Mad Mike

Depends on what your BMS/Batteries want. There is a "default lithium" setting available on the Goodwe, but you can't manipulate the parameters using the app. If your pack can live with those settings (and if you can make up the right cable), then you're away.

Or if you want to run without comms you can use the "self define" mode. Which does allow you to edit the various parameters, but will ignore comms with the BMS.

Hi
My first project from laptop batteries, used or damaged.
Finally 45kWh 5040 cells
 
 
 
More Info:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/frBY7v1aT5d2QNFb9 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/pw.tech
 
https://6394943b4b212.site123.me
 
https://6394943b4b212.site123.me/moje-urządzenia-i-program-partnerski
 

Usually the Goodwe will charge the batteries from PV as long as 
1) battery not already fully charged
2) PV > load. 
That's in general mode. So during the day it should try to charge batteries from PV. Assuming the two factors I mentioned above. 
I have the latest apps, but an earlier firmware version. I don't have the problem you describe. 
We need to start with your data from the SEMS portal on a day when your batteries didn't service the load. You don't mention mention what batteries you are using, and their age. 
Also please check to see which mode you are running in (see explanation from @Tinuva above) and the settings related to the batteries IE what the app is reporting. 

McGuywer,
my take for what it is worth...
your mission statement is to reduce your electricity bill, focused which is great.
Get either the solar water heater or heat pump. That right there as a rule of thumb about 20% saving on your current bill.
Though not popular.... (I have my helmet on for the stones that may be lobbed my way!).... buy a petrol generator and if the budget allowed a diesel generator. This will get you past the load shedding hump in the short term. I can tell you that even with over 30kW of battery storage, Eskom has pushed my little system and after a week of continued load shedding I have had to run the little gennie during load shedding to give the solar time to fully recharge itself. Granted my panels have lagged behind my battery capacity but roof space is also limited.
Get the largest capacity inverter you can afford, a 3kW is nice but small if you intend to make a dent in your eskom bill. Add your solar panels and batteries as the budget allows. You will most likely run out of roof real estate long before the budget is exhausted!  Batteries will be your albatross,l but an investment worth making if you cycle the batteries everyday and do so agressively. I actually started with a single 2.4kWh pylontech and it would be flat every night by 10-11pm! Budget limitations meant that I change my approach to increasing capacity, so I started down the DIY path and started building my own batteries.
Enjoy the journey it will be very exciting.

I win 

System:
16X Canadian Solar 540w Panels
1x SunSynk 8Kw
2x Hubble Am-2's
1x Keto 1 with 200A fuses
1x N/E Bonding DB
70mm2 Batt Cables (Still need a decent Busbar) looking @ DIY
 
Items was ordered and most has arrived, waiting for the battery's and Keto 1 Disconnect.
Installed the Trunking and DB's yesterday. Will start wiring over the weekend as the panel brackets will only be back from Galvanizers in January.
 
 

Hi. Inverter model and name please. If the batteries are shot, you can rather sell them for scrap.
Imo, go for lithium. Wish I had when I got my system.
Don't feel bad for the basic question, my first venture into going off grid was a 1.2kva mecer pc ups and 10 7ah sliding gate batteries. I knew nothing.......
 

I have an Axpert Mk _ 5000  inverter. Used it for a year. Then the solar function gave in. For some reason the batteries fried.
BUT it was working perfectly fine as long as you disconnect the panels.
So, it still functioned perfectly as an inverter-charger as long as you don't worship the sun.
Free to a good home.
I also had x 3 Victron battery balancers (which worked perfectly before the Axpert fried the Omni battery bank)
- also to a good home.
 
whoever is first to respond gets it. But take it all. I cannot sukkel with item by item. My nerves are shot anyway.
 
The Axpert is perfect as a charger/ load-shed backup. Just don't attach panels.
I upgraded to Victron with great regret at my rash decision to connect panels to the Axpert.
Now you can have it for free - which does not reflect on you at all as the load shedding function is still perfect!!

Yes you are first if you can collect from 30 Dundalk Parkview?
send me a private mail for email and tel number.

If I were starting all over again, and if I knew what I knew now, I'd specify Pylontechs.

The batteries I have now may be good (or may not be, they've been taken away for stress testing after a sharp drop in performance over the last year), but they are a local brand and the inverter manufacturers don't know anything about them. 

With my Goodwe inverter I have to set up self-define and punch in each parameter - and forgo comms between the BMS and the inverter. Or set them to BYD which is a sort of closest guess that may or may not be good for the batteries or be acceptable to the manufacturer.

If I had pylontechs I'd just select the particular model in the Goodwe set up menus and that would be it. The inverter would know how to speak to them and how they like to be treated.

I picked one up on Takealot for R729. Arrived today because its from a 3rd party seller. Ordered last week Monday.
https://www.takealot.com/liitokala-lii-500-lcd-battery-charger/PLID48571102

Hello everyone,
New homeowner here, which inadvertently made me the new owner of a massive solar installation as well (well, massive in my opinion).
We really bought our property for the peaceful backyard, and also for all the extra's the omie added over the years because he could 🙂  This includes, the solar array generation plant!
After I have started reading into solar, this whole world quickly blew up into a VERY complicated maze to navigate with so many nuances. So I did what any other person would, started Googling and trying to understand as far as possible. I am not a technical guy, but my job lends me to understand difficult concepts that I am unfamiliar with - so I'm taking this as a challenge.
Loadshedding, funny enough, isn't a big deal (during COVID) in our neighbourhood due to us being close to a testing site which means we haven't had any the last year. That being said, with the state of my battery bank, I really don't know how long it would last me until SOC is achieved? I would ensure geyser + all major loads will be pulled from the equation if that ever happens (really just evenings as PV is strong and I operate off-grid in the day).
My aim:
Stabilisation of settings on inverters Getting the most out of my PV panels Not a lot that can be done here. Just hosed and wiped them down recently for the dirt layer. Removed 2 palms that was causing lots of shade on two major sets of panels 9am in the morning! Not sure why the omie didn't remove them after spending so much money 😕  Preventing further deterioration of the bad battery bank (EXPENSIVE to just throw money on it currently) Implementing a way to monitor my installation wirelessly (I like tech, and I like comfort in stead of walking to my garage every couple of hours). From what I can gather, a RsbPi + the ICC software will do the trick? Is this expensive?  
So what does this little installation have to offer on a 200sqm house? Let me oblige:
3 x RCT (Axpert) MKS-MKS+ 1-5KVA (15 kW) "hybrid" inverters, with two spares! 40 x Shoto 100AH battery bank -- already 3/4 years old and already giving issues (more on this below) 36 x (yes you read right) ILB HELIOS 255W solar panels On current readings, around 12:30 I get from the best placed sets (2 x 12 panels) 2.1kW and 1.9kW respectively. The other set around 1.6kW. So power throughout the day if properly managed, is totally off-grid.  
My wife, myself and the little guy depending on our wellfare are people that don't consume energy indulgently. Some house background to give context:
All lights fitted with LED 3w/5w My dad helped recently install a nifty new CBI Wifi timer on the geyser so that we can shift the load on our very normal 3kw 200L geyser. Heats up fully between 10 and 12 and then a top-up at 14:30....that's it! Working like a charm. Basic fibre, router and access point tech running 24/7.  Cooking (oven and ceramic top) only used really from 4-6pm. Kettle throughout the day. Alarm and electric fence running 24/7 Built in fridge and freezer that are 10-15 years old, so they are more power hungry (planning on ripping them out and using my more efficient Defy's) Dishwasher, washing machine and dryer is used throughout the day, preferably not in unison and not while the geyser is on. Load management 🙂 Borehole + pressure pump that only operates for the garden when irrigation system is on (planning to change this so that the house can use the water as well). Inverter settings rundown - firmware 72.4:
1 SOL 13 54V 2 70A 16 OSO 3 APL 23 byd 4 SdS 25 FdS 5 AGn 26 56,4V 6 Lf(?)E 27 54V 7 tfE 28 PAL 9 50Hz 29 42V 11 30A 30 ONE 12 46V 31 SbE Batteries:
Currently no fancy BMS and yes, I do know this is vital to prevent the current situation of how the battery bank looks. Relying solely on manual voltage readings which already have produced worrying results. I did a reading 5am in the morning when they were discharged to their managed SOC % to get an idea of the struggling ones:
There are 10 batteries below 11V readings (10.xx V all of them) There are 2 batteries between 11-12V Last battery in the bank is 8.46V! > My dad, with more knowledge than me on anything electrical, suggested we use a battery charger on the struggling batteries first to bring the bank more into unison, voltage wise. Acknowledged that there are definitive bad eggs which is influencing the whole bank which we might need to pull out, 4 at a time.
> Will be applying the manual approach for now to identify those which we need to remove. That is the approach currently, which we know isn't the ideal one. Any better ideas?
> Acknowledged, the best thing in the future will be to replace this whole bank with Lithium sets that have proper BMS in place. Just no there with finances, unfortunately.
 
In conclusion:
My needs are simple and currently being fulfilled by this massive installation, especially throughout the day. That being said, I would really like to preserve and ensure longevity on this due to the fact that so much money has been spent on this. That being said, I do not plan on investing massive amounts of money currently on this system (just bough a house, remember).
I tend to type books, so for those that made it to here, thank you and I do appreciate your time and knowledge!

unfortunately I have to say, that two of the small BMS JK-BD6A20S-10P are dead after a few weeks of usage in my 16s powerwall at the garage

 
both seem to have "lost" some batteries. The first BMS lost batteries no. 01, 02 and 09

 
I first checked the cable connections. I checked it twice and three or four times but could not find any problem.
So I replaced the whole cables but the problem staied.
 
At the end I replaced the bms  with the same, new type of BMS

 
but after few weeks it losts some batteries too, this time no. 01 and 16

 
Again I checked all cables but could not find any problem so defnitely a failure of the BMS.
 
Maybe a bad charge of production. In total I am using seven of this exact identical BMS and the others run just fine, some of them non-stop since one year.
 
I contacted the seller on Aliexpress, D.YU.K.B and Dykbhuang Store and he agreed to refund the two defective BMS after sending it back and so I did so

 
But because he did not confirmed the arrival of the package in time, the dispute was closed autimatically and there is no refund.
I wrote several times via contact form and the seller agreed one more time to refund the defective devices but now, six weeks later there are still just some delaying tactics and no refund.
 
I guess it's my fault because I thought the chinese seller has some honor and will hold his word, but it seems this is not true.
 
So all I can do now is warn you about this seller.
I guess next time I need a smart BMS or active balancer I will order at ICGOGOGO again. It's three or four bucks more expensive, but service is definitely better.
 
p.s.:
my powerwall at the garage is now up and running since two month with the third BMS and works very well to charge my EV

Got the sign-off from CoCT about a month ago, so my DIY solar project is finally done and dusted. Thanks to everyone on the forum that provided advice - I probably would have stuffed it up if it wasn't for you.
The whole project took about three months of evenings and weekends to finish, and was a welcome distraction from the current state of the world.
 

4 strings of 4 Canadian Solar 400Wp poly panels in series, facing NNE.
 

Another string of 4 Canadian Solar 400Wp panels in series, facing WNW.
All five strings are paralleled together for a combined 8kWp.
 

This is my main DB. CoCT installed a new split prepaid meter. According to the technician that installed it it has built-in reverse power blocking. I have tested it to see what it does when I try to feed in power in to the grid, and it charges me in both directions. That is perfectly fine in my opinion - much preferable to it tripping when there is momentary feed-in.
Grid power is measured by an ET112. There is a breaker that connects the main DB to the solar installation in the scullery:

Top-left is the AC DB. Top-right is the DC combiner box. Bottom left is the Multiplus II 5kVA inverter, and bottom middle the SmartSolar 250/100 MPPT. The SmartSolar was initially running a bit hot for my liking, so I mounted it on a 6mm thick aluminium plate which brought down peak temperatures from 82C to 65C. Bottom-right is the Victron Cerbo. The battery cabinet on the floor contains 5 PylonTech US2000 batteries for a total nominal capacity of 12kWh. I've set it to 80% DoD:
 
 

Close-up of the DC buses.
 

Close-up of the AC DB, with and without cover.
 


Close-up of the DC combiner box, with and without cover.
The geyser and oven, as well as the swimming pool DB are connected to the main DB, so those are unpowered when there is loadshedding. The AC DB in the scullery is connected to the output of the Multiplus, so all the essential loads stay powered when grid power goes down.
 

It's pretty straight forward.
First determine your budget and then what you want to achieve.
 
By the quote of what you are looking at I recon you are looking at a backup solution. You will need to calculate how long you want the backup to run and what the power draw will be if everything running from the inverter is on.
First would be an inverter. A 48v inverter would be ideal. Also consider if you ever want to upgrade beyond your initial requirements and if the inverter can accommodate this.
Batteries. Depending on budget and how long you want to be able to run on them, this would be the most costly. AGM is ok for a backup where you are not constantly cycling your batteries. Lithium would be best if you plan on expanding the system later to not just be a backup solution. Basically if you use 500w and want to be able to go through 4 hours of loadshedding you will need 2kWh of batteries. This however is not enough as they will completely empty after 4 hours. Ideally you only want to use 50% capacity of an AGM battergy or 80% to 90% of a lithium battery. For AGM batteries this would be 4kWh of batteries or 2.5kWh of lithium batteries.
Solar panels. This would be determined by the inverter in terms of minimum number of panels for the inverter to be able to generate pv electricity.
PV disconnect and fuse box. This will be between the solar panels and the inverter.
Battery disconnect and fuse. This will be between the battery and inverter
Changeover switch. To isolate the inverter in the event that you need to remove it.
Depending on how your DB is currently setup, you might need a few more circuit breakers in the DB.
Cabling. Various types of cabling to connect it all up. Mounting system for panels and other small odds and ends.
My own system is pretty big and I'm not an electrician. I investigated the options, read a lot and then started to compile a list of what I needed. I probably had 90% of what I needed before I looked for an electrician and basically told him what I needed him to do. If you come across as confident and informed, they will not try and hoodwink you into getting things you don't need or not inform you that you can use an inverter on one phase of a three phase system as you do not have any 3 phase equipment. It's like the jokes of women being taken for ride by their mechanic. There are some good installers who can provide a complete solution without trying to take advantage of the client. Maybe look through some of the threads in the Member installation section.

😀 can imagine! Hopefully it was lead-less solder wire!

Finally the last of 4 80P 14S packs is now done. I have posted a few pictures showing the individually fused cells. As done on the previously built packs I used 3Amp glass fuses soldered onto the positive side of each 18650 . The fuses come with long tails that have to be trimmed, so before soldering began I had to trim one side of each fuse to shorten it before attaching i to the 18650. The other side is then soldered onto the busbar. once I solder the fuse to the busbar I then trimmed the excess fuse tail to tidy uo the look. 
tomorrow is that day to get the 320P 14S setup in its temporary position and see out it behaves. This weekend I risk life and limb to try weld a frame together that will hold the whole pack up inside the server cabinet....

1. Aux output. You can have an essential and non essential output and configure them accordingly. You could use the aux for a generator input, micro inverter input or wind turbine input. 
2. Zero to home. You can send excess solar to loads before the inverter and basically zero the municipal meter. This can come from solar or batteries depending on how you set it up. 
3. Support. Their support is picking up and getting better. 
4. 2 MPPTs means you have more options in string configuration and directions with unbalanced strings on different MPPTs. 
5. No additional hardware required. When I looked at going blue, the additional hardware required to get the same functionality pushed the cost up significantly. 
 
These are my personal top 5 reasons for going with the 8kw sunsynk inverter. 

By January 2008 we realised that we are in for serious loadshedding in the long term. I then knocked together a little UPS with a 1500Watt pure sine wave inverter, charger and two 105A.hr batteries. That was before LED lights and batteries in garage door openers and gates. It served us very well until 2012 when we built a new house and wired it for having a UPS. Essentially we have 2meters of cabtyre coming out of the wall in the garage with a blue standard 3pin plug top (like the plug end of an extension cord). This is connected to all the consumers needing UPS during loadshedding. The plug can go into a generator, an inverter or into a nearby standard outlet point. But we typically have an inverter/charger system between the blue plug and the wall outlet. If in the rare case that the inverter may smoke, the blue plug goes straight into the wall. Because we are talking of loads well under 3000 watt, the blue plug and wiring through the house is 1.5mm2.

Today we have a Victron MultiPlus 1600VA installed as the inverter. 12V with 3off 105 Amp.hr batteries. (Why only 12V? Because sometimes a battery is taken out for camping and the home system keeps going on 2 batteries.) The biggest consumers are 2 Bosch fridges, 9 fluorescent lights that really should have been changed to LED by now, and 3 ceiling fans connected into the light circuits. A desktop computer, inkjet printer, 2x modern flat TVs, router/modem, 2x MiBoxes, soundbar, all lights in house (LED), burglar alarm, outdoor beams (another reason for 12V), gate and garage door motors, sewing machine, cell phone chargers, bedside clock/alarm, outdoor braai rotisserie motor and lights, mosquito repel devices. This is a long list of consumers, but only a small amount of them run at the same time. The obvious stuff that's not on the UPS circuit are microwave, oven (we have a gas hob, no plug outlets above counters in kitchen and scullery, pumps, air con, towel rail or ceiling heater in bathroom, plug outlets where heaters, vacuum cleaner, hair dryers may get plugged in.
Have never had the Victron trip or even give an alarm.

Using an energy meter, our consumption at the blue plug is 210 Watts for most of the day, rising to 700 Watts in the evening. The peak hold function of the watt meter shows 1200 Watt over a week, but the sampling rate of the Watt meter is unknown. If the fridges are taken off the UPS circuit, the peak during a week is 800 Watt.

I can thus highly recommend the Victron MultiPlus 1600VA for this application. It really is a simple DIY job - the most work being the wiring of the consumers back to the UPS. However, a word of caution; the Victron must be set up (via special cable, software and laptop) to work correctly with your battery choice - check that the seller is happy to do this for you.

So, on a good day, like yesterday, I generated 17kWh on the DC side, from my panels. I have 12*320 = 3,840W worth of mono panels. I had maybe another 1kWh I could've used, as the panels idled a little from 16:00 to 18:00 (and my panels are west facing, so I still have some power then). But I think I am pretty much maxed out on 18kWh. So the investment in my panels was about R60k, MPPTs and installation included. CoCT rates on the electricity used after 600kWh for the month, is R2.53 per kWh. So I calculate my ROI on that since my panels keep me out of that range (it is an overestimate on my ROI, but I use it as a "best case" calculation).
Therefore, I can save R45.54 * 90% per day on the AC side, on the best day. So I'll rate that down by 50% (prudently) for bad PV days, but also four out of the three weeks days where I probably won't get to utilise all the available PV. After a year of monitoring my system, I'll have better data to do an actual calculation.
That puts me on about R20.5 per day of savings, or R7,485 per year. Again, assuming Eskom increases in line with investment return earn on the R60k outlay elsewhere (prudently), I shall pay back my investment in about 8 years. BUT WAIT! You say. What about the inverter and the batteries? To me, backup power was a luxury purchase that requires to ROI but my convenience in having power. So it is excluded from my calculations. With an inverter and batteries thrown into the mix, my payback period (as I went Victron and spent R22.5k + R4.5k on the inverter and Venus GX as well as about R45k on the batteries) would be much longer than I expect my batteries to last. But that was never part of my justification for the panels or the purchase of backup power to begin with.

And walk around behind the family turning of lights the whole time, seeing every watt everything draws the whole time 😅
Welcome Guss, I am also new here, so much info on this forum that helped me a lot already

Hi
Dreaming about solar... not because of Escom, but because it's cool stuff. Never got so far to make the jump. The >100K always found another place where it was spend (sometimes on very big white elephants).

Today, I made the dive and transferred the payment of my first solar system. (With luck on my side, I will be dead before the panels read their end of life)
Sunsynk 8 6.4 BSL Bull JA Solar 405 Mono's and all the other related goodiest
  A very big thank you to the guys from Power Forum Store for the good prices, good courier costs and excellent service.
I will start a post on my build so that other can see how a newbie tries to figure out all this nice goodies.

 

Seeing as the 'smart' home bug has bitten me in a bad way, I've been working on integrating all the various bits of electronics in the house. One of the obvious things to get integrated is the power monitoring side and in my case, a Goodwe 5048ES inverter. I'm using Home Assistant as my automation system and there is integration for this available, but only to the SEMS portal. This won't do, as the SEMS portal isn't great, it sits in the cloud and it only updates every 5 minutes or so. 
Ideally you want to integrate directly to the inverter and get much more frequent updates, but I couldn't find anything that is integrated directly. Looking at the inverter there's a few RS485 ports available, so it might be possible to get some data off this. But it's also possible that these are only for battery integration or otherwise unused. So, I figured a more elegant way would be to try and talk to the inverter through the network seeing as it's sitting there already. Again, there's pretty much no information available on achieving this but I figured it was worth a try.
Running PV master on a mobile device and a packet sniffer running in the background, I managed to log some interesting data in order to allow me to talk to the inverter through it's network interface. I've made some progress, but this is very much a work in progress; decoding the data is a bit of a challenge but I think I'm about halfway identifying all the data. I'm posting this here as hopefully someone else has a bit more insight and can help filling in the missing blanks, or at the very least, it might help someone with a bit more smarts to crack it properly.
Basically, the communication between PV Master and the inverter is in the form of UDP packets with the inverter listening on port 8899. Because it's UDP, it's connectionless. There's no need to explicitly connect to the inverter (as would be the case for a TCP connection), it simply sits and listens for the relevant requests and then broadcasts back with the results. Nice and simple, although (because of the inherent handicap of the UDP protocol) there's no guarantee that there will be a response. In testing I've had responses from the inverter in most cases, but it did happen where the response went missing. So, you'll have to make sure your implementation is robust enough for this case and for ensuring that all the data packets do arrive and that they are complete. There is a checksum in the inverter's protocol in order to validate the data, but it's something to take note of.
There's a few requests you can send the inverter, and based on that the inverter can respond with things like it's model/serial, it's status or confirmations whens you change settings. For the most part I'm only interested in getting the inverter status. Interestingly, there's no authentication mechanism. You fire off the request, and the inverter will answer - provided your request makes sense.
I've attached a document outlining the information I was able to decode from the information request response from the inverter. Still a few blanks there but the results are encouraging. In order to get the response below, you need to issue the following bytes to inverter IP on port 8899: 0xaa, 0x55, 0xc0, 0x7f, 0x01, 0x06, 0x00, 0x02, 0x45. The 6th byte is the request type and the 9th byte is the checksum. For the purposes of this exercise I won't go to deep into the various requests you can send to the inverter. 

Aaaaand we have liftoff. Still a few bugs to sort out with the parsing of the power figures but success! There's a loooot more info available from the integration but I'll add that once everything has been nicely verified. The author really did us all a solid by doing all the Home Assistant backend stuff.