Sunz were engaged by the architect to provide the power system for this remote beach house south of Raglan. As part of the consultation process we identified the daily load of the building and talked through the various implications on heating, cooking and water heating when building off the grid. After a couple of false starts the on the building, the power system was commissioned at 3pm on the 24th December, just in time for the owners to spend the Christmas holidays in their slice of paradise.

One of the unique features of this system is the use of a frequency power diverter for heating the hot water. With off grid power systems, the solar power normally shuts down when there is no power being used and the batteries are full. With this site being a holiday home and being unoccupied mid week, we wanted to utilize this wasted solar energy. The Frequency diverter does this by heating the water in the extra large capacity hot water cylinder. Through out the summer, the hot water cylinder is maintained at 80^oC from all the spare solar power. Even in poor weather conditions, the cylinder is normally above 60^oC and in the rare event its not, because its always warm, it only takes the wetback fire an hour to get it hot enough for showers when the owners turn up on a Friday night. IF the owners cant be bothered lighting the fire there is also a backup element in the top half of the cylinder for a quick heat up time.

The system uses the latest Lithium Iron Phosphate battery coupled with a marine grade Off grid Inverter/charger and Honda auto start generator in a small shed. The monitoring and control panel is mounted in the house hall way for easy access and as its connected to the internet, the owners have full access from their cellphones. The solar power system is split, with most of it connected to a solar inverter to power the home and hot water directly, and a small number of panels dedicated to battery charging. This is a reliability feature we always incorporate into our off grid as it will allow the system to automatically recover with out user intervention in the rare event of an flat battery. As the generator has a battery charger on its start battery, and a service contract with Honda, the only time this ever happens is if someone forgets to put petrol in it.