April 27, 20197 yr Anyone with experience with the Solar MD lithium battery products e.g. SS4037 3.7kWh ? Pro's and con's of using them? compared to e.g. Pylontech?
April 27, 20197 yr 1 hour ago, Radar said: Anyone with experience with the Solar MD lithium battery products e.g. SS4037 3.7kWh ? Pro's and con's of using them? compared to e.g. Pylontech? I've met Kaloyan (the big guy in SolarMD) and they are a bunch of really clever guys with a good product. They also now support Victron inverters. So on balance I think they are easily as good as the other local makers (BlueNova, FreedomWon). I can't say how they compare to Pylontech though, all these batteries seem pretty much on the same level to me at the moment. Pylontech wins based on cost most of the time.
May 26, 20197 yr On 2019/04/27 at 9:09 AM, Radar said: Anyone with experience with the Solar MD lithium battery products e.g. SS4037 3.7kWh ? Pro's and con's of using them? compared to e.g. Pylontech? I have received and installed my Solar MD lithium 7.4 kwh as well as their logger , I am very happy with the quality of the product so far . I have also had great support from Solar MD when I had had any questions .
June 12, 20197 yr Author Thanks for the response. I've recently been doing some desktop research and find it quite frustrating that pricing for LiON products seems quite hard to nail down e.g. SolarMD has no prices on their site, and retailers of their products all say they will provide pricing on request. Any idea what the 3.7kwh version would cost incl. VAT ?
June 12, 20197 yr 34 minutes ago, Radar said: retailers of their products all say they will provide pricing on request Translation: We don't sell to no damn introverts! Pricing is generally around R7500 per kwh storage. across all the makes, give or take a few thousand.
June 12, 20197 yr 19 minutes ago, plonkster said: Pricing is generally around R7500 per kwh I often wonder why the price for solar batteries is still so high. Bloomberg reported that the average pack price for automotive batteries in 2018 was USD176 per kWh (+-R2600 per kWh). Even considering profit and shipping the difference seems to be to high. Or are the LiFePO4 batteries maybe more expensive to produce?
June 12, 20197 yr Plonkster is pretty close - the retail price for Solar MD 3.7kWh battery (complete - no extra cables, enclosures etc needed) is R28,800 excl VAT. Add R3,500 for the logger if monitoring is required. Battery is compatible with any 48v battery charger/inverter and logger can be used with an increasing number of inverters - Axpert, SMA, MLT, Victron, Microcare, Studer, Sungrow, and Imeon. Most retailers sell systems and then the pricing gets a bit more fluid depending on total system sizing. The package is impressive and very installer friendly + the guys are constantly tweaking and improving software in logger and BMS + making logger compatible with more inverters.
June 12, 20197 yr 1 minute ago, Fuenkli said: LiFePO4 batteries maybe more expensive to produce? Shouldn't be. It needs no Cobalt. Cobalt makes it more expensive. I'm also unsure to what extent we can blame our exchange rate. That just seems to be slipping all the time. I mean it's slipped by a good 50% since 2012 and it's grossly undervalued... A bit OT, but here is an interesting thought I had. Fuel in Europe is 1.60 EUR. Fuel our side is R16, or roughly 1EUR give or take. So is our fuel cheaper? Well no, cause the ZAR is undervalued and should be around R8-R10. That puts our price somewhere between R12.80 and R16... which makes us sort-of on par with Europe in price. Scary thought.
June 12, 20197 yr 1 hour ago, plonkster said: it's grossly undervalued... I agree and so does Davie Roodt, a few weeks ago he mentioned that fair value for the rand is somewhere between R8-R10 (Like you also said). But as we all know, markets are forward looking, so people have priced in : Low growth and political uncertainty. How much they have priced in is actually the real question, something like Eskom defaulting would trigger a 250B unfunded liability in the form of government guarantees. That's more or less 22% of the total income SARS collected last year... And then we are not even touching the whole EWC and reserve bank mandate issue.
June 12, 20197 yr 1 hour ago, PeterP said: Plonkster is pretty close - the retail price for Solar MD 3.7kWh battery (complete - no extra cables, enclosures etc needed) is R28,800 excl VAT. Add R3,500 for the logger if monitoring is required. That is pretty darn expensive, after VAT incl the logger its R36 620 R36 620 / 3.7 = R9897 per kWh
June 12, 20197 yr 1 hour ago, PJJ said: That is pretty darn expensive, after VAT incl the logger its R36 620 R36 620 / 3.7 = R9897 per kWh Was thinking the same.
June 12, 20197 yr Don't see any mention of considering company size/age? I personally would look at the likelihood of long term after sales support and ability to service their warranty, which in most cases significantly exceeds the age of the business itself. Food for thought! Lots of potential pitfalls for small companies, as good as their intentions may be.
June 13, 20197 yr I have paid for my 22kWh Solar MD cabinet setup give or take R150k (VAT incl.) and with the LoggerV2 included. This was done directly with one of the installers who has been dealing with Solar MD for couple of years now and the setup has been working well now for over 5 months. So it was about 6k/kWh ( consider that the installer probably adds 15-20% margin).
June 13, 20197 yr 2 hours ago, Mstott said: I paid R53k for the 7.4kwh with logger . seems your cell phone battery needs charge - 11% compared to the 100% Solar MD
August 29, 20196 yr On 2019/06/13 at 7:36 AM, Shawn_Mueller said: I have paid for my 22kWh Solar MD cabinet setup give or take R150k (VAT incl.) and with the LoggerV2 included. ...just for interest - how much energy do you discharge from it daily?
August 30, 20196 yr 21 hours ago, Ironman said: ...just for interest - how much energy do you discharge from it daily? On my 7.4kWh I discharge it to 10% daily so around 6.5kwh used to power my home from 10PM untill morning.
October 21, 20196 yr I discharge about 60% in the summer. This is sufficient to go through the night. In the winter months mostly over 20 kWh.
November 14, 20196 yr On 2019/05/26 at 5:29 PM, Mstott said: I have received and installed my Solar MD lithium 7.4 kwh as well as their logger , I am very happy with the quality of the product so far . I have also had great support from Solar MD when I had had any questions . Are you able to show a screenshot of the battery display on the Portal ?
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