As you can see by the above information we already have no sunlight and it is summer time and only just gone 6.30pm with very little charge coming through. Normally we should have another hour or more of sunlight.
Everything is working how it should and I am now just waiting on the 4th battery to come back into service. The company who supplied me is working to fix this online and should know in the next day or so whether that can or they cant which would mean a replacement. The person who I am dealing with only returned to work on the 13th so the hope is by tomorrow this will be resolved one way or the other. This battery is still brand new and has never worked from day one.
I have an outstanding credit balance available which I was going to use by purchasing another battery and I was recommended to hold off while they play and tweak the systems performance. The safety cutting the system off at 40% has been adjusted to 30% and can go down to 20% if required.
We are currently averaging only 24 Kwh per day and we should be more than double that within the next week. Basically we go off the grid at around 5 am most week days and come back on around 8pm in the evening. I guess with the extra battery once operating we shall be able to switch off 2 hours later at 10pm.
I do not want to drain the batteries too much taking them below 30% for the reason we sill have power cuts and I might need the batteries to get me through. Last week which includes this morning we have had 3 power interruptions even though load shedding is apparently no longer. They talk nonsense as each one so far has been roughly 4 hours exactly and they cannot blame this on maintenance or technical failures.
Johannesburg has been experiencing heavy rain fall daily for the past week with very little sunshine and the system has coped extremely well with only a couple of days affected by having to switch over far earlier than planned. When the sunset like it has been for most of this week being before 6 pm due to cloud cover there is no charge coming from the panels even tough sunset is normally at around 7pm this time of the year. This is done manually so I am enquiring about an automatic process which will make things a little easier.
I do believe we will be able to save on about 1 mega watt monthly which is my initial target for next month. Once I increase the storage capacity by another 5.2 Kwh we shall see how far we can push this number up. The savings are well on track to paying tis system off within less than 5 years and once the prices rise it will drop to around 4 years which is significant. If you consider we have been working on 40% of 15.6 Kwh storage and now will be 30% of 20.8Kwh this will give us roughly 60% more and possibly will go through the entire night. Adding one more battery should do that and then we are in theory off the grid, but only just.
I reported our faulty pay as you go meter with our supplies on the 13th December and visited their offices on the 17th and a month later still have had no feed back. This is what we are dealing with and why nothing ever gets done and at least this time I have a reference number if I hear nothing. This has been going on for too long now making me feel guilty for receiving fee electricity even though this is no fault of my own and all on them.