Cyboenergy Uses for home heating

photonboy

Ok.   I bought a cyboinverter from cyboenergy for heating water at my off grid home and the results have been excellent.  https://www.cyboenergy.com/downloads/CyboInverter-CIM-1500H-Spec-Sheet-Rev-6.8-Jan-2025.pdf. I heat a 10 gallon tank, and then send leftovers to a 20 gallon, both 120v ~1200 watts.  Very pleased and with some insulation have hot water in the morning.   I am thinking about expanding the use to a Steffes ETS heater https://steffes.com/ets/.   The heaters are designed to pull the charging power away from the control/blower power.  In this way I would use 4 ~500 watt panels to “charge” the ETS from the cyboinverter and then need a separate 240v inverter to power the control/blower circuit.   https://steffes.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Room-Heater-240V-Rev-1.pdf   These heaters were/are very popular when/where there is significant advantages to time of day power rates.  I claim they could be great in on grid applications and supplemented with grid power with one of the models.   I like the idea of some radiative heat in the cabin throughout the evening to help keep from freezing.   Any thoughts or other users out there?   I have done a lot of work with solar thermal, and appreciate the lack of plumbing in this sort of application.  

NANOcontrol

I saw this comment a couple months ago.

"I have cycled through 3 units after each has died after about 18 months of usage. The first installation about years ago and each successor unit has failed after about 18 months. When it works it is great but the quality does not seem to be there in the internals as they habitually fail. Now, they don't answer their phones and there are no responses to email requests for warranty RMA. Looks like they are out of business now. Good experiment but poor quality and now the company is gone!!!"

None of these companies last too long, the products are too expensive and there just isn't an understanding in the solar world.   Techluck died, good because that was a terrible design.  I was given an ASCii because it failed and the seller refused to respond.   I got it working and am actually have a fondness for it. But it is still, what were they thinking.  It can be improved dramatically by adding a $5 part to it. 

Personally, I think having solar panels  just to heat water is goofy.  After the tank heats up, what do you do with the energy.  My PV water heater shuts off at 10:30am.   I operate off array voltage that a charge controller is connected to with the heater control I designed (the ACTii can also do this).  It only diverts excess energy when the charge controller isn't supplying other needs.  It can divert as little as 5W, no energy is wasted.  Every working solar system has at least 20% excess capacity, why waste that.

PV resistive water heating gets a bad rap, but it is extremely low cost (well not your unit) and can dump extremely large power in an instant.  I have a primary tank only 2.5 gallons which only takes 400WH to heat up.  Other tanks daisy chain in to bank more water. When I say cheap, these efficient controllers are only $20 to build. 

If your unit ever fails, I can fix it cheap.  I'd love to do a video on this unit.   

NANOcontrol

How typical.  Someone wants to talk about their great idea for water heating and then they just scurry away.