I have a medium sized 3 bedroom "luxury" home in Costa Rica. We have US spec power here and my house has a normal US spec 120/240v split phase panel. We have a bunch of 120v loads which are receptacles, lighting, ceiling fans, gas range/oven, microwave, dishwasher, washing machine, refrigerator. Then we have a bunch of 240v loads: 3x single room euro type air conditioners, pool pump, 2x instant water heaters, and clothes dryer.
My electric bill averages around 900 kwh per month.
The grid here is unstable and causes constant problems with appliances. We are constantly replacing "motherboards" and "control boards" and small appliances due to damage from unstable grid.
I am going to install maybe 6kw to 10kw of solar panels and need to consider what ESS topography and what Victron equipment is going to make the most sense. I was thinking of doing a 48v battery bank as it will be exclusively for the ESS system so seems that would be most efficient.
At first I was thinking I was limited to the relatively small selection of US spec 120v products but now that I think about it I can do an autotransformer and use a 230v Quattro or Multiplus II then set it to 60hz.
I read some posts from other using two 120v Quattros in split phase or a Quattro and an autotransformer.
It gets a bit confusing. I think I will do a Fronius PV inverter but seems like I may want to put it on the Victron output so I can stay "up" when the grid goes down or when the grid goes out of spec we can have inverter take over and still have solar PV.
In Costa Rica you can't "sell" excess power back to the grid but you can get "credit" toward future kw hours that you may need to consume later. I guess this makes grid tie PV make sense as you can hopefully trade off kwh between day and night but this does not solve the instability problems.
I thought about going totally off grid to just have perfect power all the time but system would need to be quite big to be sure of no problems. I would need one or more chargers to be able to charge from grid as necessary.
Any thoughts as to what setup is best?
