My take, it costs a lot to set up and maintain, and at times improve on:
a support infrastructure internationally, or in our case, nationally in SA.
with warranty replacements done with little to no arguments.
The proof of the above only comes to the forefront when one needs to use either or both. Until that time, everything is rosy colored and smells nice.
The next level up from the above 2 points, do that decade after decade.
I don’t care how the insides look, all I want to know is when, not if, when I need help, will I get it, and how fast?
I’ve had my fair share of “issues”. I have reported bugs that were fixed, investigated.
And there are success stories out there around all brands. We all know that.
For me, all the above points, none as consistent as with Victron support/warranty claims.
And when one runs into a dealer that does not adhere to the standards set, move to another dealer.
If you want to always be sure you can be safe against a power station blowing, you will have to charge the batteries off the grid. In which case you are purchasing the safety. I’ll argue that the benefit of safety over just setting your minimum SoC to say 30% (because you need 10% for 2 hours without sun) is marginal. Naturally with 4 hour loadshedding, there’s added uncertainty, but even setting the time of day SoC doesn’t save you against bad weather. I definitely agree that it makes you safer against grid disaster, but I don’t think it saves you money. And take it from someone that implemented HA automations for the sole purpose of safety at the cost of money.
Anything that deviates from using the battery down to 20% of whatever and only charge from PV when PV is available in excess to loads is suboptimal due to Sunsynk charging inefficiencies.
Our goal is ultimately to ditch Eskom… we started with no “favoured brand” in mind and after many months of research, reading this and other forums, asking lots of questions, we chose Victron:
Victron Company history/track record - could not find a blemish
Local Agent on my doorstep - If something goes pear shaped, I know where the Boss lives
Victron’s ease of monitoring, settings and config changes - unless something really bad happens, we are self-reliant from day to day.
Regular Firmware updates - updating firmware for any component on my system is child’s play
I have no opinion on other brands but from what I have read on some of the forums, it further validates our choice.
As an aside, there are so many folks on this and other forums with “blue blood” and they so generously offer their time, knowledge and expertise to help others with issues and questions, for us, it was a “no brainer”
I have had the experience of power going out with loadshedding and expecting it to come back after 4.5 hours, it doesn’t. Instead, it comes back after 10 hours.
If I didn’t have time of use, I would need to keep my batteries at 100% to cater for a whole night outage. With TOU, I know I need 95% at 6pm, 70% by 10:30pm, 50% by 1:30am and 25% by 5am in case i wake up to dark clouds with rain. Everything else I don’t care about. If it’s hot at night, I can use the aircons. If it’s cold, I use the aircons / heaters. I have 13kw of panels and don’t really need to worry about not charging batteries during the day. It’s only with really bad cloud cover that my batteries won’t charge.
When I first installed my system, I was becoming paranoid about not using excess grid power and was frustrating everyone else in my home.
Over the years I have set my SOC “set and forget” to the level of LS and the weather.
The joke made “solar app vs weather app, the weather app is used more”.
If the weather is ok the next day, who cares what the SOC is by the time the panels take over? Know our loads and LS is a non-issue IF the weather is fine.
I shave off max 1kw per hour from 6 pm till the sun takes over the next day, then I heat 2 x 150l and 1 x 50l geysers whilst powering the normal house loads so that by 6 pm the batts are also full again. And sometimes we even cook daytime in summer.
And I still have spare most days in summer … and that is on a 5.2kw array on a 5kva inverter and a ±14kWh bank. I seldom hit 20% SOC in the mornings.
Our Eskom consumption, in summer with good weather, drops to single digits per day.
Just the weather. All I care about.
And when there is bad weather AND high LS levels, I set it for those bad weather days with LS to Keep Charged.
EDIT:
I do control the max the inverter can use from 6 to 6.
And I do up the SOC the entire day for evening/LS use.
So yeah, similar to “TOU”.
Analogies by their very nature are imperfect. I also wasn’t so much comparing an inverter to a car, I was more pointing out that people have preferences, and because I personally value no-nonsense never-leave-me-on-the-side-of-the-road, because of the support available both through the dealer network and aftermarket, and (most importantly) I have a history with the brand going back to my parents, I will buy the Toyota even if the engine makes less power. Which it typically does
I’m sure @JacoDeJongh’s company installs around the Pretoria area. I’d just get that one quote. Jaco helped me so much with my system over the last few years, can’t recommend him enough.
Once you’ve got your system up and running, and figured out your unique needs, I look forward seeing you discussing some Home Assistant/Node Red automations in the future!
The most useful first one would definitely be a dynamic minimum state of charge of the batteries based on the ESP loadshedding forecast, based on the time until the expected slot and the expected duration of the slot. Really an excellent way to as protected as you can practically be while still saving the most money by using the batteries as you would normally. I would argue it is so important in our environment that the installers should start looking at implementing it as part of an installation (at an additional fee of course).
But then I sit and think of all the software support when things don’t work because of circumstances outside the installer’s control, and I wonder about the viability of software support, which this now becomes, is a specialist field all on its own.
Was actually sitting this morning wondering about a “control room” set up with all the sites one is responsible for, up on the screen, making sure they perform as advertised … and getting the firmwares updated too, on arrangement. Was wondering how difficult it can be. Lekker challenge methinks. Just don’t know if the clients will pay an ongoing fee for such a service.
Nah, it would be a handover (unless the client wants to keep on paying hourly rates for future services). The installer doesn’t take responsibility for ESP, or HA. It works on handover, client accepts. The client understand how to restart HA if a sensor bombs out or something. They effectively pay for a kick start with HA/Node-Red (probably better because it can run directly on GX) but take responsibility from that point onwards.
That is where I think the general client should actually go through a mind-shift. As clients, there’re many products we buy and take responsibility for the responsible use and maintenance. As investors, we are also quite accustomed to maintain and research investments. Installing solar is both a product and an investment. We (the royal we) should realise that and take responsibility.
As we head towards more and more off-grid operation, this will become imperative.
Most people have retirement funds (investments) do they look after the investment? No, they trust a financial adviser to do that for a (1% fee which they do not see when looking at the total). If they saw the fee they would demand a lot more effort (as this is easily a couple of grand a year). The day they want to retire they get a great shock as it has not been performing like the graphs they saw in the brochure, heck there is a good chance it does not even beat inflation. Be honest how many times did you check up on your retirement fund in the last 10 years. Are you beating inflation? If you can answer this you are the exception.
I fully agree with the idea of looking after and optimising your solar investment, but people want a turn-key solution. You order a product, install it, and it needs to perform. In the uk people buy an “eddi” it is a solar power diverter. It costs GBP435 or about R9000) It measures the export to grid and switches the load towards the circuit that you specify on an app eg charging the EV or heating water. Then it also measures the power on each of those circuits and gives you a nice graph.
How many people would buy a loadshedding solution that keeps track of the schedules and makes sure there is a minimum amount of battery capacity left when loadshedding hits? and automatically switches off loads during loadshedding eg the pool pump. What would be a fair price for such a system? R5000 or R10 000? Or would you be happy to rent it for R1500 p/m and get some support ?
So I guess my point is that if you are happy to pay for the service, I’m sure installers would consider what a fair price would be and charge it and they’d be happy to keep on servicing it at a rate. I mean, you could appoint one person to just manage the HA stuff for all your clients and his salary is paid from their fees.
If you don’t want to pay a continuous charge, well then you need to take responsibility.
I’m not going to get into asset manager fees, because I’ll probably end up upsetting an entire industry. But even so, you should still take responsibility and hold your AM/Advisor accountable because they definitely won’t hold themselves accountable. If you don’t, well then you didn’t take responsibility and can’t complain.
The UK doesn’t have to deal with LS. Saving money on bills and having a secure supply often require different approaches. Achieving both goals for individual users optimally will never be a generic solution when load-shedding is so changeable and at short notice.
I think people would and that they already do.
The thing is that users require a tailor-made solution for their system.
Ideally, this automation would involve a weather API, a load-shedding API and battery SOC monitoring tailored to an individual load pattern, e.g. tank levels, soil moisture levels etc.). It also must have overrides and be user tweakable from remote connections.
This is why people are turning to Node-Red and home-assistant for unique solutions.
For example, I can include this kind of information and make powerful bespoke automation:
(Yes, it took me a month to get my head around Node-Red, but I am fairly code-illiterate).
LF designs will always cost more per Watt because of the LF transformer, which will be a massive chunk of expensive iron and copper. But it is also this massive chunk of iron which provides the ‘inertia’ to damp load surges and protect driver electronics.
It does not really provide any “inertia” - toroids have very low inductance, unless you partially wind the window. It does however have a relatively high impedance, which is also a big part of why they are less efficient.
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