Solar in a blackout

You make it seem so easy! Many thanks for those links. When I searched leisure battery I was getting random things over €1000. Halfords makes more sense.

I am sure I will have a ton more questions, including how to get this past the other half, but very interesting.

Edit: First question! Somebody, possibly bullit_dodger in the solar pv quotes thread, suggested some ideas for garden mounting, and one option would be on a vertical wall. I know, not ideal from a capture stand point, but possibly the only place I could do it. Is there anything specific I would need or could I just grab the cheapest roof mounting rails and use those? Would be looking at mounting to concrete fence pillars.

Depends where you live I guess. In an urban area, unlikely to be lengthy power cuts as even in storms, faults in such areas get fixed first. Living rural you could be waiting days, standard generator is the way to go to get water into the house and charge devices. After that, rechargeable lanterns and solid fuel stove.

Mentioned previously (sorry can't remember who to give credit), but most inverters or the batteries themselves have an 'emergency' outlet so if you have a battery in your solar installation a cheap-n-cheerful solution would be to run an 20m extension cable from that outlet to the living room and plug in the telly and or router (assuming your load network hub has power but that's another problem for another day)

Depends on how accessible your installation is of course. But might be a lot easier than building an off grid solution? (but it's a lot of more fun to come up with an off-grid solution to be fair)

What is the most per hungry thing you run?

7Kw is a nice size!

What if I make a pretend grid supply?

Turn of grid at meter box. Have a small battery plus inverter to generate 220V (or could it be lower like 210V) that you can switch into the primary output of the solar inverter. Turn off any heavy power using equipment. The solar inverter and fireman's switch would think that the grid is up and running so the solar would work away. What are the issues with this approach?

Does the solar inverter need to sense the flow on the CT clamp in order to work right?

I have a Solis inverter (2.4Kwp) with a Pylontec battery installed a year ago. If I knew then what I know now and how the setup is configured to operate under various circumstances I would not have invested in a battery at all as I do not believe that they are a great bang for your buck. The Pylontec (2.4kwh) was €3k + vat. You would think that for that money you would be able to run your house for a decent amount of time. What I have found is that it will run the house from maybe 6pm onwards for the rest of the day on a full charge. However, turn on one of the big drainers ( oven, dishwasher, washing m/c etc.) and it wouldn't pull the socks off a deadman! So for me at the moment it feels like a bit of an expensive ornament 😁.

Which, leads me to the reason for my post. I have a long extension lead connected to the backup outlet of the inverter. Reading previous posts I see now that during a blackout I will not have supply from the panels available ( it's all in the small print isnt it 😕) and would be solely reliant on whatever SOC is available via battery. I have been trying to configure the solis not to discharge the battery so that at least I have maximum charge available for an outage ( at least configure it this way during winter period when conditions would not be generating really any excess charge to battery anyway). I have not had any success though. I have tried to configure the discharge time to a few mins a day but Solis seems to ignore that setting. If there is any charge there it will feed it to the load regardless. Can I just turn off the battery when fully charged and turn it on again when there is a blackout during winter? Or am I stuck with the expensive ornament!😁

@jkforde It is already configured to charge off grid by installer (00:00-01:00) but come 8AM has drained to its discharge SOC. I'd still be at the mercy of good timing of a blackout and having sufficient charge built up.

There has to be a better solution.

@Jonathan I cant see that setting on screens available to me.

It would be interesting to see how well this would work but I'd imagine not very well. When the sun shines the solar inverter will keep increasing its output voltage till it reaches whatever cut off point and then it will stop inverting for a while. Or else you'll have something heavy running and the sun will duck behind a cloud leaving the small battery inverter to carry all the load which it won't.

I have had 6 power cuts since install in February and have the batteries, 2 PureDrive set to keep 23% in reserve and it's invaluable for me where I live. No mobile signal and a dodgy copper wire fed landline that goes in a small breeze, but they won't upgrade it because of the fibre rollout in 2026 for me 🙄. I have used a kettle and toaster no problem with my small essential base load I situated all together in advance of install.

I just plug the extension lead in and 12ft away from my eps socket I have 2 plugs to switch over with router, cctv, and a few other low loads all work perfectly. I would have been lost without it. I will be upping the reserve to about 30% for the bad months because luckily I have built up a good amount of backward spinning meter units on my old meter so I need to catch back up a bit.

This video shows how to enable it. Password for advanced settings is 0010

Go to advanced settings -> Storage Energy Set -> Parameters then set backup supply to enabled.

Tested today and it worked. I was surprised that I did not need to cut mains power for it to kick in!