mjheathcote
Centenary Club
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- 9,033
In general if you go solar they advise you to get solar water heaters and gas cooking as those are two large electricity consumers so ideally you need to take those “off grid”. You would need a huge battery system to be able to run the house plus heating plus cooking.
We have regular “load shedding” which means we get cut off for 2.5 hours up to 3-4 times per day and with my 20 250W panels and 16 Lead acid batteries (10KWh practical capacity) we can manage that as the batteries charge up after each 2.5 hrs cut off if it’s at night. During the day the solar system will hack it with only very limited battery use if we time the washing machine/dryer/pool pump. Lithium batteries are the way to go now as they have many more charge cycles and also you can run them down to 10% whereas Lead Acid batteries should not be used below 50% charge if you want them to last. Also panel capacity has more than doubled to ~600W so you can get away with less panels (or bigger capacity on the same area).
Not sure about 600w panels, my new ones are 400w, which I believe to be the current readily available norm.