tigger_na

I ended up pulling the trigger on Solar Assistant. What a pleasure this is! Compared to WatchPower, well, there's no comparison. I can see each time my fridge switches on, or the percolator is running. Magic stuff.

I'm now talking to Solar Assist (https://solar-assistant.io/). It's a paid solution, but ja, as long as it works I'm willing to pay. Is this a good solution?

I ended up pulling the trigger on Solar Assistant. What a pleasure this is! Compared to WatchPower, well, there's no comparison. I can see each time my fridge switches on, or the percolator is running. Magic stuff.

I ended up pulling the trigger on Solar Assistant. What a pleasure this is! Compared to WatchPower, well, there's no comparison. I can see each time my fridge switches on, or the percolator is running. Magic stuff.

Thanks guys. Shaun, I loved fiddling and developing and blowing things up, but now I'm very simply out of time, which is why I'd now rather pay than fiddle. But thanks for the info.
 

I'm now talking to Solar Assist (https://solar-assistant.io/). It's a paid solution, but ja, as long as it works I'm willing to pay. Is this a good solution?

I charge to 56.3 and float at 54.3 disconnect 49,3 and it works 100% for my battery. LBSA 5,1 KWH and battery temp very seldom goes over 34 degrees C also only charge the battery at 20 Amps.

Consulting the recommendations of my 15 cells LEOCH 48100TB that would be way too high. Coulomb also recommends the values I mentioned. However if you have 16 cells those values may be ok.
Disconnect at 51.5V? That would make the 15 cells pack unusable. Practical operational voltages are: back to grid bypass: 48V, back to battery mode 50V.

More or less. The problem with most BMSes are that once the 1st cell reaches the upper voltage charging would stop. It does not mean all cells are fully charged. Thus one uses a trigger from the highest/lowest cell but that is a false indication for the battery as a whole. 
Also we might balance at 2A while charging at 40A. This high current causes a cells or 2 to run away and charging stops. The same during discharge. One just needs to check the values on the APP to do fine tuning. 
AFAIK even keeping lithium at 3.5-3.55V will get them to 100%. You just have to see what the 95% level might be but bear in mind the charge and discharge currents affect the voltage seen by the BMS. 
I placed the picture of the per cell volts to take care of 15 or 16 cell batteries. 

Everyone is free to believe what he wants. My observations show me another picture. In this forum we can read of many user having problems with BMS communication to the inverter. It looks like there are more batteries mismanaged by BMS than saved by them. On the other hand inverters are well designed to manage batteries correctly on their own if settings are according to battery specs. Read also my thread "Are BMS reliable?".

I think based on what you have done so far there should be nothing left of a warranty. I am sure @TaliaB based his suggestion on that fact. I also use the JK and at times we have to accept the fact that companies designing great BMSes can produce a much better BMS than what manufacturers put in their batteries at the lowest cost. 

That won't make much of a difference in longevity with LiFePO4, except that it will make your SOC drift and possibly make your cells not balance. Just keep the temperature and charge rates down.

Why don't you disconnect the comms between battery and inverter then setup the voltage and charging current under USE. THEN: As you know your way around the guts of the battery remove the bms and replace with JK bms from Lithuim Cells then you have full control over the bms settings seeing you get no joy from the supplier. At the current voltage of 58.6v(3.66v/cell) you are going to damage the lfp cells.
https://lithium-cells.co.za/detail/429357?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwzZmwBhD8ARIsAH4v1gX6oX8_R0IvbkBt_vqg1-cSRHUBiVaFIiZ6UyN2_9cKoFDvryfa324aAu-REALw_wcB

I ended up pulling the trigger on Solar Assistant. What a pleasure this is! Compared to WatchPower, well, there's no comparison. I can see each time my fridge switches on, or the percolator is running. Magic stuff.

I'm now talking to Solar Assist (https://solar-assistant.io/). It's a paid solution, but ja, as long as it works I'm willing to pay. Is this a good solution?

I ended up pulling the trigger on Solar Assistant. What a pleasure this is! Compared to WatchPower, well, there's no comparison. I can see each time my fridge switches on, or the percolator is running. Magic stuff.

Thanks guys. Shaun, I loved fiddling and developing and blowing things up, but now I'm very simply out of time, which is why I'd now rather pay than fiddle. But thanks for the info.
 

My apologies, I was busy at the time, I didn't have the capacity to respond in full.
Axpert inverters typically work well if all you want is a UPS, keeping essential loads going during a power failure or load-shedding utility. That said, there are losses in efficiency with any inverter, charging batteries from AC (AC -->DC conversion), storing the DC charge (standing losses), and then converting it all back from DC to usable AC again. These efficiency losses means that It becomes expensive to just keep the lights on.
So you add some solar panels, thinking that it would be great to offset some of these losses using sun power. And it is, solar panels charge the batteries, and but when they are charged, they just sit there in the sun. So you decide that you want to use them directly to service loads, and they can, but the problem with most axperts is that they either use 100% Eskom power, or 100% battery power or 100% solar power, there's no in-between. This means that if you have a 5K Axpert inverter with panels capable  generating say 2500W DC, and your load is 2000W, all is good, the inverter will convert and use solar power to power loads. The problem is when a cloud happens along, and solar generation drops to 1500W. The axpert-type inverter will switch 100% from solar to grid, and if not grid, 100% to battery. This is true for most axpert-type inverters, although I have heard of some that can do limited "blending" of sources. The Sunsynk, by contrast, will blend any source depending on how it is set up. In the above scenario, it will still use the 1500W from the panels, but supplement it with 500W of power from the grid, battery, aux, genny or wind turbine. So it is far more efficient.
Another difference is that it is a true bi-directional hybrid inverter ( Sunsynk uses the term "Super Hybrid Parity Inverter"). The Grid and Aux input is bi directional in the sense that it operates as both an input and an output. So it can draw current from the grid or aux, and it can send current back to the grid / aux. It can also limit the load of the current flowing in either direction too, to a pre-determined wattage. This significant because, due to budgetary contraints, most homeowners cannot afford to put in a 20kW inverter, and so they split their db into essential and non-essential loads. Essential loads are usually quite light, and allow homeowners to reduce the size of the inverter to say 5kW. The non-essential loads are usually big current hogs (like water heating and pumping), and they are placed before the inverter, on the grid side, effectively being served directly by the grid before grid power even reaches the inverter. This also means that they are down when the grid power goes, but hot water is quite stable and doesn't change its temperature in four hours, and the pool won't go green immediately if there isn't any pump working, so this kind of works well from a functionality perspective. The problem with this is that it does not result in much efficiency gains or electricity savings, because the biggest current hogs are also the ones that are still serviced by the grid (when it is there). So homeowners either have to buy a bigger axpert type inverter, or get a smaller hot water installation, or change the element to a smaller one, or get a soft starter for the pool pump, and/or shift the load to the essentials side. The Sunsynk hybrid can safely export power to the grid side though, using a Current Transformer or CT coil to measure directional load (when the grid is up).
So if you have a 4000W hot water heater element, it can still be on the grid or non-essentials side, but the Sunsynk can pump 4000W of excess solar to it. The CT coil measures the power and the inverter will reduce power when too much power is detected going to the grid. Even better, if the Sunsynk inverter only has 2000W of excess solar, the element will receive the other 200W from the grid. So it is efficient. The same with the Aux port, it is bi-directional, so it can be configured to take a genny input, or act as an output or "Smart Load" as Sunsynk calls it, and you can dump excess solar power towards it.
Here is a video which explains it:
Also important is battery support, the Sunsynk manual lists over 3 pages of batteries that it supports, most with CAN or RS485 communications.
Another difference is the wide range of capacities that it supports. In addition to the ability for it to parallel (up to 16 inverters), it comes in 3.6K, 5.5k, 8.8K, and a whopping 16K for single phase installs, and there are 12 and 50K 3phase units available. Not even Victron makes such a wide range of self-contained units, their biggest is 5K.
Pricing is a little more expensive than axpert-types, but it is nowhere near the pricing of Victron, which is a whole lot more.
This probably covers the most pertinent differences between the majority of Axpert and Sunsynk Hybrid inverters, but it is certainly not all, and other forumites are welcome to supplement it with their favourite ones. There are many others, from its easy to use interface, to the warranty and support in South Africa, that are equally important. It's simply in a different league.
Please note that I am not affiliated to Sunsynk in any way, I am just an enthusiastic owner who discovered this brilliant piece of kit under two years ago. 
                 
   
 

You'll find much of the forum is using it