gLer

Yes please let me know if you manage to make a good comms cable and if it works. I'll then buy one too, just to have one that works. Solar Assistant is software that runs on a Raspberry Pi. They can sell you a Pi with SA preinstalled. Then you need a special RS232 cable from the Pi to the batteries and a USB cable from Pi to inverter. Very straightforward. If you go that route, hit me up and I'll talk you through it.
 

Hi - I've installed Solar Assistant like @P1000mentioned and it's been great so far. I can see exactly what my battery level is, and get Solar Assistant to automatically keep the battery levels up (even if it has to use grid on occasion). It mostly works fine, still not 100%, but I think unless you're buying inverters and batteries that are made to communicate with each other, and find installers who understand how it all works, you're always going to run into some issues (as I've had to discover the hard way). Thankfully we have tools like Solar Assistant to help us out, else it would be a real mess. 

Hi guys, resurrecting this thread. I have the same issue - no communication between Greenrich U-P5000 and RCT/Voltronic Axpert Max 8kw. Just installed Solar Assistant today and using Emulate BMS mode to at least try get an 'accurate' reading of battery capacity. Battery to Solar Assistant cable on the way which will give me real-time data on battery state. But I SHOULDN'T need to jump through all these hoops if the installer supplied the correct comms cable between the battery and inverter in the first place, right? (Or was even aware that you needed one...)
This shouldn't be rocket science and yet it feels like it is...
I also wish my inverter supported solar energy priority (so I could direct PV power to charge the batteries first and fill in the load gap with the gird until the batteries are full), but alas, I didn't know any of this stuff before I bought into the solar system rush.

This is also true. I've got just enough by the skin of my teeth with 10x540W panels and 2x5KWh batteries to stay off grid, and that's in summer. The system already costs me more each month (finance) than I'd be spending on electricity, but it's worth it to bypass load shedding and not have to rely on Eskon 80-90% of the time. Winter is going to be a different story. Adding another 5Kw battery and 10 panels blows any sort of ROI out the water, so I may just add some panels for the winter shortfall and suck up whatever on-grid energy I reluctantly have to use. 

Yes probably, but  if you want to export and make it count,  you will have to upsize your system in terms of capacity, and have the roofspace and the additional 5-10kw of additional panels. Thats a lot of money. Maybe there will be a long term ROI, but i for one am struggling with the exorbitant prices  just to have the bare minimum to provide for my own needs to cope with loadshedding and energy saving. 

These are off grid and hence cannot feed back into the grid. For that you would need a hybrid inverter.

Just not any hybrid as the term is used by sales staff the moment the inverter can also use panels or fitted with an AC charger. 
The true hybrids are the ones that can export. There is a lack of understanding the grid tied portion even amongst installers. 

Ah, in the first pics it was in the can port, all good. It could be the wrong cable, depends what cable it is, a standard straight-through lan cable won't work as the pinout is specific to the axpert. I'm sure SA will work just fine if you get the right cables with it, there are loads of people using it. Good luck.

Yes correct.
This is one of the common failures made when batteries are connected in parallel. The rating is per battery both charge and discharge so it needs to be multiplied by the number of batteries.