Neuk_'s Home ESS - Round Three

Neuk_

Neuk_

Honorary Master
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Johannesburg, South Africa
We have been in our current house for around three and a half years and did reasonably well with our now 'old' setup except for winters, periods with poor weather where PV capability was reduced or where there were extended mains outages leading us to use our diesel generator. Or initial install was in a cupboard in our office which has been perfectly fine but we were always concerned about safety so eventually pulled the plug on moving the inverter and batteries to our garage which is separate from our house. Things snowballed with talk of getting an EV for my wife, we would need more inverter capacity and PV capacity as I would want to avoid using mains to recharge the EV, and more battery capacity would be beneficial as well. First our old setup...
  • SunSynk 8.8kW Hybrid Inverter
  • Sixteen 545w Longi Mono PV Panels
  • Three PylonTech UP5000 Batteries
So started discussions amongst the family, with our installer, on the internet, etc. and lots of backwards and forwards, deciding on our new setup...
  • Deye 16kW Hybrid Inverter
  • Eight 595w Tier 1 PV Panels
  • Two BSLBatt Neuro 16
  • Sixteen 545w Longi Mono PV Panels (Existing)
It has only been in for a few days but the changes have been huge, largely due to more PV and battery capacity, meaning more PV during the day and allowing us to use some battery overnight, which we never did before.

Winter PV generation before:

1783670968319.png

Winter PV generation now:

1783671033793.png

It is early days and I am still getting an idea of it all, with a few small issues to sort out, so far so good though.
 
Did the old system not get hot inside a cupboard and when are you giving that tree a haircut?
 
Last edited:
wingnut771 said:
Did the old system not get hot inside a cupboard and when are you giving that tree a haircut?
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I would leave one of the cupboard doors open to vent any hot air so we never had any issues with heat. It annoyed my wife when the fans came on, I liked it as it was the sound of not buying electricity from City Power.

Those bloody trees :rolleyes: I love tree's so would want to make a plan but they aren't ours so there is little I can do but ask neighbours to trim them.
 
Neuk_ said:
I would leave one of the cupboard doors open to vent any hot air so we never had any issues with heat. It annoyed my wife when the fans came on, I liked it as it was the sound of not buying electricity from City Power.

Those bloody trees :rolleyes: I love tree's so would want to make a plan but they aren't ours so there is little I can do but ask neighbours to trim them.
Click to expand...
Fair enough, I love trees too. Okay leave them be. How much needs to come off the top? Winter time is a good time so they bounce back in spring I hear.

How come kWp has doubled when only adding 4kWp ontop of 8kwp?
 
wingnut771 said:
Fair enough, I love trees too. Okay leave them be. How much needs to come off the top? Winter time is a good time so they bounce back in spring I hear.

How come kWp has doubled when only adding 4kWp ontop of 8kwp?
Click to expand...

The trees are quite tall so quite a bit could be taken off, the property they are on has just been sold so we'll see what the new owners are like and what their plans are before approaching the topic. It is largely a winter only issue though, summer is not a problem at all.

I am still trying to figure out why PV generation has jumped so much, I certainly didn't expect it to go up so much but glad that it has.
 
Neuk_ said:
The trees are quite tall so quite a bit could be taken off, the property they are on has just been sold so we'll see what the new owners are like and what their plans are before approaching the topic. It is largely a winter only issue though, summer is not a problem at all.

I am still trying to figure out why PV generation has jumped so much, I certainly didn't expect it to go up so much but glad that it has.
Click to expand...
How many kWh did you do yesterday?
 
Neuk_ said:
Yeah, depending on load during the day and how much battery we use overnight. Those two electric geysers not in series suck up electricity...
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Each geyser is probably 8kWh, so 8 + 8 + 30 = 46kWh, so still have 2.5kWh spare :P and the days are only getting longer now.
 
wingnut771 said:
Still dont get the double production power. Were the 2 old arrays touched during new install? New panels on mppt 3?
Click to expand...

I m still trying to figure it out, the old arrays were not touched at all other than having their DC cabling lengthened to reach the new inverter, the new panels are on MPPT 2, old panels on MPPT 1 and 3 respectively. Maybe Deye has better MPPT management than SunSynk? Maybe the larger capacity MPPT's are doing a better job? All I know is I am glad we have them as we have had no mains supply since 07:30 and it is going to take a while to get it back s it is a trip on some 88kV feeds that have taken out a lot of areas.
 
Neuk_ said:
I m still trying to figure it out, the old arrays were not touched at all other than having their DC cabling lengthened to reach the new inverter, the new panels are on MPPT 2, old panels on MPPT 1 and 3 respectively. Maybe Deye has better MPPT management than SunSynk? Maybe the larger capacity MPPT's are doing a better job? All I know is I am glad we have them as we have had no mains supply since 07:30 and it is going to take a while to get it back s it is a trip on some 88kV feeds that have taken out a lot of areas.
Click to expand...
Maybe the charging amps setting were limiting solar before on sunsynk?
 
Neuk_ said:
Might have been, in summer we easily saw the rated kWp on a good day though, not in winter though.
Click to expand...
Okay then it cant be settings, maybe new panels are just much better than old panels. How do the mppts volts and amps look.
 
wingnut771 said:
What's wrong with pv3? 76V short.

So new panels are producing 73% of their max (new panel tech?), and one string of old panels is 66% (older panel tech?) and the other 50% (something wrong?) so an average of only 58% max output compared to 73%?
Click to expand...

The string attached to MPPT3 is unfortunately split due to space constraints and gets better later in the day. MPPT1 and MPPT2 get morning sun and fade in the afternoon. I might have said before, we have a lot of roof space but none of it faces true North so we had to compromise but the new string of panels is definitely helping.
 
After some feedback from Solar Assistant I changed the Grid Connection from Auto Detect to CT clamp installed.

1784017033271.png

The Grid power, Grid power LD and Grid power CT values look like this now.

1784017041910.png

And MQTT picks up the power back fed via the inverter as non essential load.

1784017051696.png

So it looks to be working as it should now but I'll keep an eye on things.
 
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