cost or if they fail you can report them to the Electrical Conformance Board (ECB) or their professional body(ECASA)for misconduct or negligence.

 

41 minutes ago, frankvw said:

Phoenix 1.2kVA/1kW inverter so that the latter can power a bunch of fridges and freezers for

Sounds like quite a few fridge/freezers just make sure the 1kw Phoenix will be able to cope with the startup currents.

 

Edited March 26, 20242 yr by TaliaB

12 minutes ago, TaliaB said:

Good day Frank welcome and thanks for the intro.

You can contact the electrician who issued the CoC or the property agent and request them to rectify the problems and provide a new CoC at their own cost or if they fail you can report them to the Electrical Conformance Board (ECB) or their professional body(ECASA)for misconduct or negligence.

 

Sounds like quite a few fridge/freezers just make sure the 1kw Phoenix will be able to cope with the startup currents.

 

Hi, Talia! Well, the CoC is always a joke; I've seen four properties now that came with a CoC and in all cases the electrical installation was a shambles. Electricians know it's only a formality. Also, paying a proper sparky his hourly rate to actually climb into the roof, unscrew plugs to see what's in the walls, check the existing wiring against building drawings and what not (which would be required for a proper compliance check) would make it far too expensive for the average house owner. It's one of those many regulations that looks good on paper to a government employee but in pretty much useless in practice. But let's not go there or we'll still be at it by Christmas. 😜

I've got two chest freezers and a fridge that will be running off the Phoenix inverter, as well as a fermenter fridge (for brewing) that has a tweaked thermostat to keep a fermentation vessel at constant temperatures set between 14 and 24 degrees, depending on what's fermenting in there. We're out in the sticks a bit, so we prefer to do the Mother Of All Shopping Runs once a month and not waste petrol. Plus, I'm stocking a lot of brewing and distilling ingredients that have to be kept cool. So from an electricity cost standpoint it makes sense to use solar there.

I'm looking at the 1kW model inverter precisely because I want to allow for start-up currents, and because it leaves some room for future expansion. The freezers and fridge themselves consume less than 500W together if the compressors are all running at the same time (which does happen but not all the time). I also want to keep the discharge current of the battery within reasonable limits, so that's a far as I'll go.

36 minutes ago, frankvw said:

I'm looking at the 1kW model inverter precisely because I want to allow for start-up currents, and because it leaves some room for future expansion. The freezers and fridge themselves consume less than 500W together if the compressors are all running at the same time (which does happen but not all the time). I also want to keep the discharge current of the battery within reasonable limits, so that's a far as I'll go.

Earlier you mentioned a fridge that had inverter technology. If you have amongst these fridges you are backing up any without an inverter then you need to be careful about the startup current. The motor will take a lot of current to start up - momentarily. But momentarily is enough to stress and possibly trip the inverter.

A good tool for measuring these sorts of things is a Kill-A-Watt. You plug it into the socket, and the appliance gets plugged into the kill-a-watt.

This is a very satisfying toy in my life. And I can tell you that a fridge we replaced last year used to draw 1.3kW on start up. It's replacement - with inverter driver for the motor - never drew more than 203.9W

48 minutes ago, Bobster. said:

Earlier you mentioned a fridge that had inverter technology. If you have amongst these fridges you are backing up any without an inverter then you need to be careful about the startup current. The motor will take a lot of current to start up - momentarily. But momentarily is enough to stress and possibly trip the inverter.

A good tool for measuring these sorts of things is a Kill-A-Watt. You plug it into the socket, and the appliance gets plugged into the kill-a-watt.

Yes, the fridge with the inverter is currently running off the Multiplus. I have a Kill-a-watt and it shows that the fridge has never drawn more than 150W, so there's obviously some soft-start feature. One of the freezers, on the other hand, has a Chinese compressor and that does draw a fairly hefty kick of start-up current (albeit quite briefly); hence the 1kW Phoenix inverter being on the plans. That model can (according to the specs) deal with 2400W peak currents, which should handle the freezer start-up peak.