Thanks alot. That's really helpful

richmon74:


only one advice for you;
NO LOAD CONSUMPTION IS OVER 200W

Please, I need advice on the Voltron 15kva inverter. Anyone with experience on it? What's the performance like? The pros and cons of it. Thanks alot.

Thanks brother.
Checking it out now..

pranil:


Are they available in Nigeria ?
what about BMS
otherwise the BLUENOVA and freedomwon are better SA brands with lot of users and a good record.

Is there anyone in the house using this battery?

LiFeYPO4 Lithium Iron Yttrium Phosphate Battery


I do like to know your experience and the cost.

Thank you all for your encouraging words.
The make is Power Safe V batteries 12V 190AH 16#
It's really getting old and tired but manageable for now.

babaegun:


@ANEB

Thanks for sharing your setup with the house!! You have a fantastic setup.

Wow! this is painful. The solar charging part is faulty. Hope this is not a drawback for hybrid systems? The proposed FM 80 will fix the issue but it means spending more. For me, I don't charge my batteries at all with utility power again. I completely disabled it. I hope you will be able to do this when you increase your solar panels anyway.

Whats the name/model of these batteries? 4 Years. Are they still strong?

All in all, am sure you are happy with your setup. Can you imagine how much you have saved on petrol and generator noise? That's the beauty of Renewable energy.

Do enjoy and keep us informed always.

Cheers.

My Journey into Renewable Energy.

2015! Yes 2015. That was the year I had to make a decisive and far reaching decision about the future of power generation and consumption in our "little" home. I approached my wife, (mind you, with caution) and my children to discuss this new project that could potentially reduce the astronomical cost of electricity (alas! In the future) in our "little" home. Solar power... using photovoltaic panels.

Let me back up a little bit... My street and indeed my entire neighbourhood gets roughly 20 to 22 hours of electricity in a week and sometimes, we would be waiting for electricity from the power company for a month or two. Oftentimes it's a transformer fault, high tension pole(s) dropping off like a sparrow. In many occasions, old and tired lines giving way after screaming for replacement for ages. To cut the long story short, we are often without power for a long stretch of time. The only option had been to run the portable generator. And this... brothers and sisters cost a small fortune monthly. Ten litres of petrol is required for my household for twelve hours. Multiply that by thirty days and slot in 145 naira per litre... you begin to feel like a 150kg of load on your shoulder. 43,500 naira for only 12 hours of electricity to run basic appliances. If we were to fire the generator for 24 hours, the bill would be 87,000 naira in a month. Eighty seven thousand naira? That's crazy. Really crazy. Like my friend would say... not sustainable. And that was just the financial aspect. The noise, fire hazard and the anxiety of something going wrong while I was away and the family needed to power the house... no price tag for it all.
Okay! Enough of the stories. We as a family, after weighing the pros and cons of the generator power... decided to embark on a solar power generation and consumption adventure.

Being a DIY person, I set out on the design. Base on personal data collection, I came to the conclusion that my household basic appliances electricity requirements was about 18KWH for 24 hours. That's a huge amount of power to generate considering that Calabar falls under a 4.5hour full sunlight per day region. I decided to cut down on some load... replaced all the light bulbs with LED bulbs. And  the load dropped to 15KWH in 24 hour usage. 

I believed modular design would work better for me. I set out to purchase the following equipment:

80amp charge controller (outback FM80.. though the seller sent me 60amp FM60. that was dubious of him)

5kva Ipower plus hybrid inverter... Zinox

Luminous 3.5KVA inverter (existing from my previous inverter project)

16# 250Wp solar panels (later upgraded to 26# ) i.e. 6500Wp panels in total.

16# 200AH AGM batteries in 48v system  (existing from my previous inverter project 4yrs old).
Some cables. 16mm and 35mm for moving the huge current from combiner box to the charge controllers.

Breakers as appropriate for the design. Constructed a stand for the solar panels (though some panels are roof mount)

NOTE: Due to the peculiar nature of house, I had to make some concessions.
Trading high angle 19° for a 3.5 hour shading from 2pm. I figured the losses would be less with high inclination compared to 3.5 hours of shading.

We completed the installation and power generation has been better than expected.

Challenges I have encountered so far...
The Zinox Ipower plus inverter though very good has one draw back. It only absorbed on utility mode. When on solar... it jumps the absorption mode to floating mode. As such, I had to reduce the number of panels to Ipower plus inverter and put more panels on Outback charge controller. I maxed out in amps on the outback FM60.

Future plans:
Purchase additional Flex max Charge controller (FM80)
Increase my panels to 9000Wp

Find out more about batteries... possibly the batteries with 3000 or more cycles.

Currently, we run 1.5hp borehole pump daily for 45minutes
Microwave oven for 30minutes
Other loads amount to 800Wp
In 24hours, we take from the solar average of 19KWH.

The system can do more but not enough good batteries yet to maximise it.

Most of my knowledge came from this forum. So gentlemen and ladies (If there's) thank you for contributing everyday and finding time to respond to questions and challenges. You guys are the best.

Good evening house!
I have been following this forum for more than a week now. I most confess, I have learnt so much from this forum. The willingness of the gurus to respond to challenges presented by newbies like me. Please keep up the good job you are doing.

I have a 5kva Ipower plus inverter. My challenge is how to get the data. So I am finally at a point where I can play with the software(WATCHPOWER) that came with my inverter. So I hooked it all up with a USB to RS232 converter. Everything seems to work. I can even hear the relay when I switch output source priority from utility to SBU.

The issue I have is on the data logging I cannot select the device in the droplist. Its just not there. It does show the device ID on the main screen on the left

Has anybody else experianced this

Just to update
I finally got it sorted out.
An upgrade was all that was required