Altricity
Solar Panels in Johannesburg

The Altricity store is all about alternative electricity. Here you will find gadgets, articles, services and all manner of ideas to help you save electric power, provide 230 volt power for your vehicle or assist you with breaking free from the grid completely in your home or office.

Here you will find gadgets, articles, services and all manner of ideas to help you save electric power, provide 230 volt power for your vehicle or assist you with breaking free from the grid completely in your home or office. We are in the process of adding products to the store and finalising stock, but you can order products from us. To be honest, this is the perfect time to ask these questions since the costs associated with setting up Off-Grid systems is at an all time low. There are two main options when it comes to reducing the cost of heating water and they are namely Heat Pumps and Solar Collectors. Heat Pumps might sound like a really fancy name for a new technology but to put it simply, they work in the same manner in which your fridge works, except that now we are interested in the heat that is generated, rather than the cold side of things. Since we only really care about the hot water generated by the heat pump, the cold air which is produced by the heat pump is piped away to the outside and wasted but with a little thought it could be used on hot days to cool down the home or office. One seriously good reason to install a Heat Pump is the efficiency, which is substantially higher than a resistive element geyser system. An alternative to Heat Pumps is a Solar Collector, which essentially uses the sun to heat up your water instead of electricity. This does not mean if we have a cloudy day that you’ll have no hot water, since even Infra-Red and Ultra-Violet light can pass through the clouds but if it is miserable outside for a few days straight, then you might start to run low on hot water. There is a reason why the market is flooded with energy saving light bulbs and appliances, it’s because they work. Their effect can be clearly seen on the bill at the end of the month. If you plan on buying a freezer anywhere in the near future, consider a chest freezer over the traditional upright designs. Now that we have covered most of our bases when it comes to energy efficiency around the house, we can start to talk about Photo Voltaic Panels, Inverters and Battery Banks. Since every home is different, I’m going to give you a rough idea to the approach you should take when it comes to using the sun to power your home. The first thing you need to know is how much power your homes actually uses on a daily basis and the maximum load that you would possibly put onto the grid at any given moment, assuming a regular day at home. This means that if you had a 1kiloWatt PV array, you would only be able to use around 600Watts of the energy and this is why we use MPPT’s these days since they bring that efficiency up to over 90%. The second decision you have to make is the capacity of the battery bank, which is not as simple as taking your homes daily consumption and matching the size of the battery bank to that. The next thing to bear in mind is that if batteries are drained to 50% (anything more than 50% is not a good idea) on a daily basis, their lifespan is considerably shortened. That 30% represents the energy that the batteries have to provide to your home and from that we can work out the size of the battery bank by dividing half of the total daily consumption by 0.3 which will give the required capacity of the battery bank (in kilowatt hours). Next up are the Inverters which can be an expensive problem later on if they weren’t chosen correctly when the system was designed. As a rule of thumb, take the maximum load value and add another 20% onto it in order to cover some changes that might happen in future. The reason for this is that you might be able to get away with using a couple of smaller inverters instead of one large one for everything. The last thing worth mentioning is the practicality of trying to go off the grid. Consider putting in a separate electricity meter to monitor your consumption and also to check that your electricity bill is actually correct.