My planned solar system upgrade

After nearly 10 years living off-grid and some 240 months not paying the municipality or Eskom a cent for electricity, not to mention the pleasure of not having to deal with load shedding, the time has come for me to upgrade my solar system and replace some components with more modern equipment.

The main reason is winter; the shorter days and days-long cloudy weather and rain along the Garden Route are making an upgrade unavoidable, or I will have the same power disruptions the rest of the country experiences. A secondary reason is that there is much better stuff available now.

The only problem after 10 years is that my batteries are shot. I had to disconnect two for draining power out of the other two, and the remaining two aren’t coping.

A decade on a battery bank of only four batteries isn’t bad, considering that the batteries were second-hand golf cart batteries to start off with.

The thinking 10 years ago was that golf cart batteries are probably the best batteries one can get because rich golf players don’t want to get stuck on the 16th fairway.

Golfers also replace their batteries regularly, again because they don’t want to get stuck without wheels.

Despite their much easier job of running a small solar system, however, even these good batteries eventually wore out. Still, they were a good investment at the price of R2 000 each 10 years ago. (I also didn’t have to pay the municipality R80 000 to install a transformer and run 200 metres of cable to my house back then.)

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