tdanzfuss

@South Easter, I agree the SMA settings were most definitely designed, worded and brought to live by Germans and not recommended for the faint at heart (is it really suppose to be this complicated?) Anyways - I would appreciate it if you can send me the details of the engineer that "conquered" your settings? Thanks!

Hi Guys, thanks for responding - been offline for couple weeks so apologies for late response. @Gatvol, no I'm in the Pretoria area. Do you know of an installer that can assist me? I did log a contact request today at www.SMA-Service.com so let's see if I get anywhere... @pvdw22 Thanks. But complete newb question - what do you mean by "312.05 in the setup" ? Attached is an export of my Sunny Island settings, According to my understanding my settings look a bit bonkers to me? Below is Current VS Proposed settings based on my understanding of p85-88 of the Sunny Island operating manual CURRENT PROPOSED Minimum width of own consumption area 35% 45% Area width for conserving battery state of charge 5% 5% Minimum width of backup power area 0% 35% Minimum width of deep discharge protection area 5% 10% Lower lmt deep disch. protect area prior shutdown 10% 5% Most productive month for battery usage range June profitable December profitable Something else that does not look right to me is there's a cable just dangling around between the battery cells, I think it is the temperature sensor - surely this thing must be attached to a cell or something? Link to image here Thanks for the feedback thus far, much appreciated! Solar nonsense.xlsx

Thanks for the feedback guys - I think I'll pull in some professional help from SMA. The settings are way more complicated than I expected TD

Hi Guys, I'm new to the whole solar/power generation game, so please be gentle :-) I recently purchased a house with the following solar setup: Sunny Boy 5000TL-21 Sunny Boy 5.0 1AV-40Sunny Boy 5.0 1AV-40 Sunny Island 8.0HSunny Island 8.0H Sunny Home Manager PV system power: 15.300 kWp Nominal battery capacity: 49,008 Wh Battery type: Flooded lead acid batt. (FLA) I'm trying to configure the system so that the batteries gets charged by the excess generated by the PV during the day and then run on the batteries during night time and only switch over the Grid if batteries run low. During day time the house uses relatively little power (it "idles" at around 800Wh) so my gutfeal is that between 10:00 and 14:00 the PV should generate enough electricity to power the house and charge the batteries. I've set the "Time window control for charging the battery-storage system" to charge at 4KW everyday between 10:00 and 14:00 to try and force the system to charge batteries during this period, but it seems like the system is ignoring me and the batteries are being charged early in the morning using Grid power and not during the time window I specified? I don't even know where to start and debug this? The net effect of current behavior is that my batteries gets charged by the Grid before the PV generates excess electricity that can be used to charge the batteries? I've also never seen the battery levels drop below 60% , but I can't seem to find a good report in Sunny Portal to verify this. Anyone familiar with Sunny Boys and Sunny Islands that can guide me in the right direction? Much appreciated! TD