Hi Guys, well i eventually had my system installed, thank you for the advice received on the forum. I went with the following. Multiplus 2 5kw inverter , Venus GX, 12 x 400W Canadian solar panels, MPPT smartsolar 250/100, 3 x pylontech 3.5kw.

Due to having a prepaid meter i do not feedback into the grid currently, will look at a Bidirectional prepaid meter once Tshwane get their act together.Currently my highest KW production in a single day was 16.65Kwh (As currently my solar panels are only using what i consume as i am not feeding into the grid), so theoretically i am wasting around 10Kwh in solar production so want to push this through to the batteries.

So i plan to use my batteries to reduce Eskom use and utilise the 10Kwh of lost solar production. The plan is too use 30% of battery power  once solar production stops which is 10.5kwr - 30% = 3.15kwh , leaving me with 70% SOC (7.35kwh).  If load shedding occurs i then have battery power from 70% -30% as i will set the lowest state of discharge to 30% which is approximately 4.2kwh of battery power for loadshedding? (If i undestand it correctly)

What are your thoughts on the above in terms of using battery power to supplement Eskom? Is my logic above correct, is the above efficient or should i use 40% to supplement Eskom and keep 30% for loadshedding?

 

Lastly what Victron reports do you guys mainly use, and what are you looking at in the reports? I have looked at the dashboard and advanced on VRM , and login to the MPPT to see History etc however to be honest on a lot of the reports i have no idea what i am actually looking at? For a newbie what reports should i be looking at to ensure my system is running optimally, reports to ensure my batteries are healthy, reports to check consumption etc etc 

 

5 hours ago, SheldonB said:

Victron reports do you guys mainly use

You mean which charts on the Advanced tab? I have one up for each solar array, and one for the total (so I can see that nice bell curve, or if anything is wrong). Then I like "System - Grid", that's power used from the grid, I like that one to be as flat as possible. I also have battery SOC up. "VE.Bus State" so I can see when it went to Float, or if there was an outage. And then a few other less-important things, like AC input voltage, total consumption, and so forth.

Hi PLonkster thanks for the feedback.For a non electrically inclined individual a lot of the graphs etc make very little sense hence my query? Will check those graphs out.