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Wilfred

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Posts posted by Wilfred

  1. Good day,

    I am going to add 2x US3000C batteries to my 4x US3000B battery pack.

    I will also be adding the Communications Hub as from past experience (my electrician), from the 5th battery there is sometimes issues and it is possible to loose one of those batteries without the Hub, I know Pylontec claim that it is only needed when going over 6x batteries.

    My questions however....

    1. Can the B's and the C's work fine when connected to the Hub without updating the firmaware?

    2. Can the Hub work without being connected to the Inverters? As I have 2 Synapse 5.0+ inverters and no matter what you try, if you connect the RS cable, whatever you call it, the 2nd inverter in parrallel do what it want or give an error 61, if I remember correctly from previous attempt.

    3. If all else fails, where can the firmware be obtained for the Pylontec US3000 batteries?

    4. Is it easy to update firmware, what type of cables are needed?

    Thanks

  2. Very odd, do you have a switchover switch and it was perhaps on Eskom instead of Solar (I know it is stupid).

    But the scenario you are explaining is basically impossible if your inverter was running at the time. The power could only go out if your credits run out in midday if your inverter was either off or bypassed somehow.

  3. I think I know what you want to do.

    You want your inverter to stop supplying power and deplete the batteries further until there is sun again the following morning to start to charge.

    I have no idea if this can be done.

    How many batteries do you have on-site, won't it be better (I know it is expensive) to add another brick? In the event that you can not control the inverter somehow. I would imagine something like a switch, but I guess you will have to initiate the process from where you are.

    I know that my batteries sometimes run for 2+ hours on 22% and yes, they never go, or never before gone below 47v.

    Is there maybe a load that you can reduce for that early morning/night time hours to reduce battery depletion, there should be if you are willing to switch off power for the time being.  

     

  4. The trick with the geyser is the size of the element. If it is only you and your wife, you can connect it to a timer (geyserwise). Depending on when you use the hot water, you can actually run that geyser only in daytime.

    I added a geyser to get away from night time water heating. My three kids shower or bath in the afternoon and me and the wife take the morning shift. Both geysers will typically be 60 degrees when the sun go down, one geyser feed hot water to the other, in the morning the one geyser will be in the 40's and the one feeding the house will be in the 50's, then the heating cycle start again.

    Only when in your case you use the hot water in the afternoon and you really need it in the morning is when you need to heat it during night time, other than that, just heat it during daytime with excess power. 

  5. You are using almost no power at all :)

    Solar is a "way of life" change in my opinion.

    In short (many more details behind the scenes)

    1. The bulk of your demand should be shifted to daytime when you have sunlight to supply the power. It also don't mean that you can start each and every appliance you own at the same time during that time.

    2. How much power do you need to get from sunset to sunrise? This is what you should base your battery bank on (in my opinion) so that you don't run out of power halfway through the night. Also the bigger your battery bank is the better your system can handle inrush/spikes.

    3. As mentioned in 2, how much power do you need from sunrise to sunset, basically to run whatever power you need as well as to have a bit extra to re-charge your batteries.

     

    I bought the solar panels first without knowing anything based on my crooked calculation, in the end it actually worked to my advantage.

    Since then I learned a bunch for someone with 0 experience in electricity.

    Luckily in my household the only thing that did draw a lot of power during night time was a geyser, an oven and a kettle.

    The oven is on-grid (used 3-4 times a week), the kettle was swopped with a gas kettle, I do currently use a 900ml kettle for those quick cups in the evening. I sorted out the geyser and manage the timing on the geyser/s.

    The swimming pool run from 9am to 1pm (1kwh) (ironing happens between 1pm and 2pm), the wife run the washing machine between 8am and 9am (barely 1kwh) and any other time the geyser/s are not running, the geyser/s run on and off between 8:45am to 14:15pm (2kwh each). But my setup can handle all of that, even the once a week lawnmower. You will definitely not need such a huge system as I can imagine that you already have a solar geyser in place as well.

    We have thus far not have dirty clothes nor cold water, knocking on wood :) . I have the grid as back-up currently and only on cloudy days along with load-shedding do we need to manually switch off the geysers to lower load so that the batteries don't get drained. When there are no load-shedding the system run on it's own and will switch to grid if need to.

     

     

  6. 5 hours ago, JustinS said:

    Looking at your list, that is probably just over 2kW draw. Which is 4kWh for a 2 hour load shed.

    I got some quotes from Solar Man in Pretoria for around R50k for a similar setup (2x3kWh Shubart batteries + 1x 5kW Axpert inverter). Should be able to comfortably recharge in 2 hours.

    You might only be able to draw 50% out of those batteries.

  7. 5 hours ago, ShaunKZN said:

    1. If I get another 5kva will this then equate to 10kva supply?

    2. Will 4 batteries still work with 2 inverters connected in parallel?

    3. Does the inverter have to be the same make(ie MKS II) or can I use any axpert 5Kva inverter - The only advantage I can see to this is the cheaper price. Are there any disadvantages?

    4. In a few weeks I plan on getting solar panels , how many of what power would I need for 2 x 5kva connected in parallel to achieve maximum efficiency?

    1. Yes, max supply per inverter 5kva;

    2. It will, but could be a little light, I have no experience with Gel batteries, I do know that depending on the age of your current batteries, you can not just add on, except for lithiums where you can add on over a period of time;

    3. Is better to have the same inverters, more important is that the firmware of the inverters are the same;

    4. You could be limited to around 4000w input per inverter depending on the inverter specs, you need to be within the Amp and Voltage parameters also.

  8. When the communication work properly, the low cut-off voltage do not matter, you can reset it to 45v if you want, within a couple mins the batteries will change that setting back to 47v.

    What happened in your scenario, the batteries probably went down to below 10% and shut off to protect against total discharge, or at whatever setting you had set it up to. Unfortunately, you have to manually reset/restart the batteries after that.

    I don't know how far they will go down but on 9th January while I was in hospital, we had a cloudy day, load-shedding, and me not able to tell someone to lower the load.

    My electrician luckily went past my home to pick up his RPi and saw the hectic mess starting to evolve.

    He quickly lowered the load, reset the batteries, they were only beeping with alarm and did not shut down yet and were at 7% (the batteries according to my graph still show 47v), right at that moment of reset apparently the sun came out behind the clouds and all were well again.

    Our major problem currently is cloudy/rainy weather with a combination of load-shedding. If load-shedding is not there, the weather don't matter, if load-shedding is there, then hopefully at that time your batteries are full enough to carry through the cloudy weather.

  9. The new model is called a "load-shedding relay", basically stop any power going to a certain appliance during certain times as well as when something else is drawing power.

    After that item, lets say primary geyser shuts of, it will supply power again within 15 minutes.

    Cost is over R 1 000, I have one installed, nice to have but not really needed if your timing/timers are working properly. If not, then you might see this as a need.

  10. Hi, 

    Your system is running as it should, sometimes #2 will jump to 140A, it do not actually put 140A into the battery.

    No matter what your settings are, if you are set to PYL (#5), the system regulate itself. It should not reduce your cycles significantly.

    I have seen that when our house is less “busy” it take longer to turn a cycle though. I have not had a cycle turning faster than 24 hours (I however have 4 of those batteries).

    I unfortunately have some trouble now with my Pi freezing more often as I am not mobile enough to go and fiddle with it 10x a day :).

    I know it seems scary, but just leave those batteries to do what they do. It is normal that when they are 100% that they will discharge a bit and then recharge. If you want, I can go back and plot my system for you to compare. Just keep in mind that I have lost some data due to my Pi deciding to strike.

     

  11. 9 hours ago, Johan Conradie said:

    I added a Raspberry Pie to my solar system. System consists of 2 x 5KvA Axpert Inverters, batteries and a PV array. The Raspberry came with pre-installed ICC software. It was a simple plug and play. Extremely easy. Thanks you to https://centurionsolar.co.za/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIo_eY3Ofc5gIV0ed3Ch3ElQQqEAAYASAAEgKPD_D_BwE for the easy setup. With a few tweaks, here and there, the software is monitoring the usage (consumption) and electricity generated by the PV array. I can control the inverters very accurately with the software. It is also useful when calculating where to spend money on, i.e. more PV’s or more batteries and so forth. I am new to Raspberry. My questions are: Does the software should create a data file on the raspberry? If so where? File name? Can it be exported and viewed on another windows machine?

     

    Your Pi should send the data to a server provided by Centurion solar, just ask them, the data is usually sent to Emoncms and you can use it with graphs, etc on you laptop or desktop pc or even on your tablet. Also maybe check, they should/could have send you an email with instructions.

  12. On 2019/12/27 at 8:21 PM, Len225 said:

    This issue has become very annoying and as per my above post I’ve now reached out to Dyness directly so let’s see what they say.

    Hopefully they come back to you with the correct pin settings on the communication cable as well as the dip switch settings, no idea why the 3rd one should be set a certain way for a certain inverter, usually the 1st one is to slow down the bit rate.

  13. Try and contact the Chinese on their website, they are really helpful, give them your inverter model. They should come back to you within a day or two with the correct settings.

    If you want to try it and play it safe, bring setting 13 down with 1V. As well as settings 26 and 27. With setting 29 at 47V you would rather get a low voltage warning, you could bring that down with 1V too. The BMS on the battery should protect it very well. Setting 02 seems fine it is not close to what the Pylontech’s are and should be low enough not to over charge as well.
    I would do that until you get some feedback from them, I have checked the data sheet on those batteries quickly and they seem to be exactly the same as the Pylontech’s.

    @Coulomb the recommended C rate is 0.5C and continuous C rate is 1C, I still need to learn what this mean :)

    http://dyness.net/download/Dyness Portfolio.pdf

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