Business Opportunities From Home South Africa

yeah hello everyone and welcome to thisseries we're going to talk about how to power your home or house from solarpower now first of all i have to say thanksvery much to xodar who are sponsoring this series as you have known if youfollowed any other of my videos david of x earlier and his companykindly donated all his time to install solar power of my house and what i likeabout xlr and and the companies that for one that have a great choice and varietyin terms of products and brands david himself like me enjoys tinkeringand finding solutions to problems so he

enjoys very much getting involved in thetechnology and making it work well so i certainly appreciate the inputnow today what i'm going to do this whole series is going to cover off fromdeciding whether you want an onboard system and off-grid system the types ofsolar panels where to have a charge controller or a grid tie inverter ormicro inverters battery bank the solar panels that cost involved isn't worththat the complications of doing this in south africa vs somewhere like europe orthe states so they're going to be quite a few few videos covering that off andwhat i ask you is that as i start these videos start posting your comments andquestions as we go along and armor

training corporate there's into thevideos as they go along by all means if the video series hasbeen completed or something has been cut off and you slap a question post a comment and i'll do my best toanswer for you and it's worth posting a video on it i will do what we're going to starttoday though it is getting understanding all on grid this is off grid but before i walk youthrough this little picture and and discuss on grid vs off grid and what thegrid is and let me just show you some of

the equipment so that you are familiarwith what i'm talking about when i shade this diagram and then we'll get down and explain itok so let's start off by looking at these solar panels we are going to talkabout these in detail later on a narwhal might even refer you to some othervideos that up maybe i talk about the performance of the different types ofsolar panels under different conditions so the one thing to note that today youcan get cheaper panels from china and what have you but you want to be awarethat if you do want to use your panels with high voltage systems which issomething we'll talk about you have to

consider the quality the build qualityand how they put together and that's something we'll talk about in terms ofthe gaps with the connectors we're also going to talk aboutmonocrystalline this is poly crystalline and amorphous and which seemed toperform better under what conditions this is an mppt charge controller soit's a maximum power point tracking charge controller and this device issomething our point out which is especially useful in off-grid systems asit takes the power from the solar panels it converts it does a dcd to dcconversion service at the right voltage for your battery bank to charge a set ofbatteries

this can't supply power directly to yourhouse and that's why this particular unit is more unit is more useful inoff-grid systems but we'll have a look that when we come to the actual diagramitself right so here we have the grid tie inverter this inverter takes thesolar power directly from the solar panels and converts it to your mainselectricity to feed your house directly or even to feed back onto the grid so this this unit here is the grid tieinverter and this is a normal inverter so this doesn't take power directly fromthe solar panels per se it can be fit from this we can pick up energy from thegrid tie and it can use it but this is

used to take power from a battery bankand convert that to a sea parte y or how so it can also charge the actual batterybank itself and i just show you down here i've got a large bank of lead crystalbatteries i've been doing research into differentbattery technology to find what is best and our decides to go they bank of leadcrystal batteries but these are the components again they'll be talkingabout in that diagram to that so we get an understanding of how thatall worked together right here we have an energy monitor now the one reason ibring up the energy monitor is that one

of the important things to understandwhen you are going to or considering adding solar power to our house you need to understand you need to scopeand size the requirement of your energy source and to do that you need tounderstand how much energy using you can of course have a look to a monthly bowlbut ultimately what we want to do in the series as well as have a look at thedifferent monitoring equipment to either measure your household plat power allthe individual power requirements for each of your appliances are we goingthrough the ways that you can do that with the different types of modernmonitors and measuring equipment

now the other thing that will also betalking about in the system particularly when it comes to understanding the solarenergy in south african context is the prepaid meter the different type ofenergy meters at your power company can provide you with and the potentialchallenges that they can pose so this is off see the power companyenergy meter this is a battery monitor and a lot ofthis equipment what i will do for the more advanced people as i'm going to gointo individual tutorials on how on how these work and how you can configurethem because these have lots of configuration parameters to make themwork properly so that you can monitor

your your installation correctly right one of the other things we will betalking about is how to make your house run more efficiently because the moreefficient you make your house run the less power you need from your solarsystem which is going to tends to be expensive so here what i'vedone in our house this is that kitchen we used to have aset of big fluorescent tubes which threw up a lot of energy and these are ledtubes now that these only use a third of thepower that an all set of fluorescent tubes use but there are some downsidesthat need to be considered with led

lighting of this kind i have a ledlighting and in my house and i'm sure i'll walk you through that and try andshow you when led lighting is appropriate or not and also cfl lightingas well we also then have a look at differentmonitoring software to understand how were your solar rays actually performing i monitor my cell array just because i'mentry to understand what daily power i'm getting from my solar array out ofinterest i've got a 82 2250 what array on the roof and at the moment at thebeginning of spring if i have a a full day of sun i'll getabout 12.8 kilowatt hours out of that

array on a bad day yesterday we had aday when it was overcast and raining i still managed to get about 6.8kilowatt hours out of it so this is something which to understandto understand how well your system is going to perform at different times ofthe year so again at this assist you with sizingyour rate cater for whether you want to actually generate money from your systemor just power your house and to understand can you power your house andthey're cloudy conditions and how will perform under winter ok so let's get down and have a look atthe the first set of basic things to

understand and that is an onboard systemversus off-grid system so let's have a look at a typical ongrid system and the components and potentially have it all hang together sofirst of all when we talk about on grid we're talking the grid would be yourelectrical power company or in the case of south africa with say is calm becausewe have a national power company there is no competition it's just one supplier but the grid feed basically theelectricity feed which comes into your house as ac power and that can be in thestates will be a hundred and ten volts

or inside baskets - 20 or in in the uk is 240 so that is your main grid feed into yourhouse now to get solar power on to all grid-connected house you could then have a solar panel whichis installed on your roof or on your property somewhere it can then feed a grid tie inverter nowremember i pointed out that grid tie inverter what they're great time voteddoes it takes the direct current dc power that comes from your solar paneland it directly converts it to ac power

which can directly power your house now this is probably one of the cheapestand most efficient ways of having a system power you're using solar power topower your house the other option is to use as i pointedout that mppt charge controller you could have that these dotted linesi've got going to a that what i've noted use a flex max which is that the modelof the charge controller i have so it could feed a charge controller whichthen charges a banker batteries that bank of batteries would then have to gothrough a separate big inverter which if you remember i also pointed that andthat would then convert that to ac power

to power your house now what's theproblem with this system for one you gave every time you go through a devicelike a and an inverter or through a set of batteries you're going to have losseswhich are going to make your your system or inefficient so in this case if you didn't have thegood time vert and you went went through your your charge charge controller youbegan through there you would have losses over here you then putting power into batterywhich has resistance and losses when you put it in at then has to come out ofthat battery their losses through

another inverter their losses before itgo into an feed your house now thesesystems in terms of using batteries for the most part if you don't need youdon't want to use batteries because they cost a lot of money you can afterreplace them every couple of every three to five years and issued by reallyexpensive bank of batteries which can last 15 to 20 years you want batteries if you you want tocater for a power outage from the grid so if the grid fails then you have abackup source to power house when there's no grid now in south africa wehave an aging grid network which hasn't

been maintained so that's one reason whyi installed the a bank of batteries to cover for outages also because at thispoint in time because i cannot feed back onto the grid i want to make the most use out of thesolar power which is coming which is installed on my house our household during the day probably uses takes too long on averageat about 800 2000 watts but i've got 2,200 what's installed on our roof sothat can be hand because on a cloudy day even if there's a drop in the power ofthe roof

i can still run my house but i'm thenlosing honest bright sunny day i'm losing the potential of all that powerbecause i cannot feed it back to the griffin and gain credit for it so what i do is i charge i go through agrid tie inverter which is far more efficient than going through a chargecontrollers that directly goes through the grid tie inverter and feeds my houseany excess power is in pulled through the bigger inverter and charge the bankof batteries that means at night time i can then usethat excess power charge stored up in the batteries and feed that back intothe house at night so i'm not using the

grid and again when the morning comes ithen use that excess power to recharge the battery bank that as i said that'sexpensive you can get away and reduce the cost cost of your system by literally justhaving a big bank of solar panels and a great time vertor and for the most partin the states and europe those are the types of systems that theyuse and i'm her foot refer you to a link of one of my viewers called matt he'sjust installed a five point two kilowatt around his house and it's a wonderfulproduction he does some aerial photography and i if you're interesteddo go and have a look because it really

is a nice installation but what i wantto point out is matt makes use of another technology which is quiteinteresting you can see i've got a note about microinverters now what you can do i have one grid tie inverter for a whole bank ofnine solar panels those solar panels have to be our connect had to becarefully connected so that they they they push the path through to the goodverte inverter in the most efficient way so that you maximize the power comingoff them they are connected in series so it means if any one of those panels isshaded or is not ultimately pointed to the sun it can draw down the power ofthe whole bank of solar panels

now that is something i you you have tobe careful with with installation and something after live with because forone we don't we don't here in south africa have a big market of microinverters but on matt's installation you can have he has one small inverter / solar paneland that means you get the maximum efficiency from each and every solarpanel and if you have a problem with either one solar panel or in fact if youhave a failure on my system of the single grid tie everything goes down ifyou have a micro inverter on each and every solar panel you can still have afailure and have the whole the rest of

your rate up and working but just theone side panel or inverter will be down so let's just talk about feeding backonto the grid in our deal situation what you want to do with your excess power asopposed to trying to pump it into a battery bank you want to feed it back tothe grid so that you can great gain credit or even and money back from yourpower company for doing that and for the most part in australia in europe and theus you can do that here in south africa unfortunately we're a bit behind thetimes we are playing catch-up it's about to happen their battle bringing thisthing called net metering which is what their you do is the meter is a meter tounderstand what you use and what you

feedback in some cases no moneyexchanges hands you just gain credit for to push back and then at night forinstance you use that could you pull back off the grid and use that creditthat you had the best way to look at that is to try and understand how thatwill work over a year because obviously you have to account for winter and youmay generate a lot more power and summer and then be pulling back more during thewinter months and so you need to try and size your array appropriately if that'swhat you want to do in south africa we have these prepaid meters so at themoment we have to have an intelligence system that disconnects the grid when ihave access pass that doesn't feedback

and that i use it internally in thehouse there are we what we can go into adiscussion on how to intelligent to use that power whether it's pushing into theback to bank or intelligent load diversion by low diversion i mean switching your low to either heatup your geezer with the excess power or switch on your pool pump when you've gotthe excess power so that you don't waste any of your excess energy from yoursolar panel right so let's now look have a look at it off the grid system nowcertainly in south africa this is probably at this point in time one ofthe areas where people are willing to

spend money on fault photovoltaic power generally speaking if you have if youhave a farm or a holiday cottage which is off the beaten track in the mountainsand it's going to cost a lot of money to bring the grid to your house it's far more cost-efficient - thenbring in a system a a solar power system which can solar power your houseindependently now in the on the grid system one does want to be careful andcalculate if you really want to power your house as much as you can you needto carefully calculate what your power requirement is but sometimes it's notthat critical if you get to have the

grid connected because you can alwaysget power for grid you can always increase your powerrequirement over time as you have money but in off the grid system you need tohave enough power to power the house entirely because there is no grid so that's what you need to understandcalculate the power requirement of your lighting any heating cookingentertainment systems and try and make them run as efficiently as possible the infinite the potential efficienciesthat you gain in the house will say it will save you money three times over andthe reason for that is that any extra

power you need needs to be k - cated for potentially in more solarpanels potentially in a bigger inverter or charge controller and then a largerbattery bank so that's why it's far cheaper to makeyour house run more efficiently that have to spend the extra money in threeextra places to provide the extra power for your house now in off the gridsystem one can potentially operate far more efficiently foremost grid connectedsystems you have to cater for appliances that are running at 220 volts or mainsand as i said each time you start going through a charge controller or batteriesor an inverter you start losing

efficiency and off the grid system in anideal world what you want to do is have your solar panel bringing your your yourpower you go through your charge controller which you need to do becauseyou need to control the amount of charge whichgoes into your battery bank an mppt charge controller makes the collectionof power of your solar panel far more efficient i have a video which explains in pptwhich i'll link to over here but once you've got the power coming into yourbattery you potentially have the option in and off the grid system to try andrun as match of the household off let's

say at 12 or 24 volt 40 volts or 48 voltsystem for instance if you have a 12-volt system you could potentiallypower you're down lighters and lighting directly from that 12 volt that means isno inverting it means it's a far more efficient use of the power coming fromyour your power source of the battery bank of course you may have to introducean inverter as i've got here so that you might be able to partially round somethings of 12 volt but then you also might have someappliances or entertainment systems which need mains voltage either 110 or220 and then you'll take those through an inverter and into your house

so that's an off-the-grid system whereyou don't have the grid feeding your house right side i do hope that kind of gives a goodstart or introduction into solar power and in terms of showing the differentsome of the different components and off-grid vs on grid there's lots more to discuss and a lotof the questions which have imposed to me so far and particularly in for the southafrican market is is it financially viable going this route at the momentand what i plan to do is i'm really

trying to do some calculations to showwhat systems could potentially be fired viable at the moment in south africa the one thing for me that is quiteimportant is at the moment people need to realize it over the lastfour years since 2008 our electricity prices are probably doubled they'regoing to double again with them the next three to five years we alsohave the issue that's not enough money has been invested on on our pirate and ithink potentially the same might be from what i hear the state's might evensuffer from the same problem they have an aging good as well

now if you do have those issues thatpotentially you're going to have more power outages and then the the financialviability might seriously by be that way nikon inconvenience if you don't haveelectricity in south africa we've got a tiered system for what you pay forelectricity so if you use less electricity thenumber of kilowatt-hours you use per month become cheaper as you step up andstart using about more than a hundred and 50 kilowatt hours which of coursemost families wouldn't would be using more like six hundred two thousandkilowatt hours plus once you start bringing your your keyboard usage belowthose certain thresholds you stop paying

a lot less per kilowatt hour so my goalfor my system was to get below 600 kilowatt hours i was easily using athousand kilowatt hours eight hundred thousand kilowatt hours and i bring mindbelow 600 lord hours i suddenly save a lot more money sowe're going to go to a discussion about that we also potentially where it becomesmore viable particular folks in europe and the states is that you get rebatesfor your systems in south africa we don't so as i said please do post yourquestions

they were going to cover of things likepower factor someone raised a very interesting point about power factornormally power factor is something you don't have to worry about in a privateresidence because path factor isn't measured by your metering system and theif you have a bad path back to your house it is the electricity company that takesa knock that's different for big industryhowever if you're generating you our own power does power factor play apart and potentially it does and that's something we'll investigate

so it's they stop posting comments aboutthe questions that you might have would like to see answered and i'll certainlybe going too far more detail all the individual components to show what partthat play and the different options and pros and cons of each each of themanywhere thank you very much for following theseries if you do want to follow them then certainly do subscribe what does help is if you do give athumbs up and write the videos and share them on your twitter or facebook feeds thanks very much for watching