The inverter you already own is an asset

What the last decade left behind

Households here spent ten years buying inverters, batteries and rooftop solar. The grid has recovered — Eskom reports unplanned outages at their lowest in nine years and roughly R26.9 billion saved on diesel over three years — but the hardware is still on the wall.

That hardware is close to ideal for a wellness installation. A chiller is a small, steady load that a battery handles comfortably. A sauna heater is a large, brief load that is perfect for scheduling into the middle of a sunny day when your own generation is at its peak and grid electricity is at its most expensive.

The battery-backed chiller circuit

We put the plunge chiller on a backed circuit so the basin holds temperature through any interruption, planned or not. It is a small circuit — the compressor is not a geyser — and it means the one piece of equipment that suffers most from an outage never notices one.

For a club or a hotel this is not a comfort feature. A tub that drifts to twenty degrees and has to be pulled back down costs far more in electricity than keeping it cold did.

Scheduling the heater onto your own generation

A timer and a relay, wired so the cabin does its heat-up window when your panels are producing. On a household with a decent array this shifts the single largest load in the installation off the grid entirely for most of the year.

It is cheap to do at build time — a few thousand rand — and almost annoying to retrofit, which is why it goes in the first drawing.

In short

• Chiller on a battery-backed circuit so the plunge never drifts
• Heater scheduled into your solar window — the biggest load, off the grid
• A few thousand rand at build time, far more to retrofit
• Load shedding is over; the hardware it left behind is what we are using