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If peak shaving is available on Solis GEN input then it's definitely the best way to go.

Hi @biometrics I was using generator + inverter running in off-grid mode roughly 10yrs ago. The brands I used were different, but the basics are still the same. If the battery is partially charged and we’re on generator, when I boil a kettle will the inverter blend battery and generator power to supply the load? Kettle can draw more than the inverter generator. No. Inverter in off-grid mode, when charging batteries from a genset connected to AC IN, can just charge batteries. It won't generate any additional power for appliances. What settings should I change in the Solis app. The most obvious is the max battery charge rate. Currently it is set to the nominal 50A (max is 100A). If the battery is 50V and I want to charge at 500W then I need to set it to 10A, correct? My inverter, which is not Solis for a shame, had 2 settings: max charge rate from PV max charge rate from AC / Genset You need to change the latter. That leaves 1,500W spare for the house, correct? Yes, theoretically. But be carefull not to overload the genset. Personally, I would not use 100% of rated power. IMHO this 2kW genset is too small for serious application. Mine old was 8kVA gasoline inverter-genset. The thing is that you don't want to charge batteries with just 500W of power, since it would take ages and generators are pretty inefficient. I would try to charge as fast as possible while staying in the most-efficient range of the genset, in order to shorten the engine-running-hours and save the fuel. Will the inverter automatically know what the generator can output? No. You need to set "max charge rate from AC", otherwise the inverter will overload the genset.

I've seen this issue in 2 cases: 1) There was a Link0/1-cable problem betwen the batteries in the stack. 2) Batteries in the stack had too different firmware from each other. IMHO, this looks like a case #2. You need to flash all the batteries to the same FW version one by one. Just take care of chipset as old ones will have a different chip and therefore will use different firmware BIN image. But the ZIP flashing method should take care of this.

Yeah, I saw issues just like this in the past - RCD on the input side of inverter tripping when switching between modes. Not on every try, but pretty often. Just to emphasize, these are RCDs, not MCBs. So it's not a spike or overcurrent, but in most cases the RDCs trip because of imbalance in current passing thru L vs N line. Which is normally caused by leakage current, or by shorting PE+N after the RCD. Root cause: Internal grounding relay (PE+N) of the inverter must be closed in the off-grid mode, but open in the grid mode. When inverter is switching between modes and connects AC input to the grid before disconnecting internal PE+N relay, then RCD trips. Since it is unsafe to run off-grid mode with the internal relay open, the inverters are trying to minimize the time with PE+N relay open - and sometimes it happens that AC input is already connected while the PE+N relay is not fully opened yet. Then RCD trips. For inverters running in parallel it's even worse, as their mode switching logic is much more complicated. The behavior depends on the logic incorporated in the inverter's firmware. Some models are doing OK, others are causing troubles. The working solution is to put RCD at the inverter output, not at the input. RCD installed at the inverter input, especially when more inverters are running in parallel, is a free ticket for these troubles. PS: For example, in my country, RCDs are mandatory for output circuits, like light, sockets, domestic appliances, water pumps, in order to protect users. If these circuits/devices are being fed by the inverters, then there's even more strict requirement - must use Type B RCD, the one that can detect DC currents. But, AFAIK, we have no requirement here to use RCDs for inverter inputs - just MCBs are sufficient.

IMHO, both, the generation and consumption are two sides of the same equation. If the generation is extremely poor, there's no point in trying to optimize the loads. And vice-versa, if the load is too lavish and wasteful, it's better to optimize it, before spending more on additional panels and batteries. Speaking of "charging the batteries first vs. supplying the loads" all the systems that I know work in a way that if the load is ON, then the energy flows to the load, bypassing the batteries completely. Batteris are being charged only with the energy that is left after the loads are satisfied. This applies even to low-voltage systems (12/24/48V), where chargers are connected to the battery bus and inverters are connected to that same bus too. I see that the OP is aware that the energy has to be used reasonably and he's doing it already. Looking at his system, it's obvious that battery and PV upgrades are the next logical steps.

Most of the time it's not the fault of the App itself, Push service or server, but it's about the Android Power Management. This is how to test it: Open the Sunsynk App, browse it a little Close the Sunsynk App via switching to phone's home screen DO NOT ALLOW the phone to lock or screen to turn black Turn of the grid power, in order to generate Push notification Notification should arrive in a second or two BACKGROUND: Modern phones have very small batteries and power hungry CPUs, therefore Android OS introduced the internal mechanism called DOZE. When an app is not running in the front-end, Android puts it into sleep after a couple of minutes. Even worse if the screen is off or phone locked - then the most of the apps are deeply hibernated after five minutes or so. Therefore, their resident parts are not able to receive Push notifications. Then, there's a DOZE scheduler running, that wakes-up each app for a split of a second regularly, giving it opportunity to check for the Push notifications. On top of that, whenever Android "thinks" that an app is useless, it will kill it completely and clean the RAM too. In order not to scare users too much, there's a static internal whitelist that contains apps that should never be killed and never put into a deep sleep. This list typically contains PhoneDialer, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc. That's the reason why for example WhatsApp Push notifications are arriving quite quickly, while the other apps that the phone manufacturer did not put on it's list are starving. Sunsynk App being a perfect example. Shame is, that over the years multiple layers of Android Power Management were introduced on top of classic DOZE. Not to mention that silicon designers, like Qualcomm, Samsung or MediaTek, started to add their own "optimization" bloatware, that does very similar job of freezing and killing apps, but in parallel. For example, on the MediaTek-based phones it's called DuraSpeed. To add insult to the injury, there's no way how to check and configure all these layers in the GUI. At least DuraSpeed (not relevant for Samsung) has an entry in the phone's Settings, but sometimes it works, sometimes not. Battery Manager has GUI on some Android versions too, but there are a lot of phones where it's configuration does exactly nothing. Android Power Management is fully configurable only via developers CLI (like Android Debug Bridge). The only thing available to Samsung user is this: Go to the Samsung settings Select Apps Find Sunsynk App and click on it in the App info screen disable "Manage if unused" in the App info screen scroll to "Battery" and click on it in the Battery select "Unrestricted" Whether the Android Power Management will honor the above setting is never sure, but that's all you can do as an user. Good luck

According to the photo, slave inverter is not turned on. It's in solar charger mode aka Standby: You have to turn it on, using the switch located on the bottom of the box:

@Riyad179 UF5000? That is the model that I never heard of. If that's UP5000 or US5000 then you can find the upgrade images and tools in the FILES section of this forum. BTW: Normally, when Pylontech battery beeps and lights the alarm red during the start it indicates that there's HW issue. For example burnt DFET.

This exactly support current measurement error theory.

Actually, these two (SOC and current) are tightly coupled together, which would be why @TaliaB is pointing this out. SOC is being calculated via integration of current over a time, therefore: If the current measurement is not precise, the SOC will deviate a lot. Vice versa: if you see that the battery is reporting incorrect SOC, the most probable root-cause is the current measurement error. It's important to keep in mind, that the current measurement in BMS is working within a range 0,1A - 200A typically, charging and discharging combined. All of this using the same shunt resistor. For example 200A/100mV shunt has resistance of 0,0005 ohm and at 2A vs 1,4A it will produce 0,001V vs 0,0007V. This goes to the amplifier then to ADC. Therefore, it's basically impossible to measure small currents precisely, no matter how hard you calibrate. Lower the current, higher the error. Back to your issue: From my point of view, it's just the current measurement error caused by a different shunt type and calibration of JK vs PYL. In order to check it, just measure and compare current of each battery at a steady load using your Fluke, not BMS.

Yes. For this particular case the different orientation of 2 panels in the string of 8 does not matter. Will work the same. Some additional info: Based on how half-cut panels are wired internally and given the fact that the most of the objects generate vertical shadows (poles, trees, chimneys etc.), the best orientation of panels for areas with occasional shadows casted by nearby objects is portrait. For the areas where shadows are generated only by the sun hitting the horizon or hiding behind nearby buildings, the best orientation is landscape. This way, the horizontal shadow will turn-off each loop of cells individually. In portrait, horizontal shadow would turn-off whole lower half of the half-cut panel. Same applies to ground-mounted PV plants with multiple rows of panels, where the front rows will generate horizontal shading. On the other hand, portrait orientation has a significantly lower cost of construction and mounting hardware, which outweights potential benefits of landscape orientation in the most cases. Therefore, landscape is being widely used for the flat roofs only, where the space between the rows is the most precious resource. Here, portrait would cast long shades and would been prone to wind damage.

There are some inverters with dual battery input, for example certain Deye models can do that. But in your situation it does not make any sense to go this way. One of the advantages of your current 48V system is, that you can add more batteries in parallel as you go, without any hassle.

That's true. There always has to be kind of balance between the loads, production, panels, batteries and their C-ratings. Makes no sense to have batteries so large, that you will not be able to charge them within a week 🙃 On the other hand, from my experience, most of the offgrid PV systems have their batteries as the weakest link. Which is obvious - batteries were extremely pricey in the past. Now, while still not really cheap, they are affordable at least. So, for a lot of people it makes sense to upgrade their batteries now and then add more PV if they realize that their current panels are not enough to support the loads plus charge the batteries in a reasonable time. Well, it's the neverending story... "a solar itch" one would say 😉

Hi @Bran I assume that the batteries are something like "SOL-B-L-M200 Mecer Second Life LIFEPO4 Lithium Battery 12.8V 200A" and you have 4 of them connected in series. So it's 10kWh of storage. Do I get it right? If yes, then: These SOL-B-L-M200 are LFP 4S for 12V, 16S for 48V. BMS is just basic, nothing super-complicated and works without any communication with the inverter. So, just get any LFP battery that will be 16S for 48V, parallel it together with these four SOL-B-L-M200's and you're OK. The best would be to charge your existing battery to 100%, then disconnect and charge the new battery to 100%, then connect together. The new battery should be at least 100Ah x 48V (16S). Reason is, that if M200's BMS will suddenly disconnect, all the charge/discharge load of Axpert 5K will be directed to this new battery. Therefore, the new battery must be able to handle such a load. Adding 200Ah would be even better, of course. You did not asked, but I have to react anyway: East+north+west is great for feeding the grid, for PV without batteries, PV with flooded-lead-acid battery (FLA charges really slow at 90%+ SOC) and/or PV with a very small battery. In all of the above cases, designers prefer to stretch the production hours, because the small, weak, or non-existent battery is unable to store all the energy produced during the noon peak. Therefore, it's better to sacrifice the peak and spread the PV generation over longer hours. This E+N+W arrangement works excellent over spring, summer, fall, but has very poor results in winter. For a serious offgrid system in SA, with a large lithium battery, the best is to point all the panels to the north. Reason is that in the serious offgrid setup the spring, summer and fall are of no issue, but the winter is where you want to squeeze every watt of PV production, in order to survive. For offgrid that's designed to work during the winter it's battery bank has to be so large that it will be capable of running the loads for a number of dark days in a row. Therefore, it's best to squeeze all the winter PV generation (where north is the best) and store it in the battery in order to use it tomorrow...or day after tomorrow. I am not pushing you into rearranging your panels, just want you to know that if you will gradually increase your battery to something like 50kWh or more, then the E+N+W orientation of panels will start to be the winter bottleneck.

@roadrunner79 were you able to resolve the issue? If not, just try troubleshooting steps from this thread: https://powerforum.co.za/topic/20916-listing-all-pylontech-battery-modules-in-batteryview-v3028/ Also, your installation of BW might be corrupted or missing definition files. Worth to try a new download from the Forums Downloads section.