a way to solar

Timing was perfect, had rain this morning round 8am so the roof was a no go. Dried up just before they arrived. Now this wind is picking up just as they are finishing the cabling on the roof.
 
Those with a LuxPower inverter and HomeAssistant can have a look at a free integration, no need for Solar Assistant. Send Guy an email (it is and he'll give you access to his GitHub repo. It is mentioned in post 56 of the thread.
I've used lxp-bridge before I got access to his repo, but found it a bit "wonky". All seems stable now

EDIT: it is in post 56
 
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gotaway said:
Those with a LuxPower inverter and HomeAssistant can have a look at a free integration, no need for Solar Assistant. Send Guy an email (it is and he'll give you access to his GitHub repo. It is mentioned in post 56 of the thread.
I've used lxp-bridge before I got access to his repo, but found it a bit "wonky". All seems stable now
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Might look into that - now that I have two LuxPower inverters to look after.

Same guy that did all my solar work before - pretty happy with his work still considering he drove 200km to get here and is now heading back.
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All done. That space above the battery is where I want to add another in future, so no trunking needed now. Interestingly I see they wired the two sets of 3 panels each on their own MPPT. Will see how this works tomorrow. The inverter has an option to combine the two as one.
 
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I'm guessing PV1 is the chimney one and PV2 is the tree one. Will see what these Longi 550W panels do a bit later in the day. Dang I wish I had the dough to get a Big Bertha here too.
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Latest mobile app update (iOS) now shows state of charge on the graphs
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Electricity stats for the past week (2-8 Oct). These stats might be a best case type of scenario as sunshine was plenty. According to Home-assistant self-sufficiency for this week was 83% :D
I'm quite happy with my decision to bite the bullet an install the max panels the inverter can take, and with the performance of the system.

For this week, grid usage worked out to R101.76. If all usage was from grid, it would have cost R591.92. A cool saving of R490.16 fpr the week.

Only time I had the inverter in "hybrid" mode was Sunday morning early when the gardener was mowing the lawn. I did a manual flick of a switch for that.The rest of the time it runs in off-grid mode.

Currently the inverter is set to charge from grid at night (21:00 to 04:30), but only if the SOC reaches 30%. It will only take it up to 45%. This happens a few times over night, hence me eyeing another battery.
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I'll have to add a wifi repeater in the garage, lost ther inverter around 4pm yesterday and it only came back after I rebooted the router. I'll leave that hanging until our fibre that side is installed.

Yesterday was cloudy and I saw the inverter juggles between full power (1500W) per MPPT string. This could be due to the clouds causing the panel to fall below 120V, the minimum for the Luwpower. Combining the strings in the settings did not make a difference. There were a few burst of sun where it produces 3000W so that means all panels were go. I'll keep an eye on things though, looks like we made it through the night without dropping below 50% - but it is a very tiny load, fridge, deepfreeze, router and my HP t640 - so it goes from 65W up to 350W in a repeating pattern. That in itself is good since it means the house does not use eksdom power when no one is there.

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Rouxenator said:
I'll have to add a wifi repeater in the garage, lost ther inverter around 4pm yesterday and it only came back after I rebooted the router. I'll leave that hanging until our fibre that side is installed.

Yesterday was cloudy and I saw the inverter juggles between full power (1500W) per MPPT string. This could be due to the clouds causing the panel to fall below 120V, the minimum for the Luwpower. Combining the strings in the settings did not make a difference. There were a few burst of sun where it produces 3000W so that means all panels were go. I'll keep an eye on things though, looks like we made it through the night without dropping below 50% - but it is a very tiny load, fridge, deepfreeze, router and my HP t640 - so it goes from 65W up to 350W in a repeating pattern. That in itself is good since it means the house does not use eksdom power when no one is there.

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I find their cloud infrastructure a bit unstable. If it loses connection again, just unplug and replug the dongle.

With the integration (which does not rely on the LuxPower cloud servers) I posted about above, there is an automation to restore the local connection to the dongle.

Yesterday afternoon the dongle stopped updating the cloud and the app. After I un/replugged the dongle the cloud started updating again.

No cloud history since the issue started, but everything is on Home Assistant. Which to me indicates a problem on the cloud side, not the dongle
 
That is one thing that is pushing me to move away from the OEM cloud solution. Unfortunately, I cannot just unplug the dongle with it now being 200km away, but I do remote into my computer that side daily, so it is easy to reboot the router. The dongle usually reconnects within a minute or so. Another thing that will no dount cause issues is the internet connection, right now it is still MTN fixed LTE and when it is load shedding you can forget about internet. Hoping the fibre folks over at Trusc comes to sort us out soon.
 
New eskom free record for me - 1 week.

Sun was not enough today to get the solar geyser above 40 degrees so I had to power it up. Battery is 47% and I just had to start the dishwasher, might make it to the morning but I suspect then it will reach the 30% EOD on grid so tomorrow it's eskom juice for me.
 
Dropped the suncrap connect stuff, bought solar-assist, way better for me :)

Just need to get it reading all the battery data correctly , it’s currently using inverter values

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ijacobs3 said:
Dropped the suncrap connect stuff, bought solar-assist, way better for me :)

Just need to get it reading all the battery data correctly , it’s currently using inverter values

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Did you get the battery cables as well?
 
ijacobs3 said:
Dropped the suncrap connect stuff, bought solar-assist, way better for me :)

Just need to get it reading all the battery data correctly , it’s currently using inverter values

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I might be wrong, but something looks weird in that graph. Did they install your CT coil the correct way around?
 
DawieZA said:
I might be wrong, but something looks weird in that graph. Did they install your CT coil the correct way around?
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will have to check on that, the grid / non essential was used yesterday with the oven, but thats the only thing on "grid"
 
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