Maybe just a last word about this going off-grid.
Its been an interesting week. Not only was it fairly overcast but there is also the technial issue associated with the new batteries. Batteries come 50% charged. Obviously, that means that at startup one has half capacity (nominally). So, your first night WILL mean that you're most likely to go dark in the night. The next two days were quite overcast but there was generation and charging happening from the panel array (these latest panels are awsome in low light conditions). But, although the batteries did reach +95%, on both following mornings the batteries died (uncannily - right at sunrise - spooky). the third day had very broken cloud cover so good light and the battery pack hit 100%. Since then we have not had any overnight drop-out of power and have had (ave) 45% battery capacity at the start of mornings.
My take on this startup is that Lithium batteries are strange beasts - and - it took a couple of days for them to :cycle' into proper charge/dischage behaviour (I guess that the sentence might not make sense at first but its what seems to have occurred). So, now they have been through a couple of charge/dischaged days they're "burned-in" (like when we had to "run our vehicle engines in" in the old days).
We were a little unlucky with the startup weather which was caused by an infrequent system that moved down from the Mozambique Channel southwards.
My long standing electricity monitor shows our usage behaviour is still constant. The odd part, and, this relates to the GRID supply (nominally 240v in RSA +-10%) is that the monitor readings from the GRID are twice what I see from the Inverter (a stable 230v and 50Hz).
Lastly - as South Africans now used to LOADSHEDDING in the grid since 2008 (people call them black-outs the power utility insists its loadshedding) our attitude to the batteries/inverter going down was Ah well....it happens. Well, we started out here without the grid - now we're back where we started (except its a generator on steroids now).
