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Flagship Solar
Contact   (+27) 71 527 3924

Vannie farm

Jan 11, 2024

Home / Case Studies / Vannie farm

In February of 2021, we were contacted by a client on a small farm in Tesserlaarsdal. They lead a modest lifestyle, engaging in subsistence farming and cultivating garlic as a cash crop.

They have 8 small dogs, a beautiful art studio, a very small house near the middle of the land and a fairly large box-shaped warehouse store workshop toolshed all rolled into one near the back. They don’t use much electricity, probably only around 10–12 KWH or units of power per day, let’s say R500 of electricity per month. But it cost them no less than, R8000 in line fees from ESKOM per month to get it there, even though the transformer was paid off, so it wasn’t that.

We conducted a site visit to see what we could do for efficiency before installing solar panels, but they had already covered all those bases and just needed a good system to cover them for load shedding and for the weeks-long stretches of power outages every time the cables got stolen

The farm was connected via a 3-phase power cable, and 3-phase power was distributed everywhere on the farm where it needed to go, although nothing on the farm required 3-phase power to operate. So we specified a 5 kW single-phase Victron inverter with 14 kW of lithium battery and 12 x 460-watt solar panels, which we installed in and on the warehouse-workshop..

We also rewired all the distribution boards so that the farm could run on single-phase power only and powered up everything on the farm. We also supplied them with a 3 kW single-phase generator, which was programmed to load the battery while the farm still ran on the inverter. We also included a changeover kit to run the farm on the generator or a bigger rental generator if the need arose.

We commissioned the system in April 2021, and the client filed with Eskom to remove all the Eskom infrastructure from the farm.

A month later, we followed up with the client, and based on the monitoring that we had done on the system and the usage, we advised the client to switch from a gas stove and oven to an electric stove and oven because they always had too much power and could displace the use of gas.

They also switched from irrigating their farm once a week with the borehole to once a day since the borehole runs on the solar power and inverter system; it doesn’t cost anything to run. They also switched from mowing the lawn with a petrol mower to an electric mower.

Vannie Farm has been off-grid for water, electricity, petrol, and gas since May 2021. They have not paid a cent in electricity since we installed, and their power has never been off for any reason.

The system paid for itself in savings in just 28 months, and it still works like new.