Greetings!

 

Long time lurker now, decided I'd finally register and join the fun.

I've recently had my solar system installed, started off as a loadshedding backup with 4 batteries and an inverter, but the bug bit pretty hard. Added on 4 additional batteries to my 3kVa Synapse inverter along with 6x 300W panels. All super exciting, and really enjoying my setup so far.

Had a small homelab setup for ages with Grafana and have started monitoring the inverter too. I've attached a screenshot of my Grafana dashboard for all things power.

Also been toying with a scheduled task, switching between charger priorities. The Raspberry Pi that's currently monitoring the inverter runs a scheduled task in cron to switch to solar priority/utility priority based on sunrise and sunset.

All pretty cool!

 

I have two potentially silly questions that I can't seem to find the answers for, probably because I'm Googling the wrong terms. Hopefully you guys can answer:

1) If I run my batteries to say 60% capacity and they start charging (I've set the max charge to 30A from what I can remember) does this use any additional power from Eskom?

2) Running on battery power, the first 15 mins or so tend to drop quite quickly and then almost flatline. Is this normal? I'm using around 550W on average when switching to battery.

 

I have read on the forums that the Axperts seem to measure voltage/capacity quite poorly.

Great to be here, see you guys around!

On 2020/03/29 at 12:41 PM, iops said:

2) Running on battery power, the first 15 mins or so tend to drop quite quickly and then almost flatline. Is this normal? I'm using around 550W on average when switching to battery.

This is very normal.  I have noted this with Enertec batteries, and the battery data sheet confirms it, there is a sharp drop initially to approx 24.8V within the first 15 minutes, then a long flat discharge of several hours to 24.0V