Hi to all. Jürgen from a small coastal village on the West Coast of the Western Cape, StHelena Bay. In the last 2 years, I have gone completely off-grid on my water supply, maybe to the extreme? LOL. 

Next is the electricity supply? Stumbled onto some CANADIAN SOLAR Polycystaline 335w panels a few weeks ago. Next is to do a detailed data logging of the current electrical consumption(750kwh/month ave). Acquired an EFERGY unit I will be installing this weekend.

My plan is to design the system to built in 2 phases. Phase 1 will be a 5kva HYBRID Inverter with battery back-up, and phase 2 will basically add an addition 5kva. I need the inverter to supply PV/BATTERY first, and fill in any shortfall with UTILITY GRID power.

Any advice will be appreciated.

 

Thanks.

 

 

Awesome Jurgen! I cant give any advice because I'm so new at this, but one  of the best things i discovered was the ability to measure what each device appliance is using (by use of an efergy / kill-a-watt / sonoff etc). I've been able to cut back on so much of my usage/wastage and really get my batteries to last longer through the night.

Thanks Jason. I know that monitoring equipment is frightfully expensive, because I own about half a bars worth of compressed air auditing kit. The price of the efergy stuff was rediculously cheap by comparison. I run 3 pumps to produce my household water: a 750w centrifugal wellpoint pump, a 600w rotary vane HP pump and worst of all, a 1,55kw booster pump to drive the pressure for the house. At the least the booster pump has a VSD, which will even out the surges. The 3 pumps add up to 3kw alone. But at least they dont run all day.

My plan is to log the house load over 8-days, and see what that looks like, before I purchase an inverter.