RikH

Ok, that means your battery is not empty. Than I guess @Coulomb is right by stating your battery wiring is somewhere faulty. Now I understand how you short circuited the battery terminals on the inverter. Well there is hope for the inverter but sometimes hope is just deferred disappointment...

Exactly. Or the lithium batteries are completely exhausted because when he connects them the voltage drops to 7V he said (due to charging capacitors?) and after that they slowly recover to 30V. Edit: when this is true the BMS should disconnect... What is the battery voltage when it is not connected?

Well there must be something wrong with the measuring, otherwise it is not possible to get half a volt difference. Did you measure the voltages yourself as well? Edit: are you sure the batteries are numbered 1 -> top, next 2, next 3 and the lowest 4? There is however a change you should make: put the + cable to the inverter on the top battery and put the minus on the lower one so you can be sure current is shared even over the batteries.

@iops, you cannot simply divide the Wh by 2 in order to get 50% DoD. You have to take the Peukert component into consideration when you use LA batteries. For that it is very easy to use the BMV.

Was that with the batteries connected?

That would be nice to understand what you mean. Its not clear. (Not to me at least...)

You should not be comfortable with that. I see in your screenshot battery 3 is half a volt lower compared to the others. How is that possible? Did you connect them in the right way? Can you make a picture of the connections?

@GerhardK83, dankje voor je reactie in het Afrikaans. Is zo leuk voor ons Nederlanders om te lezen! Ik heb gekeken waar @Jaco de Jongh mee kwam en dat ziet er ook goed uit. And it will save you a lot of hassle when you order it in SA.

I use this: golfplaat. If you're interested I can ask if they ship to your country. SA I assume? Hang'em under the roof. Silly joke... 😊

Quick update on the build. Yesterday my sons helped me laying the 18 new panels. Here some pics: And there is the first 6.120 Wp: So far, so good.

What is the logic of this?

So after all this time still no rain? Can't imagine but I'm from Holland. 😀 Anyway, did it work out?

Ah ok, now I understand.

Beste @Gabriël, wat is jik?

Hey Plonk, look on the road, not in the sky! Didn't you notice you drove on the wrong side of the road!??

Haha don't worry man! Is this geyser fed direct from your DB? In that case it shouldn't be that difficult to wire and automatically switch it.

It definitely is a 5k. In the next postings you will see more detailed foto's.

The panels that came from the porch are a little weird. Look at the specs: Umpp: 49,7 V Uoc: 60,4 V They where connected on the SMA as 6s3p and gave a little over 300 volt during the day. The new inverter can handle 900 V and 10 A per MPP tracker but the max is 10kW. It's an Infini 5k hybrid: MPI HYBRID.pdf It is hanging there for half a year already so I'm happy that there is some progress now. The new Trina panels will be one string 18s MPP tracker and that will remain below 900 V even when it's freezing and below 10 A. Max power will be 340 x 18 = 6.120 kWp. The other string will be 12 panels in series so it will not come over this 900 V again. Remember, 60,4 V Uoc... Amps will remain under 10 A and max power will be: 3.120 kWp. Total 9.240 kWp. Very nice for this inverter! The 6 remaining old panels will be charging the battery by means of a PCM60X. In the mean time the roof is getting bigger and bigger: The steel will be cladded with wood as well for the looks. It's huge, 10,5 x 7 meters! Next step, mounting rails and panels. To be continued...

We have a porch in the backyard that is covered with 18 260 Wp solar panels. They are connected to a SMA grid tied inverter and do their job quite well. Still I want to make changes to the system and slowly but surely changes are taking place. Here is why: The solar is producing enough power for us the year round but that is only because we use the grid as a battery. In summer we have a lot of excess power that we draw out from the grid in wintertime. That is just how net metering works. From 2023 net metering will be phased out gradually so using the grid as a battery comes to an end at a certain time. The porch is a old steel construction with the panels bolted on to it and made (well they tried to make it) waterproof by using tonnes of silicone sealant. It's leaking all over the place. So roughly the plan is to build a new wooden porch with room for the old 18 panels and an extra 18 340 Wp Trina's. New inverter and DIY a 30 kWh battery. Here is the old porch: Only the steel under cunstruction will remain because that's strong. Here are some pics of the build: Next post will be the building of the new porch. To be continued...

At the moment I'm building a solar system from scratch and I have been thinking about this. There are 2 advantages in my situation, first we can push back in Holland and 2nd There will be 10,8 kWp on the roof and 30 kWh DIY batteries. So what I will do is measure SoC with Victron BMV702 and use the relay to tell my home automation computer (Hubitat) the SoC is let's say 90%. At 80% it should turn the geyser off again. This will feed the geyser with 3 kWh when no other discharging or charging is involved. After this the process will repeat when SoC is 90% again. I will be using an IKEA outlet (zigbee) to switch the geyser element. Hope this will work out well.

Haha that's nice! Guess you will take the sign away in wintertime?

Done. But left open questions like age etc. That has nothing to do with it.

What you are describing here is clipping.

Yeah but you want to go to 95% I understood. Why? You want to expand the life of these batteries I guess? Well it looks like that's not possible with your gear but you shouldn't be to worried about that, my understanding is that these Pylons are good batteries.

Or is it getting to high voltage?