Before I recommend a battery or a panel, I start by understanding your home circuitry and electrics and how you live.
Solar isn’t a product you “buy.”
It’s a system you plug/interface into your electrical network design – and that design starts with behaviour.
Here’s what mapping and tracing reveals:
1. How you actually use power
Not how you think you use it – how your home behaves hour by hour.
2. Your lifestyle rhythms
Peak times, work-from-home patterns, mornings, evenings, appliance cycles.
3. Essential vs heavy loads
What must always stay on – and what should never touch or drain your battery bank.
4. What can live on solar
Pool pump, geysers, appliances with staggered timers.
5. The silent costs draining your wallet
Load spikes, poor grid conditions (spikes, dips, over and under voltage), unnecessary automation, poor wiring, miss allocation.
Only once you understand these patterns can you design a system that delivers:
This is why so many systems installed in panic didn’t live up to expectations – they weren’t designed around people’s needs, utilisation patterns, budgets or modularity of design (build or enhance as your cash flow allows vs once off systems).
Next week, I’ll unpack the three main inverter types in simple language – and why choosing the wrong one can lock you in for years.
At the moment, there’s a noticeable trend in the issues I’m being called out for and often, it comes back to solar system design. More
The conversation I’m having with homeowners right now. One of the interesting things about being an electrician is that you start to notice patterns in
When I started sharing my off-grid journey, I never expected it to become quite so emotional or controversial. Right now, though, things feel like they’ve come to a standstill. I’ve done what I can, followed the processes, asked the questions, and pushed where it made sense to push. For the moment, all that’s left is to wait and see what the next move from City Power and the City of Johannesburg will be.
What non-vending customers need to know.
By now, I thought I’d be off the grid.
Instead, I’ve walked through the doors of City Power and the City of Johannesburg nine times.
I never planned to disconnect from the grid until a recent policy shift changed everything. City Power announced an obligatory conversion for certain prepaid and
South Africans often think “an inverter is an inverter.”
Not true.
Here are the three types – simply explained:
