Professionally installed inverters & batteries are wired in to your Distribution Board and convert power stored in batteries to mimic Eskom power, alleviating the problems of load shedding and other issues. They come in many shapes and sizes but they do similar things:

• Monitoring Eskom power they switch quickly >20ms from Eskom to battery power during a blackout or brownout.
• Inverters are extremely quiet in comparison to generators.
• Inverters are used in most forms of alternative power e.g. standard, solar, wind.
• Inverters are a building block for going off-grid.

High Efficiency Inverters  (80%+) are better because

• Pay less upfront as you need less batteries
• Pay less in 5-15 years when you renew the batteries
• Recharge time decreases because you have less batteries

Main Inverter types:

• Standard – Designed to power the essential parts of the home/office when the power goes down.  A charger keeps the batteries fully charged when Eskom is working.
• Hybrid/Grid-Tie – A more expensive but intelligent unit that plugs in to both utility power and an other alternative energy source e.g. solar or wind.  These units are designed with the ability to feed power back in to Eskom. PLEASE NOTE: During Load Shedding your solar / wind power also stops working as a safety feature.
• Hybrid/Grid-Connected – This is what most people want when they ask for solar, however it is not what they are usually given. You have the benefit of your solar units primarily powering your appliances & lights but with an utility ‘top-up’ when required. This allows you to use as much free power as you can from your solar panels. It does not turn off your solar panels during load shedding.
• Off-Grid/Solar/Wind –  Does not connect to Eskom at all. This term is used a lot and is very expensive to achieve you whole house without external power.
  NOTE: Selling back to the grid is still not legal for small systems  in South Africa and Eskom are not considering this in the near future.

What is the difference between Pure and Modified Sine Waves?

This is generally a question to be asked from the lower end of inverter quality. Usuallt the portable units. Basically, it defines the quality of the power the inverter feeds to your appliances.

Modified Inverters are cheaper than Pure Sine Wave inverters for obvious reasons.  Computers, lights and phones can usually run very happily modified sine wave inverters. This is because they all come with capacitors in their power supplies that help to ‘smooth out’ the modified power. Therefore little heat build up and damage is done.

Motors and other appliances like that e.g. fridges, dishwashers, drills, high end-electronics must always be run off of a pure sine wave unit. This is because the modified power can not be ‘smoothed out’ by them. Heat is released in the electronics as a consequence of the abrupt power drops and this can mean that you seriously decrease your appliance life. The only problem is that most people don’t realise. A fridge with a 10 year life can be reduced drastically and the money you lose in the future might just make it preferable to chose the better, pure sine wave option. Many retailer don’t like to talk about this as they also get to sell more appliances as well as cheap inverters.

PLEASE NOTE: Some TVs and audio equipment can buzz through the speakers on a modified sine wave inverter. There is not a lot that can be done to prevent this and so we generally recommend a pure sine wave inverter to prevent any unforeseen problems.