It has been life changing. Yesterday and today we’ve had power outages here, not even to speak about the loadshedding and I can just continue life as normal.
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Im glad youre enjoying it. It is an utter game changer, and give you back a big part of your life and sanity.
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I do have one problem and it’s that my geyser is not connected to the solar. So now after a 24 hour stint of no power, I can’t take a shower.
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Can’t or won’t? 
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Haha won’t. If I had to go somewhere I may brave the cold water.
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Do you have the 8kw inverter and how big is your geyser?
If it is a 8kw inverter and your geyser has a 3kw or smaller element, you can ask them to reconfigure your system to connect your non-essential loads to the Aux port and then configure your aux port as smart load. Then, when the batteries are fully charged, you will export solar power to they geyser even when there is no Eskom and it will automatically turn off once your batteries fall to below 95% SOC (or whatever value you configure it to).
That is the cheapest solution as it would just involve a callout fee. Should take less than an hour to do.
Converting your geyser to a solar geyser would probably be around R20k and converting to a gas geyser installation would probably cost around the same if you take the gas cage, bottles, installation, COC, etc. into account.
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Was that a whole area issue for 24 hours thing? How long did your batteries last?
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Yes and I’m not sure how big the geyser is. However I think this may be the best option to go for.
It was an interesting one. It was rainy and cloudy here so I was worried about the batteries. Plus I had the maid and the gardener here but the batteries never went below 40%.
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Typically the older geysers used to have 3kw (150L) and 5kw (200L) elements, but the newer geysers use 4kw for 200L and is better insulated.
In all cases, you can run the geyser off the aux port but the bigger the element is, the more care you need to take with your total load while the geyser is running. You’ve got a maximum of 8.8kw load, so if you have an old 200L geyser with a 5kw element, then you can’t run the tumble drier in the afternoon for instance. However, you can always replace the element with a smaller one which will just cause the water to take longer to heat up, but then you don’t have load management issues.
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Looking for investors! I want to start a GoSolr competing company in KZN. Not to provide a good service, but just to be disruptive enough that GoSolr buys my company 
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Do it for MP too, and I’ll invest the piece of red wire I have in my garage. I might be able to also find a white one.
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Had a braai with my BIL this weekend. He sells solar installations for businesses. He told me about the mines and farms around Middelburg who’s installed just over 50MW of solar power just around that town. So it makes me wonder how much power has moved away from Eskom the last few months.
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Can’t move away what they don’t have…
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Sounds like fun. But you should plan to provide good service!
Snd bizniz planz plz.
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Yeah now it makes sense as to the rising costs and connection fees they want to force on everyone.
The more people bailing the less income they will have to cover all the free connections.
Sad that guavament thinks that is ok , just charge more for way less and it events out in the end…
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Yeah because they know that almost everyone with solar will still need Eskom as backup. It is almost impossible (or at least, very expensive) to go completely off-grid. I’m about 99% off-grid but it only takes a couple of consecutive days of rain for me to need Eskom to kick in… sometimes just for the geyser and sometimes even to charge the batteries if the clouds are very dense.
Hopefully the rate for feeding power back into the grid is enough to recover the connection fee eventually. When I was planning the system, I was speaking to a guy from I think the Western Cape and he showed me copies of his rates and taxes account where the power he feeds back into the grid essentially refunds his electricity usage and his rates and taxes… And he had a relatively small (but weird) setup.
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So I’ve had my first maintenance issue since the solar inverter system was installed last August. I noticed today that despite clear sunny skies the panels were only producing half of what they usually do (1,6KWH instead of 3,4KWH) checked the inverter and sure enough only PV1 is producing power, nothing but a few Watts coming from PV2. With the heavy clouds and rain over the last few days I attributed the very low generation to the weather.
Contacted gosolr and after waiting for a bit, not too long at least, I spoke to one of the support staff. He had to check a few things and then asked if we were currently being shed which we were, which meant they couldn’t do a factory reset until we had grid power again (how ironic!) Later this afternoon when the grid power was back I awaited their call, which did come despite being a bit later than they had said. The guy apologised straight up about phoning later than planned but advised they were having some kind of issue. He wanted to let me know they are working on it and will call later. So the problem isn’t fixed yet but at least they call back. And I have the assurance that if stuff needs to be fixed or replaced if the reset doesn’t clear the problem, they handle it as part of the rental service. So there are some positives 
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Is gosolr providing Hubble batteries?
I’ve been having some issues with my Hubbles, but I have the first generation which is just over a year old. Two of my batteries are reporting that they’re only 50ah batteries instead of 100ah. I then need to reload the firmware to fix it for a couple of days, but it is now to the point where I have to reload firmware daily for battery 4 and 5. I’ll contact them tomorrow about a warranty claim… was just collecting data until now.
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Ya they are using Hubble batteries, haven’t had that same issue though
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Did they ever get back to you?
Our installation starts today. Mrs Redd tells me the installers arrived an hour earlier than expected, which I’m taking as a good sign. Hoping it all goes smoothly.
They do show Hubble batteries on their site. Will confirm when I’m home.
Those in the know, is the monitoring app you use a dedicated GoSolr tool, or something else?
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