Youda

Good morning guys, so it's 8:30 in the morning and the panels are pushing almost 6000 watts: Well, it looks like the east-west orientation is not THAT BAD, as I was initially afraid of

That's true...exactly. I had to explain to my darling that there will be no new shoes for her that month... And don't ask me what was the revenge she came with...

Couple of days ago, I was asked about the max power that my system is able to provide to the AC loads. So I did a quick test and it looks like supplying 10.000 watts is not a problem: For this test, I turned on all the electric appliances around the house, even the floor heating. By that time, the electric meter that I've installed on AC-out reported 46.5 Amps at 230V. To be honest, I was not a brave enough, so after a four minutes I've turned all the loads off. Well, it's good to know that I can turn on a tumble dryer and dishwasher at the same time, while still having more than 50% headroom. Is such a system having a good ROI? The answer is NO. But it's a very similar feeling like to drive a decent car - usually, you're not running 160mph all the time, but it's good to know that you can, if there's a good reason to do it BTW, normally I'm having just 3 to 4kW peaks during the day:

Thats right. On the other hand, with such a steep angle, there is enough solar power from morning till the sun goes down. So I can make my morning shot of meth..err of coffee...without torturing the lithium.

AC coupling is the way that every solar inverter works (aka grid-tie inverter). Let's say you have 3 solar inverters. All of them are connected to the grid, so they work in sync with grid and therefore in sync with each other. If there's a load, you are not consuming the ESKOM power, but the power from solar first. If there's a small or no load, the generated power goes to the grid and you get paid for it. That's the simplest case of AC coupling. The AC coupling makes sense where you are allowed to sell power back to tje grid. You can create a more sophisticated scenarios, even with batteries. For example having one grid-tie synced with grid and connected to a non-critical loads. Then, adding a second inverter, ie Victron multiplus with the batteries. Critical loads will be fed from Victron. Clear?

I found the rails being the real pain in the ass. So the rails was the only part where I hired a contractor. First 18 panels I installed with a help from my friend, but he was badly sunburnt on that day, so it looks like our friendship is not as good as before Therefore I have to pull and mount rest to 72 by myself...

TTT, oh, please! No more panels! I've pulled every single one of them to the rooftop with my own hands. It was a terrible excercise

TTT, but you have to add a wiring scheme. Otherwise your post won't be counted

There are many ways how to sync more inverters together. With on-grid, they do a simple AC coupling. Speaking of off-grid installation, the most common is having a unit that is capable of parallel output using a comm cables. For example Mecer, Axpert, InfiniSolar ... these can do off-grid parallel.

Well, just to add some more info: Do I really need such a system? The answer is NO, but it's a real FUN to play with it! BTW, "Youda" means "redneck".

EmonCMS charts: Daily consumption stats:

DB: Monitoring: There's no "AmpHours" counter in the Fibaro, so I used "Btu/h" instead, sorry for that:

Hi guys, let me share my current solar LAB setup with you: PV modules The only installation option was the roof, which unfortunatelly has a bad orientation: one side of the roof is facing East while the other is to the West. So I decided to install panels on the both sides of the roof. Luckilly, the panels are not so expensive and are going to last for decades, especially when compared to price and endurance of batteries. It's 36x 275Wp facing West and 36x 280Wp facing East. All together it's almost 20kWp of solar modules, but because of the orientation, the maximum possible power is quite a bit less than that. Panels are wired in four high-voltage string, each having 18 panels connected in a series. The actual voltage of each string is 600V. Inverters, that I use, have a maximum allowed DC voltage of 900V, so there is a plenty of room for voltage increase that is going to happen during cold winters that we're experiencing here. For the DC cabling, I used 6mm2 solar cable. WEST: EAST: Photo from mounting the modules: Inverters All the high-voltage strings are connected directly to a pair of InfiniSolar Plus 5K inverters, that are paralleled together. So, there's no combiner box under the roof. Of course, there are fuses placed in each string, one fuse for positive and one for negative. Every string has a surge protection too (Citel). The inverters are set in OffGrid III mode, so they use ESKOM just for syncing their frequency with the grid, but the grid itself is disconnected (there's a grid disconnect relay in each InfiniSolar). Therefore no energy is supplied back to the grid, nor can it be physically supplied. When a power spike on the AC output of the inverter occurs, the inverter sends the excessive energy to the battery. Such a spikes occurs whenever a strong appliance is turned off, for example geyser or kettle. If the battery is completely discharged, the inverters can automatically switch to the bypass from the mains. In such a case, solar energy is used only to charge the battery until the battery voltage reaches an acceptable level again. So far, it has not happened, but since winter is comming, I'm awaiting this to happen soon. If the grid fails, nothing happens, the inverters do not need the grid to run. Synchronization of both Infinis with the grid is drawing 4 Watts total. Well, I'm looking forward to see the invoice from the ESKOM The combined power of the inverters is 10KVA, so it can run ANY appliance that I need, even some combinations are not a problem. So I'm running a washing machine, geyser, fridge with ice maker, tumble dryer, induction cooktop, etc. Not counting numerous computers, laptops and TV's. InfiniSolar Parallel: Backup Just to be safe, the LAB is backed by 3kVA UPS and the 8kVA genset with electric start. So I left the UPS to supply the light circuits, internet routers, firewall, DVRs, surveilance cams and other crap. The genset is wired in a way that it can supply the AC to the InfiniSolars in order to power the LAB and/or charge the batteries in a case of a real emergency. To be honest, I'm running a genset just once per month to do a regular "fire-drill", since it's cheap and loud as hell. Battery bank The battery bank is a 48V 200Ah LFP box that I've purchased as a product built to order. There's 16x100Ah Winston cell. So far, it works great, but my LAB has a night consumption of about 6kWh, so the battery is small in the long run. There's 16x 1A balancer, coordinated by a central BMS. The BMS has a small OLED display, so you can check the SoC, AmpHours, charging current etc. directly by looking on the box. Monitoring BMS cyclically send all it's status and all the values to the UART interface. So I hooked UART with Z-Uno and pass the values through Z-Wave wirelles network to the home automation (Fibaro). The Fibaro is already monitoring all electricity meters that I set up on AC in/out. It's also monitoring and controlling a number of electrical appliances I have. And sice I wanted to have everything in the one place, I'm monitoring the RS232 interfaces of both InfiniSolars. Thanks to this, with just a cellphone I can see how the laboratory works while I'm on the other side of the world. For example, I can turn any appliance off/on or change the temperature of the heating in each room separately. Well, I hope that this supercomplicated system won't kill me in somewhere in the future. BTW, the geyser is operated in the same way - Fibaro turns it on when the batteries are full and there's a lot of sunlight. Values from Fibaro can be easily transferred to EmonCMS, so I do in order to keep a history charts. In each InfiniSolar, I have an SNMP Web Pro Card installed, so I do not need the SolarPower and SolarPower Pro software at all. Built-in webserver on SNMP cards is quite usable, and in fact you can also set up parallel mode with it's help. The downside is that after a few weeks the SNMP card got stuck - obviously the watchdog circuit is missing. At first I thought that one of the cards was faulty, but after the second card experienced the same issue, I realized that it is "a feature". 36x PV module delivered:

Well, the display on the Infini Plus is a bit different. All the values and states are shown at the same time so there are no "pages" you can scroll through. By using 4 buttons, you can walk thru this single screen and change the type of info displayed. For example, you highlight "AC Output" and then you can switch between kVA, KW or percentage. AFAIK, the Infini parameters cannot be tuned without an external software (contrary to Axpert, where one can controll the machine just using built-in buttons and display). Attached are the screens from my two units, master and slave when running from the battery with PV switch OFF. So I had two units paralleled during the day, put in bypass, with a battery disconnected. No charging, no load. Older kept it's 33° temperature. Newer went to 44°C, but not higher. In the evening, I've attached the battery and allowed discharging. No charging, no load. In a couple of minutes the newer went to 60°C and now it's turning blower on/off. Waits a minute, then turns blowers on just for a second and immedially turn them back off. It's funny, instead of keeping calm and steady airflow, it's screams up and down like a trapped coyote I'm looking forward to receive some info from the shop tomorrow...

Hmm, here's the SolarPower screenshot and output for couple of query commands. But I'm still struggling to find "U1 display screen": ^P004VFW (CPU1 version) ^D017VERFW:00001.01 ^P005VFW2 (CPU2 vesion) ^D018VERFW2:00001.01 ^P003MD (device model) ^D037000,005000,99,1,1,2300,2300,04,120 (Infini-Solar 10KW/3P 5000VA) ^P005PIRI (rated info) ^D0452300,500,0217,2300,0217,0100,0480,2,01,0,1 ^P003DM (machine model) ^D006151 (Hybrid type AS4777)

Hi Coulomb, Thanks a lot for the code analysis! I left both units running in bypass overnight and they behave differently. Older have the fans slowly rotating all the time. Temperature 34°C. Fans in the new one stand still. Temperature 46°C. AFAIK, the InfiniSolar Plus 3K 5K and 10K are one family of machines. InfiniSolar Super 4K and E5.5K are side branches with some major differences. Therefore, when there's a firmware update for 10K, an update for 3K is released too. On the other hand, since all these units are utilizing master/slave microcontroller architecture and are being controlled by the same software, I mean SolarPower/SolarPower Pro, I would also assume that the codebase is more-less the same. Coulomb, can you navigate me where the "U1 display screen is", please? I'll take a screenshot. BTW, I see that you are patching Axpert fimware releases for some time. Why the hell Voltronic did not fixed the charging bug yet?

So, when in single mode AND (load > 2KW OR charging=true) then fans are spinning, else they stand still. This is different to the older unit, where fans are spinning all the time, adjusting the revolutions up/down according to a load. Reset to the factory settings did not help. So I will assume that the newer unit has a different internal setting like the Plonkster noted. Anyway, I've already mailed the shop as I'd really like have confirmed whether it's okay or the unit is faulty.

Quick update: in the single mode it's cooling okay. Not an airplane, but fans are spinning at least. Will investigate further

Hi Plonkster, you're right - it's not just about firmware, NVRAM bits come into play too. But the top of the box was really hot to touch. So after the max temperature has risen to 64°C, I turned it off rather. Hmm... maybe I can try to run this one in single mode and put some decent load on it, to see if the blowers start to react...

Hi Chris, I was lucky as both units came with the same firmware: Main FW version 00001.01 Secondary FW version 00001.01 SNMP FW version 1.0.6 To be honest, I think that there's no other FW version for 5KW units. I saw updates for 10KW and 3KW, but no update for 5KW

Today's morning, I found out that during startup the blowers on top start spinning, but they stop after 5 or 10 seconds. Inverter works normally, and produces no error. Here's the photo taken from the top with protective mesh removed - inverter is powered-on, but as you can see, the fans are standing still: Notes: Because they are spinning during startup, it's not a bad controll chip. Because inverter is able to report internal temperatures, it's not a bad thermal probe. Strange is, that these fans have sensor wires built-in, but the inverter is not producing error while they stand still. A firmware bug maybe? Yes, it's a brand new unit, so I can take the box from the wall and ride it back to the shop. But I feel that this might need just a quick fix, so no point in moving 30Kg beast back and forth and undoing all the copper wires... Any good ideas, please?

That inverter is definitely defective. I've just compared the startup sequence of the both units, and despite having a same FW version (which is a must for parallel), they behave diferently. The old one is much more noisy on start, while in the new one there's just a small internal fan spinning, but the three big blowers on top are quiet.

Hi Nicholas, FYI, Infini10K is one of the few "assymetric" inverters on the market. It can generate a different amount of power in each phase. Well, if you need 3 MPPT inputs, then I do understand why did you choose going this way.

Hi guys, so I've just installed 2nd InifiniSolar Plus 5KW next to my 1st one and tied the two in parallel. They are syncing nicely, splitting the AC load 50/50 etc. So far, so good. Strange is, that my older unit has it's fans constantly running, while the new one is almost silent. The older is reporting 32°C inner temperature and 34°C max component temperature. The new one is reporting 44°C inner and 64°C max component. Hmm, does any of you experienced such behavior too? Thanks! Youda

Reading this, I would say that safest way for Nicholas will be to buy a 3x Eastron meter and perform this as three separate 1P deployments. Instead of going for 1x Eastron and 1x modbus server and then tuning the whole solution. By the way, Nicholas why you are against deploying a single 3P inverter? That would simplify the setup a lot. And introduce savings on cabling and overnight self-consumption of the 3vs1 inverter....