jumper

I found this interesting as error 61 will cause the battery to stop charging due to communication error after 10 mins which is about the same time. There is also a lot of confusion around dip switches and rs485 pins as they seem to change and apparently a lack of chips cause some manufacturers to switch bms modules mid production leading to more confusion and supplied cables not working with certain batteries. This is why I suggested trying USE mode and entering settings manually to see if the inverter works and charges the battery for more than 15mins...that way you'll know it's a comms error and not a problem with the battery.

Hey @Jaxone, I came across an interesting video a while back and it seems the boating community has this issue too. Here's the link: Here's a page where they apparently tested the device he came up with; I've not looked through this yet, but maybe it can help you: https://www.wildebus.com/hybrid-battery-bank-introduction/

I have seen pylontech and dyness batteries on the forum that don't work with the supplied cable due to having a different bms and therefore different pins on the battery port. I would suggest trying USE instead of PYL and enter settings for your battery manually and see if the inverter works and charges the battery. If this works then you know it's the bms cable that is incorrect.

Thanks @Scorp007, nicely backed up with visual data there 👍 I guess it gets much dirtier out here with the nearest tar road 20km away and 4 years of drought 😅

@Scorp007Hmmm, I guess my panels get much dirtier out here on my farm. We also keep a lot of bees which seem to make wax droppings on them too. I suppose it's not the same for everyone. I have noticed a lot of specialized solar panel cleaning companies, I guess they are providing a valuable service, but probably only makes financial sense if you have a very large array which doesn't get cleaned often.

Rain cleans panels. I usually see 8-10% increase when washing my panels every few weeks.

Are your new panels in the same location and angle and face the same direction as the old panels? If you add different spec panels in parallel, they will all be dragged down to the lowest spec ones, so you will likely not get the max output from the array. Can't help with your other problem as I'm off grid.

Yeah, I'm aware of that now, that's why I mentioned it died on a cold night, not during PV production when one would most expect it. Yep, found that out too, only after it died though... school fees paid! I have rewired to 2S for my new King. Yeah, runs beautifully thanks, except for the standard firmware bugs of course.

I also have a 5KVA with max SCC voltage of 145V which I ran on 3 panels in series for almost 3 years with a Voc of 136.6V before it eventually died one cold, frosty night, but that lasted a lot longer than yours. It also doesn't specify an operating voltage range for the SCC though, only max 145V. Just mentioning because maybe the fact that yours specifies the operating range, it may be sensitive to the max 115V.

I have one very similar system I have been running for about 7 years now which has similar specs except the SCC is smaller and doesn't have the operating voltage range. This runs on 2x325W panels in parallel, yep that's 1S2P (no typo) with no problems charging 4x200Ah 12V gel batteries from PV (It's off grid, but my loads are small). Perhaps you should try running only 2 panels in parallel and if that works then you could add the 3rd in parallel too, otherwise you might only be able to run the 2 panels in series. Edit: P.S. my panels have a VOC of 46V and Vmp of 37V, so they are higher values than yours, but it may still work.

Everything looks to be in spec, the only thing I notice is that your voltages are quite close to the max 115VDC operating voltage of the inverter SCC. I'm not 100% sure how the inverter reacts to overvoltage there.

Didn't they teach you in school that buying the answers is cheating? 🤪 I already used up my 50/50, now I'm asking the audience, I'm saving my "phone a friend" for last 😁 Jokes aside, this has been a great learning experience on how serial comms work and using an adapter will allow me to connect to other batteries with different pinouts in future. At the moment all I'm wanting to do is record my readings when my battery is new and check them intermittently and if things get out of balance I'll worry about it then and maybe in the meantime they will add shoto support on the axpert king and then I'm sorted.

Yeah it did with mine too and assigned FTDI drivers and it seemed to work, assigned com port and com sniffer app could see it and send data, but when I couldn't receive anything from the battery or do a loopback test I went back to the site I bought it from and saw they say it uses a CH340 device and drivers (apparently inferior to FTDI), so I downloaded those and when I tried them I got BSOD. I think in the end Windows was right and the site is wrong and it's probably a FTDI chip (or clone maybe). After this I did more research on doing a loopback test with 2 wire RS485 and found out that it's not possible because it is set to "No Echo" so when the serial port is transmitting data, the receiver is disabled (Source1,Source2). I found out it might be possible to turn on local echo on the ftdi chip, but that involves changing a bit in the eeprom and I'm not going that far just yet. I might try and wire my USB-RS232 straight to the USB-RS485 and see if I can send & receive that way just to see if it works and then I'll know if I have the correct driver and can move on.

Setting 13 will only come into play once the voltage for setting 12 has been reached. It is the voltage at which you want to allow the battery to be used again. So once you reach setting 12 the inverter will switch to utility and charge the battery until you reach setting 13 and then it will use the battery again. Not quite yet if you are coming out of setting 12 and charging up, it would need to reach 14.6V and stay there for a little while (depending on your Ah and charging amps) before it is fully charged i.e. complete a full charge cycle, but 13.5V is fine for this setting if it is not happening all the time as the battery will likely get a chance to fully charge once there is PV again.

This is very interesting info indeed, I have a rs232 to usb, but never bothered to try it, I will when I get my system running again, hopefully this week. I tried the rs485 converter with a few different com sniffer apps and got absolutely nothing, but it's not possible to test if it's actually working without another device because it can't send and receive at the same time. I tried installing the drivers the supplier's site recommended, but just got a blue screen of death, so gave up after having to reinstall windows. You say you managed to read the pack info which is all I am hoping to achieve right now, so I'll have another crack at it. Thanks!

My guess is some sort of flashing, my panels aren't on my roof so I've not dealt with that at all.

I had a feeling you were a diy kinda guy like me when you mentioned the combiner box 😀 Always safer to go with something pre-built when it comes to protection and you learn a lot more when you do it yourself rather than paying someone else. The bonus with the 2 string combiner is, depending on how your panels perform at your location with angle etc. you may even be able to get up to 10 in a 5S2P configuration to squeeze out the extra watts.

I'm not sure that would work as they are technically different hardware protocols and likely expecting different software protocols too. I can't test that as I don't have a RS232 port. What I have managed to gather points to this being a full-duplex vs. half-duplex issue. RS232 is full-duplex (can send and receive simultaneously) and RS485 can be both. With this type of adapter there is only D+ & D- Tx & Rx, not Tx+, Tx-, Rx+, Rx- (& GND) like the 5 pin adapter. Apparently the Tx+ & Rx+ (also Tx- & Rx-) are joined on the board which makes it only run in half-duplex (cannot send & receive simultaneously) mode which doesn't work with these batteries or any setup requiring full-duplex. I found this out eventually because it is not even possible to do a simple loopback test with a jumper cable, even though the site I bought it from gave instructions how to do it (never mind that it uses completely different drivers too, but that's another nightmare). Edit: Correction: we are using half-duplex (2 wires), full-duplex uses 4 wires, but it still stands that the joining of the wires on the 2 pin usb converter messes with the way it works as far as I have been able to find.

Thanks for this valuable info, good to know pbmstools works on rs232. I tried for a couple of weeks to get rs485 to work (my bat only has can & 485) and tried every possible combination of pins and a bunch of software and my conclusion now is that it's my cheap USB-RS485 converter with only 2 pins, so don't buy one of these if you try it. (edit2: this was an incorrect assumption) If you do manage to get RS485 working, then please update here as then I might consider buying another converter. Edit: also kinda confirmed by @TheoVogel in the image above with a 5 pin converter Edit2: this was incorrect, I did manage to get this adapter working in the end, see further below.

Yes, you should only need those 2 wires for it to work. Bummer that it didnt help, it might be a software issue between versions or something.

This is probably because you are now charging from PV only during the day and also powering the house from PV during the day, so it will take longer to charge depending on your loads. These 2 fields brought to my attention that this is not the same as the axpert types I know. I've read the manual and I see that these affect the way SBU and SOL settings work. I'm not familiar with this menu, but at first glance it looks like field 20 will never be reached as you have the DC cutoff at 48V, try changing field 20 to 48V also. You may have to tinker with these 2 values to get things to work as you want, but that's all the help I can offer unfortunately.

Oh man, this gets confusing because it depends if they are talking about the pins on the port on the battery or the pins on the RJ45 plug on the cable because they are often counted in opposite directions. The Dyness manual doesn't make it clear which they are talking about, but because they count from 1-16 in the table I expect they are going far left to far right. So pin 1 in the battery port is far left and that corresponds to pin 8 on the RJ45 as per the diagram in the BX51100 manual: I have just checked the pylontech cable that came with my king using a multimeter against the BX51100 pinout in the manual and it is the same. Using the numbering of the RJ45 plug as in the image above, it should be pin 7 on the bat side goes to pin 5 on the inverter side and pin 8 on the bat side goes to pin 3 on the inverter side. If that's what you have and it doesn't work then the only thing I can think is that you might have a different version bms that the inverter doesn't recognize (I've seen this with Narada batteries on here).

By combiner box, I understand something like this with all your protection in 1 box, ready built as that's what I use, maybe I'm using the wrong term. I notice now that this is only a low voltage unit (135V), not sure if it is available for higher voltages or what you were thinking of getting. You could get your installer to wire you up something similar in a db box next to the inverter so you have the necessary protection, especially a breaker for when you are adding panels later on.

Aha, yours was more obvious than mine... just wondering if you've tried this option from a few posts up (you didn't mention it originally) as it seems the dyness is different to the pylontech: