root

I would solve the problem with a Sonoff POW R3 reflashed with tasmota. Set the heatpump controller to always be ON and control when it receives power using the Sonoff.

I'd put it back to what it was when it showed the error so you can see the error in the new position otherwise they will say the position was the problem!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/badly-managed-unrealistic-ban-installation-solar-asbestos-africa-rvdbc/?trackingId=ZAQxeSRzRsSRPB4YLCrNXw%3D%3D
 
Another view on solar on asbestos

@FrankcFtypical explanation from Sunsynk....
FW have 2 battery profiles for their HV series of batteries. One is Atess HV and Sunsynk HV. Atess has 2 options for HPS and PCS. HPS uses High Voltage but lower VOlatge than the PCS. The PCS uses the HV+ battery which supports higher voltage range. 
My point is that FW only has a single Battery profile for Sunsynk. The voltage range is constant not as the Atess which has 2.
@Evan9707 You needed a Transformer based Low frequency inverter because you have High inductive loads. Typical of the Sunsynk is that is it High Frequency and this is not well matched for these loads. 
The magic is in the large transformer on the Atess Equipment...It makes the load not drop, the load stays Uninteruppted.

There is also the issue of keeping the batteries balanced, most cheap inverters just charge both in series. Check the maximum charge
voltage does not exceed 28.4v at the tail end of the charge cycle. A bad BMS can wreck a battery. I would rather fit a single 24v lipo with the right protection.

Stage 1 assessment.
I did the initial assessment at the guest farm and what a surprise as how thing's are done. The inverters and battery combo was purchased through a reputable solar company but the installation was done by local electrical contractor that i would rather not name.
This farm cater for around 30 to 36 guests at any time with 12 guest cottages no self catering, 3 meals done from kitchen that is gas reliance. Each cottage was initially supplied by a 1000va inverter powered from a 12v 100ah AGM battery installed inside the cottage right next to the main bedroom and the fan never switched off. After many complaints the inverters was moved outside, but still audible in the quiet, tranquil environment. So next step put a label on the inverter to switch it off if noise becomes unbearable. Below pictures i took when staying over and believe me the noise was irritating.

 

 

 

Read the label above🤣

 
Stage 2 the new installation.
4 x 12kw3Ph Sunsynk inverters supplying independently. 3 x inverters servicing the cottages and 1 supplying the dining room. 4 x 20kwh FW in parallel supplying the inverters. 60 x 460w Seraphim Siv Series solar panels connected 15S1P 4 strings(30xNE and 30x NW) each string connected to Mppt1 on each inverter. Each string Voc 622.8V+16%(-20°C)=722.5V.  It appears the  lowest  temperature that has  been recorded  in Southern Africa was  in  one  of the valley's  of Lesotho, just to the west  of the escarpment (near Sani Pass) close to the guest farm hence the reason for such a low offset on solar. 
This time around i used good old fashion cable racks to accommodate the 95mm² battery cables running some length to each inverter.
I used exactly the same solar panels (Seraphim Siv 460wp)in the Checkers CL 33 install as they perform very well.
I occupied their "sort off" board room for the inverters and batteries 😜

Sort of "board room"
 

 

 

 

 

This above distribution was re-done twice hence the labelling "work in progress"

4 curcuits used 2 spare. 
The most difficult and annoying part off this installation was the laying of the 165 meters of 16mm² SWA cable different lengths different directions.😩
 
 
 

This is the new style of installation no airflow!!!!

I wiil go through my foto gallery and see which close-ups i can post.
I did originally advised to install the ATESS system but the Guest farm owner was adamant to have seperate power sources, as i should have mentioned they get a lot of lightning strikes on the farm. The "board room" is almost a Faraday cage as there is four ATS(air terminations installed) with 8(DCS) down conductor systems installed using 25mm² wires to 8 difrrent earth spikes.
 
The batteries One(top left) LiTE is programmed as the Master and the other as slaves. The parallel LiTE’s is connected to each other via the CAN Bus using standard LAN cable. Non Can interface with inverter back to grid 51v inverter utility charger set to 53.5v and the SCC set to 55.8v.

@Steve87 @Moffat @MikSA @root Guys, I had a lengthy debate with the director of technical at Sunsynk and it turned out well. They had one of their top techs log into the system and do a thorough check into the backends, which us plebs can't access. Here is their feedback

Findings on the practice.
The battery profile is not setup correctly , the nominal voltage for this battery is 411Vdc , yet the battery is only charging up to 331Vdc @99SOC , Please contact freedom won to log into the battery and check as well as update profile and adjust the battery profile. Now I have to contact FW AGAIN, and ensure they go out to site and let me know what they can do to resolve the issue. (Note, FW has logged into this battery multiple times and have always assured me they find no fault) 

Vital to being able to keep within the inverter output limits (and avoid importing expensive grid power unnecessarily) is having the means to display the relevant information in an immediate and accessible way.
That's what I told my wife, anyway.  Really, I'd just scored a bunch of old RC servos on ebay for £5 and I wanted to play with them. 😉

 
In context:

 
It uses 6 servos, a Wemos d1 mini clone and a tri-colour LED.  Dial faces are 3D printed, with a filament change from white to black (which turned out much better than I imagined, TBH).
The servos only had around 90° of sweep angle, so I 3D printed some little holder/gearbox things to get over 180° and provide a shaft for the needle to go on, plus some 'steampunk' needles.


 
All run buy the obligatory D1 mini and held together using the very latest in 'twist and tape' technology.

 
Yee-haw! 🤠
It gets fed the data from 'node-red' running on a Victron CerboGX via UDP packets over WiFi, updating as often as the data changes (approx 3 second intervals).  The LED changes colour according to state, so 'All OK' is green, 'You're getting very close to/exceeding the inverter output limit, so if you don't want to pay for grid, don't turn anything else on' is red, then blue for 'dumping power into the hot water tank'.
It's by no means silent in operation.  I originally made a single-servo version for just PV generation and coded it so that the meter movements were gradual (a kind of PID to get from one value to the next), but apparently it 'sounded like we have cockroaches' when it made it's ticky-scratchy transitions between values, so the big version just jumps between values with a 'zzziiiiiup!' sound.
It's actually quite reassuring to have an audible indication when the sun comes out for 5 seconds, or it starts charging at night.
I'd also put a little radar sensor in there, with the aim of having it detect when there was nobody around, so it could stop displaying to save power/noise.  Unfortunately, that meant that every time you entered the room, all 6 needles would suddenly move at the same time, making you jump out of your skin and spill your horlicks, so we just leave it 'on' all the time now.
There's also a basic web UI, so you can see the same data on your phone or whatever, plus it's useful for troubleshooting:

 
I had fun and learned loads making it - and now it's become a family game to try to cook dinner without making the red light come on. 🙂
 
Libraries used are 'ESPUI' and 'servo', plus 'arduinoOTA'.  Code, FreeCad file for the gearbox & stl file for the arrow-head needle are all in the attached zip.
Power_meters_v2..zip

Background: 
I have certain 'trust issues' when it comes to utility supply companies.  Whether it was 'Good Energy', who helped themselves to £3,000 from my bank account in the week my first child was born (they apparently transposed two digits on a meter read), or the corporate behemoth 'Octopus Energy', who in the 18 months I was with them (and since) never once managed to produce a bill that reflected the tariff or rates that I was supposedly on, or any number of sh*t-weasels in between, I don't know.  Suffice to say, they all rank somewhere beneath Estate Agents in my book.
So I like to keep tabs on my energy consumption.
We have a 'SMETS2' Smart Meter (Landis + Gyr E470) on a dual-rate tariff.  Supposedly, this meter transmits usage data (over the 3G network) to the supply company (via the DCC, or 'Data Collection Company') and it can communicate over the HAN (home area network) with a display unit, to give the customer real-time information on consumption, daily totals, costs etc.
In practice, though, forget it.  Even if they did eventually send me the display device, the data is only available via the display screen.  There are other (expensive) ways of obtaining the data that require a third-party company/device, but not for me.  I suspect it's only half-hourly logging, anyway.
The only useful information that I can get from the meter itself are the two kWh (import) registers - visible on a tiny LCD panel, and accessible through an undocumented, utterly convoluted and unmemorable series of ninja key presses on the two buttons, plus a solitary blinking red LED that blinks once per Wh imported.  Smart, huh?
 
So, I built a device to count the pulses with a 3DU5C Phototransistor, using a L239 comparator to clean the signal and send it on to an ESP8266 (I used a wemos D1 mini, as it's what I had).  It's largely based on this project, but adapted for my needs (influxdb).

The D1 mini connects to my wifi network and every minute logs the number of pulses it's seen since the last successful database write.
It also calculates the current Wattage (simply by multiplying the duration between pulses - (1000 / pulseDuration) * 3600.  It also writes to a 'night' db table when the rate changes, then a 'day' table when it changes back - the actual switching of rates I opted to do via a single UDP packet sent from a 'node-red' instance elsewhere, to avoid having to do any time keeping or NTP synchronisation on the device itself (I wouldn't want to risk missing any pulses).
I found the pulses from my particular meter to be around 23ms long, so adjusted the MIN / MAX in the code accordingly.
Naturally, there is an LED, which changes state whenever a pulse is detected.  All housed in my trademark little grey plastic 3D printed box and clipped to the front of the meter (you can just use blu-tac, if you can remember where you put it) and powered via the micro-USB on the D1 mini.

Viewed in Grafana, I can select any period of time and sum the number of pulses to get a fairly accurate idea of consumption over that period, enabling me to very quickly check my bills.  I've also hard-coded in (to the Grafana dashboard) my tariff rates and standing charge -  It also writes a '1' to a separate db table every night when the rate changes, to enable easy calculation of the daily standing charge.

You can just about see above that at around 4.45am, my router rebooted (so communication with the db failed for about 90 secs), but the pulse reader just kept totting up the pulses until the db came back online, hence the thin spike.
I hope this is useful for someone, or if not, at least interesting. 🙂
The code (I use 'Platformio') including libs is attached:
 
Pulse Meter v0.05.zip

Broken washer-dryer story:
I am using washer-dryer combo with an integrated heat-pump from AEG happily for number of years. Bought first one roughly 15 years ago, and when it died from overworking, I bought a new model. Recently, I was doing laundry and realized that towels are not as fluffy as they used to be.
At first, I was thinking that there's a problem with the dryer part of the machine, as it's a pretty complicated device. Double-checked that, but the dryer and it's heat-pump was running okay. Since I am monitoring most of my appliances power consumption, I launched Grafana (https://powerforum.co.za/topic/2322-youdas-off-grid-lab/page/9/#comment-151001) in order to check for anomaly. You guess - it was there:
 
In the past, the machine was having a huge power draw at the start of each cycle, in order to heat the water:

Starting roughly 3 months ago, this part of power draw stopped showing:
Okay, the issue was obvious - the machine was not heating the water, which usually means that the heating element is "kaput" and has to be changed. So I bought a spare-part and changed it to make the machine great again
Autopsy identified that the old heating element was electrically interrupted, since it's resistance measurement was equal to infinity. Not only that the element was covered in limescale (which is pretty common) but this time there was a lot of fibre chunks too.
It's clearly visible that the element burnout happened exactly in the spots that were covered(heat-isolated) the most:

Following the successfull repair, I was thinking about two topics:
1) Why it took me so long to realize that there's something bad with the machine.
2) How to spot the issue ASAP in the future.
 
As of 1) the answer is, that during summer and fall, the temperature of tap water was not that cold, so the detergent was still doing it's job partially. But when the winter arrived, the temperature of tap water has fallen rapidly and reached unsuitable level, which led to my late discovery of the issue. Well, completely other thing is that any machine should be able to identify such a basic failure by itself. But it did not. What a shame.
Speaking of 2) I did a minor change to my existing automation script that is sending me PUSH notification every time the  machine finishes the cycle: now the script is logging the highest power draw achieved during the cycle and this value is being attached to the aforementioned notification. With this information, I'll be able to see immediately that there was something wrong during the last cycle.
Notification:

Of course, I can add a rule that checks highest power draw achieved during the cycle and send me an alert if the value will be less than 2kW, for example. But you know - I am too lazy to do it, despite it's just one line of code, technically
Youda
 

How the system works. I have done the assesments on the refrigeration side as this is all it is. 18 double door coolers and 2 double door freezers for ice and 1 display cooler. The idea behind the install, to run the fridges and freezers during daytime and power them down during evenings after the doors closes. The freezers within 5% margin between them will rise from -17°C to -12°C in 17 hours.( no doors was opened) The fridges was set at 8°C and would rise to 13°C some 14° in 17 hours.
 The temp of all the fridges was dropped to 2°C and after 17 hours we measured 9°C. This concept was approved as a means of power saving and there is no risk for product contamination.(liquor what could go wrong) The complete process is controlled via a Siemens Plc Simatic-S7-1500 that was programmed by myself using STL language. Should the freezer temperature rise to -5°C it will trigger the contactor either supplying utility or the gen if in LS at night. Futher to that the plc also controlls the fridge/freezer startup after complete powerdown to start up 1 minute apart to avoid huge start up current.
This concept if successful will be implemented at other liquor stores.
The Growatt covers the lights, tills paypoint machines and wifi during LS.
So @Bobster.it will only use utility if any refrigeration temp setpoint is breached and the plc will detect and take appropriate action . It also monitors current flow from each h-vac unit to ensure that if the temp rises it is not a fault on the compressor(breakdown). The plc gets a reading from the MPPT's,(CL33) and if solar output drops below setpoint it will decide utility or gen( Ls)
 

Yes, get a geyserwala. It replaces the controller on the wall and allows you to connect to it via a webpage or a app. Cost less than a R1000. Easy diy fit.

Their is nothing wrong with his batteries. One of my stacks went from 89% to 100% in less that 30 minutes today. I've not even looked at my others. That would show as near vertical on his graph!! (EDIT another went from 90% to 100% in 9 minutes).

Evening Folks
After seeing a post about thingwala and getting your geyser connected to the internet, I purchased a geyserwala connect.
The install was easy enough after watching the install video, my biggest delay was that the data cable was a little short, the installers of my solar geyser glued it to the wall. The Wi-Fi connects easy enough, but just be aware, if your IP addresses does not start with 192.168.x.x, you will need to set the IP in manually on the geyserwala.
Once online and the online token was installed the geyserwala worked flawlessly, I set in the setpoint temperatures and setup the timers and could not be happier.
The service was awesome. If you looking to future proof your geyserwise unit, geyserwala connect is the way to go.

Chmmmr with those batteries you can pull full power.
4 x Us3000C is 37amp each that is 148 amps in total
Up5000 is 50 amp each that is 100Amps in total
Total available amp is 248Amps. The 12kw max is 240Amp.
I would divide into 2 banks and run double cables from each bank to an busbar. From there to Fuses and inverter.
2 Pylontech cables will not be able to handle the current of the inverter. Please note that all cables should be the same length.

 

Sorry @root i see now your confusion Jhb has yesterday's date i will rectify

Look at the irradiance between Jhb and Cpt today.
 
 

I run two Victron multiplus 2 5kW units in parallel. In the Victron guide for parallel setups they stress the point that your DC cables running from a busbar need to be of equal length. BUT the also state that your AC cables need to be of equal length as well and NOT be over sized. There needs to be a bit of resistance on the AC side for the units to correctly operate in parallel. 
I know you have 2x Sunsynk units but maybe this can help.
To quote:
Warning against over-dimensioning the AC wiring
Note: Do not over-dimension the AC cabling. Using extra thick cabling has negative side effects.
Technical background: for a properly working parallel system, the AC current should be evenly distributed between the paralleled units. The resistance in the cabling helps with that and is needed for that; to overcome small differences between one inverter/charger and another, for example in the AC contact on the AC input. When the resistance in the cabling is too low, such small differences in resistance of the current path in a unit itself can results in a large relative difference. This results in bad current distribution.
An exaggerated example:
Using 2 units (A and parallel and using too good cabling, one might achieve a total resistance for Unit_A of 0.0001Ω and a total resistance for Unit_B of 0.0002Ω. This results in Unit_A carrying twice as much current as Unit_B. Using the same 2 units in parallel with, for the sake of this example underdimensioned AC cabling one might end up with a total resistance for Unit_A of 15Ω and a total resistance for Unit_B of 16Ω. This results in a much better current distribution (Unit_A will carry 1.066 times more current than Unit_A) even if the absolute difference in resistance is much bigger than in the previous example (1Ω vs 0.0001Ω). A side effect of over dimensioning the AC cabling can be faulty Power Assist operation. Out of all units, the phase master is in control and measuring the AC input current. And in case that current is (grossly) unevenly distributed between the paralleled units, the resulting total AC input current can end up being too low (under charging the battery).
https://www.victronenergy.com/live/ve.bus:manual_parallel_and_three_phase_systems

Sunsynk uses high-frequency switching to create a AC sine wave. This design is prone to dipping since it takes time for the control-loop to catch up and tell those mosfets to giddy-up.
Your battery is a tad small for this size installation. You are barely over the 1C battery/inverter ratio. 1.5C is the minimum in my opinion.
Funny enough I have friend with the same problem on a 8kw Sunsynk. Also dips and is undersized (1.275C) on the battery.

I really really tried to get off the grid, but failed. The winter weather here in the Western Cape doesn't make it financially viable.
I've got 12kWp on the roof, and 20kWh of battery capacity. There are days, sometimes multiple in a row, where my yield is in the low single digit kWh. I would need to triple my battery storage to be able to outlast such days.
So I'm grudgingly paying for my grid connection each month, even though for 8 months of the year I buy almost nothing.
 

After reaching out to Phylontech in China, it looks like my warranty will be honoured. Thank you to all for the feedback and insight into this issue. Below is the email reply from China. 
Hi Quintus,
 
After rechecking your case, I agree that overcharging is not the main cause of battery damage. After inspection, although the battery has been impacted by large currents, the current alone should not cause damage to the cells.
 
Sorry for the wrong judgment I gave before, I will contact Segensolar to prepare a new battery for you. Please note that when using a Victron inverter, it is best to set the charging voltage to 52.5V.
 
Best regards,
Chris

We use an ESP32! All the rest is a trade secret!😆

You are making the same mistake as in the Luxpower thread from the other day. Connecting the batteries together on their own with no charging source will not balance them,they will only slightly balance between each other if you have a major SOC difference due to the flat charge curve of LFP. The correct way is to connect them and charge them up even if they have SOC difference , the packs balance between themselves at 89% SOC. The reason for these over voltage issues in the beginning is because the (15) cells in a pack is not yet full balanced. 
53,2V is not too high . Its too high if your specific inverter overshoots this value . You need that higher voltage to keep the cells in a pack balanced . If its overshooting with CAN comms you may need to switch to voltage settings and dial the voltage in so you get 53,2V at the batteries BMS. Sunsynk had this issue a while ago where it was overshooting to 53,5-53,6V. They have since corrected this in a firmware update and now it never goes over 53,15V ,absolute most 53,2V. I would just keep using CAN comms and cycle those batteries more. The cells in that pack will balance out over time. 

It will not effectively balance the packs no. As an example say you have a new battery which comes at 50% SOC and parallel that to a 80% SOC battery , they wont balance fully as there is not a big enough voltage difference for current to flow. You want to balance packs the same way you would when balancing the cells inside a pack and that is by charging them up to 3,55V-3,65V a cell.