Hi Vassen here. Some may know me from the “other forum”.
Seems like people didn’t like me questioning the unverifiable rubbish that was being fed through about some new batteries in the market and also misinformation spread about other well known battery brands. So my account with all my posts disappeared.
I was reading the victron vs sunsynk post on this forum and I really like that people can still have a decent discussion about 2 competing brands stating verifiable facts without any hidden agendas.
I’m about a year into my solar journey, starting off with a single 5kw sunsynk, then adding a 1200w hoymiles microinverter. Then removing the hoymiles and adding a second 5kw sunsynk. In total have about 11.5 kw of panels facing north, east, west. It’s a lot but my house only has 1 west facing roof. Other sections are either flat or south facing. So I’ve had to improvise and make some north and east facing brackets. Secondly, my neighbors, east, west and north seem to love big trees and my panels unfortunately don’t. In terms of storage I have 4x pylontech us3000c and looking to add another 2 in the next few weeks as soon as stock is available again.
Welcome! I actually still visit the “other forum” every now and then (when I am looking for something to read and I’ve finished all the threads here), but it has been getting less and less. The interesting topics really seems to be here.
I did in fact stumble across that battery thread you mention. Proper discussion seems to be impossible. The flat out aggression towards the points you raised made it obvious that those in control have their own interests.
I really hope that you find this forum to only be about sharing knowledge as objectively as possible, I certainly have.
Actually that is so true. The quality of discussions there has deteriorated so much recently. It’s all about what you want to promote. Which is also fine if they had made it known.
What really got to me was that people say… this is the best because I say so and the other brand is bad because I say so.
As I have said there as well, I just wanted to help people based on what I have learnt through my journey. I’m hoping to do the same here as well. I wasn’t there and I’m not here to promote any product, business or myself. Constructive engagement and learning is what I’m looking for.
Yeah, I think I really got on some people’s nerves on that side with my questions. I still stand by my comments / questions though as I was quoting manufacturer documents, not my own opinions. But still I got accused of making up stuff. I do think I was spending far too much time there though.
My old buddy @Tariqe told me today that @RyanG also got banned and he was only there a few weeks and only shared his personal experience with his purchase. So stopping people from commenting about their own bad experience is really sad.
Happened to me as well (I’m not an installer, reseller or anything, only someone with a system of my own and passionate about the product that I decided on). That was just before this forum got started (so quite a while ago).
They banned me for no real reason (I recommended Jaco as a great installer to use - at that point he was still one of the commercial members there so yeah). Unbanned me again after I emailed them (and I believe others spoke to them as well). But I haven’t posted since the whole incident as obviously my views weren’t welcome anymore.
Sorry you had to have a similar experience. It is frustrating investing time and effort into a community that devolved into being a front for a business.
Anyway. Time to move forward and not dwell in the past.
My only concern is that new members that know nothing about this whole topic who join just looking for information as they want to get started in some sort of backup / solar system get fed biased information to suite people pockets without actually understanding people’s needs.
Not to worry at all. People do their homework and the chances of them stumbling apon this kind of feedback on other forums are great. They might silence people on their side, but they can’t silence the world wide web…
Seems to be the trend all over the Internet. A few years a go I read an article about Ggle getting to big . The writer’s concern was that . if they are used for every thing we search they will control what we get to see as well.
If you have a look at Youtube the amount of videos that gets deleted because Youtube has decided that it does not fall within it’s parameters or views , it seems to have become true ,
There is one legal thing one has to keep in mind: And that is that by law the forum moderators can be held liable for defamatory content. This may indeed cause moderators to be overly sensitive about even legitimate reports of bad experiences.
But with that said, from what I heard this is not what is happening in the old country. What is happening there, is that the forum was repurposed into being a vehicle to drive sales to their own shop. That is their right and I wish them the best with it. I personally decided I can no longer be a member of the unpaid support team if it ends up selling products for a competitor. Among other reasons of course
I would have been perfectly fine with this if it was equally applied at all times. However, the reality is that misinformation was freely shared by certain users to make certain brands look bad and dissuade people from buying them while at the same time unverifiable information was shared about certain very new brands in order to promote them. There were even posts by the some individuals showing tear down photos depicting a really bad build quality of well known brand and a few weeks later another user showed a tear down of his personal lightning damaged product showing an excellent quality. The difference between the first and second was like day and night.
After the first poor quality build photos and the nonsense that was shared, many new users decided to go with the new brand and even some users of the old brand questioned their investments.
So this proves the second part of your comment that Information is shared to boost sales.
As Jaco mentioned, people should make educated decisions and not base information of 1 site.
I would definitely like to know what brands were discussed. Of course there would be no issue with divulging such information, since that is just retelling a factual event
In Afrikaans we say “I have a dead brother on this”, goodness know where we got that expression, that is to say this is a matter that gets on my nerves: When people delete the poor reviews and boost the good ones.
This is especially prevalent on Facebook, where Solar PV installers will curate their pages so all the criticism is neatly hidden. A very well known solar water heater installer (who branched into PV) blocked me once for asking questions about an Axpert they installed in Cape Town for example (in that time when the legality was hotly debated).
In any case. Yes. Batteries. Very big mistake if you buy a cheap one and it breaks on you. What were they recommending over what? I am exceedingly curious
The thread effectively focussed on discrediting Pylontech because of changes to warranties, not being a 1C product, things like that while boosting Hubble. Trying to make it seem like Pylontech will not honour warranties because of a number of fine prints in their documentation.
I don’t really understand these things. Surely the cells in Pylontech and Hubble can’t be that different - One BMS allowing a battery to work harder compared to another one isn’t necessarily a “plus”.
Aaah ok, I had a gander at the thread on the other side.
Out of the three listed initially, the Hubble is the one I’d rate third. That is not to say it is a bad battery, but I have a lot of experience with Pylontech, and also a bit of very positive experience with BSL. Honestly, from a technical standpoint, BSL has one of the best BMSes I’ve dealt with, the only thing I don’t have data on (which for Pylontech we do, thanks to the Ausie battery tests) is how they will hold up.
There are people who sell a Hubble with a Victron inverter, and then they program good voltages on the inverter because the battery cannot communicate with the rest of the stack. Which is fine on a technical level (with some caveats)… but many manufacturers won’t honour a warranty unless you have that comms cable…
I remember years ago, when I was a young Linux-convert who took every opportunity to bash Microsoft Windows, that someone told me I was going about it wrong. You don’t pick the OS first. You pick the best application first. Then you pick the OS that the application works best on. The OS is secondary. The application (which does the job) is primary.
I think some of that spills over to this debate. You don’t pick the battery in isolation. It needs to fit the rest of the stack.
Besides, that 1C argument is rubbish. Load shedding is 2 hours at least. Nobody specs a battery in a solar system for 1C.
Edit: Where 1C comes into the debate is when you are comparing batteries. You cannot directly compare two batteries if one is tested at 1C and the other is tested at C/10 (which at least one manufacturer actually does!). And you cannot directly compare the expected cycle life if one tests to 100% DoD at 1C and the other tests to 80% DoD at C/2. That is true. But once you KNOW the parameters… you can usually make a pretty good estimation as to where they will land. A battery that does 2000 cycles at 100% DoD and 1C discharge rates… will usually do over 7000 if you treat it properly, which is where EVERYONE else specs theirs too…
I agree that it cannot be a one size fits all. Each person and situation will call for a different implementation.
C rating was used as an argument to favor Hubble but when you do a comparison based on the 1C, which the data sheet says gives 3000 cycles, the new argument becomes but that’s at 1C and at 0.5C, it’s a lot more than 10000 cycles. When I ask where does 10k come from, I get given a spec sheet for a totally different battery.
Personally I have enough batteries to not care about C ratings and the pylons work well in my situation. From a price perspective, for me pylons worked out better.
When doing a comparison of the warranty, from reading both the warranty documents both appear to have strengths and weaknesses. Conveniently people only speak about pylontech weaknesses and not the Hubble. The biggest part for me was that Hubble warranty on the BMS is only 2 years. They are a 1 year old company that already have some deprecated products so my concern was what happens after 2 years should the current product be deprecated.
I never stated that it was a bad battery. It’s just one that needs to prove itself in a market and the proof in my opinion can only come with time as more people use it and they have the opportunity to resolve issues.
Maybe we can start a separate thread on battery comparisons focusing on pylontech, bsl, freedom won, Hubble and other currently popular brands and look at the data sheets / warranty clauses. Price is very subjective as they change pretty rapidly. I bought my last 2 batteries at 16100 retail 3 weeks ago and now they are just over a R1000 more thanks to loadshedding.
Isn’t both LiFePO4? I understand that the cells can be manufactured better or worse, but don’t Hubble and Pylontech just assemble the batteries from cells purchased in bulk (i.e. not manufacture their own cells) and slap their BMS on it?
No. Pylons are LiFePO4 which they actually manufacture themselves from raw materials. I watched a video once about their manufacturing process. They also design their own BMS. So it seems like they manufacture the battery end to end. Not sure if it’s still true but it was a year ago.
Hubble, from what I’ve read are using BYD LiNMC Nickel Manganese Cobalt cells and they then slap a unknown BMS on.
Nope. They do not. While the chemistry is the same, the cells in a pylontech battery are very different. The differences do go deeper than just the BMS.
If that is true… the entire comparison falls flat. You can’t compare those two.
