hi this is Mark from M Solar Power with the first episode in our survey education series and today's
episode is going to be about understanding your solar inverters battery and what we've got really
is there are two functions that batteries can do the first thing that we use them for is we
use them to save money we use them to store excess solar power which we can retrieve later
and the second function is we use them for backup power and these two needs are directly opposed to
each other the first instance we want to drain our battery and thence example here we've got
a battery at 95% and on our solar X triple power batteries the battery is 90% usable and basically
that means the last 10% is unusable and what we're trying to do is to take our batteries down from
typically when they fall in the evening down to 10% in order to not draw any power from the grid
and only once the batteries have reached 10% then our systems will automatically start drawing power
from the grid this however is directly opposed to backup power because for backup power we want
to have our battery capacity available for when there's low cheating and if load shooting occurs
and we've already used our battery we're unhappy that we don't have any power on hand so what
I've done is I've created this document which I'm going to link here in the YouTube description and
just go through the different options of how you can set your battery and the different modes I'm
just going to tab across to the document and this is the document that I've got working on in the
background and so the first paragraph here really is just what I've spoken about and then the second
portion is around battery basics now on our solar ex hybrid systems as I mentioned the batteries on
90% usable and what that means is by default they sit with a minimum capacity of 10% you can see
this here from the phone screen and you can see this screenshot here from the inverted screen this
percentage is not to be changed because if you change it for example to 30% in this case once
the inverter reaches 30% state-of-charge and it's load shedding the inverter is not going to supply
any more power because in essence you've told it switch off at 30% this is the minimum percentage
that I want to drain my battery to so these don't change the setting don't change the capacity at
all and also the amperage is here below I've had some clients where they've changed the say to 2
amps and then there's no or very little power available for when there's low cheating because
the battery can't dish out more than 2 amps so I just wanted to check a little bit further in
connection with the different types of modes so the first mode is the mode that I touched
on earlier is self use and then self use mode we are crying - and thus MERS the app in your phone
we are trying to use all of the battery power available and in other words we're trying to have
maximum money savings we want to draw our battery down to 10% and we want to reduce the money that
we spend on the utility so in other words we drain our battery before we draw any power and in the
summer months it's really enjoyable because I draw very little power from the grid as I've
always got excess power left in the morning in the winter months during the solar winter then
typically on that's a cold cloudy day and I went full our batteries and I'll have to supplement
about half of our power with power from the grid so what you can see at the moment is we've been
having some load shedding in Capetown and it's being a very cold period with lots of rain and
a cold front passing through for about 4 days so I've set my battery to force time use which I'll
come back to you in a second which allows me to charge my battery to have power and reserve for
backup from the grid as the Sun is not job so in self-abuse mode if I select self News mode and I
select save I'm going to write that setting to my inverter and I've now changed my inverter to self
use mode so now it's automatically going to change me back to money saving mode and I'm gonna start
drawing power from the battery it's night time while I'm recording this video so immediately I'm
going to be taking power out of my battery one of the most common questions I get is you know
I've got my system and self use and why is my battery not charging and during the day firstly
what your system will do is it will Saul sorry let me try that again firstly what it will do
is it will power the needs of your home first and then excess power is stored in the battery and in
this mode it can't charge from the grid at all so typically we set our systems to self use and the
purpose of this mode is for maximum money saving this the second scenario or the second option
that selects providers they provide a backup mode and in backup mode the stance of inverter changes
basically if we click down our work mode here and we change our inverter to back mode backup
mode and we write that sitting to the inverter and better changes it starts and it changes its
priority its goal is now as to have the maximum amount of battery power available because we're
in high levels of load shedding and if you get a load shedding and alert that's the easiest
thing that you can do is just change your system to backup mode and voila it will automatically
start putting any available solar power into your battery and not worry about powering your home and
feeding excess power to the grid so that's really easy to do and in this document I've got links to
to the videos which basically we just show you how to do that on the keypad of the inverter so
what sort of ex do for us is they do something that allows us to sit on the fence to get the
best of both worlds so what we typically do is when we commissioned a system and we install it
we set the system into self-consumption mode with a caveat the caveat being we have a minimum grid
tile limit set and what a minimum greater limit does is it's the minimum that it will allow you to
draw the battery down when the grid is there when your inverter is tied to the grid in other words
when there's no load shedding and so typically by default what we do for our clients is we set
our minimum and gretel limit to 30% and by doing this we leave 20% of the power in the battery in
reserve for unexpected load shedding and we leave the other 70% available for money-saving solar and
I highly recommend this what we typically do is when Eskom announces load shedding and we've got
higher higher load shedding occurrences happening we change the stance we increase the reserve limit
so this is a photograph from my inverter screen I've changed my reserve limit to 80
percent because unlike at the moment my priority is having power and not saving money so so let's
give us just a recap they give us three fantastic different options we have self use and if I just
pop back to the app and it's really easy to change this on your phone or directly from your internet
Net monitoring we have self use available and that is going to maximize our savings we have
backup mode available which is going to give us the maximum amount of backup power available we
have the option of setting a minimum and greater limit and self use that allows us and I know the
sounds a bit confusing that allows us the best of both worlds and lastly if it's an emergency
and we're really short of power we can charge our battery from the grid and basically it's
like setting the alarm clock of when you want to charge your system from the grid and I've got a
video linked below for how you do that so there's incredible options available please don't sit and
fiddle with you on vert or if you don't feel comfortable you not sure on what you're doing
and just leave it in the default mode where we left backup power available for you and
there's incredible freedom but with freedom comes responsibility if you change you're
on inverter settings and you have set them incorrectly in other words you've
set your minimum battery percent say for instance to 90 percent or 80 percent then
your inverter is going to switch off at 80 or 90 percent because you've instructed it
to do so and there's no way of repairing it at that point to adjust the setting until
the grid comes back so please reach out if you have any further questions I've created
this document with the video links associated which I'll link in the description below and
thank you for tuning in and I wish you many happy years of being empowered by the Sun!