Last night we found out that we need way more storage to make it through the night. We currently have 4 x 5Kwh batteries which is actually 3 now as one is faulty and the suppliers are busy rectifying that. Around 1.30 am we had nothing with no power what so ever. What was ironic was the rest of the neighborhood was on load shedding at the same time our power cut off so we would have had no power anyway.
Even if we add another 2 more batteries makin our total storage at 30Kwh it still may not be enough depending on weather conditions. I have to come to terms that for now I will be tied to the grid even if it is for a small amount.
The last thing I would like to see again is zeros all over the screen as there is nothing you can do about this at 1 am as there is no power being generated. My family was not happy at all and if I am honest I had my doubts even though I was reassured by the suppliers what we had was sufficient. Not even close would be my verdict, but it will create massive savings.
If one is only pulling from the grid for 6 hours per day that is still a 75% saving. I expect that will be the worst case scenario with most days having sufficient power storage to see us through the night.
The problem was yesterday we had a late afternoon seasonal thunder storm that meant we started to use our battery storage sooner than expected. That stole around 3 hours of generating power which would still have seen us short by around 4 hours.
We are learning as we go as the alarm triggered when the battery hit the 35% mark. If we had the other faulty battery working that would have given us an extra 3 hours or so which would have made it close.
At 8.15am e power was restored as the battery levels had already recharged with the morning sun which means we can run every appliance in the house from direct power. This only took roughly 90 minutes to reach this point and two hours later at 10 am we are already at 90% battery storage with 13.5 Kwh stored. This is all savings that we do not have to spend on grid power.
1 Kwh is costing R3.12 currently and I would guess from looking at the solar stats the household is consuming 60 Kwh per day which would mean our bill would be around R5500 or $300 monthly. I expect once we have tweaked the system and added the extras we will get this down to around R1000 per month or $60. This would mean the investment would have paid itself off within 5 years.
I had an original budget of R250K and it looks like this figure will end up around the R300K mark $16K which is still good going considering what is being generated in savings. This is excluding the price increases which happen on a regular basis plus more importantly we will avoid load shedding. I still think this investment will be paid off in less than 3 years due to the ever increasing prices.
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