Wilfred

I still can’t find a stage 6 schedule for Pretoria, apparently most of the City council websites went awol. The app I downloaded today crashed since stage 6 announcement and have not recovered yet. We had load shedding fro just after 19:00 to around 21:00. I have been changing settings and keeping the batteries full since the rain and load shedding started last week. Still much to get used to though.

With this coming load shedding schedules, my system will pay for itself very quickly. My office is ran from home, I have 5 staff members and by not loosing 4,5 hours daily is worth it through and through.

No idea, to be honest, I am caught off-guard by this whole load shedding thing and struggle to decipher this stupid app lol. Because I am trying to preserve my batteries and not run heavy loads when load shedding occur in my well planned “use as much when the sun shine” mentality Apparently it mean more areas will have load shedding at the same time as some of the power stations have flood. Also maybe longer outage periods and more times per day.

1st you need to determine what your usage are between 16:00 and 8:00 in summertime and also how the sun will behave in wintertime, I don’t have that data yet and will only know after the next winter. You will need a bank to supply you with enough kWh to go through the time there is no sun. Let’s say it is not raining, then you need enough battery backup to carry you through the night. Problem is that winter time and summer time will differ, also what you will use will differ. If you use the batteries with heavy loads it might shorten their lifetime, in other words it might cause it to turn cycles quicker. This is the most expensive portion of your system, so you will need a couple of things added to get you totally off-grid, for example gas/solar geyser, but solar geyser might want to use electricity during the early mornings. Gas oven, etc. Everyone have their favorite when it come to batteries, I like batteries that have an indication of SOC, such as Narada or Pylontech. New batteries such as Dyness (which is basically Pylontech) also have this indication with LED’s on the front indicating SOC. These are the lithium-ion batteries. With gel batteries I don’t know anything except that you need a proper battery monitoring system and you can only discharge 50%, therefore you need way more batteries, also that you can’t just add on and they also don’t have the lifetime that you would expect of them. The Pylontech’s came with a 7 year warranty + 3 year extended warranty by registering them on Pylontech’s website. They say 6000 cycles for 80% DOD, and 4500 cycles for 90% DOD, my batteries never went below 20% thus far. My cycles turn between 24 hours and 47-48 hours. I am currently on cycle 30 and have used the batteries for 40 days. I currently have 4x US3000 Pylontech 48v batteries, I believe they are 70A max charge/discharge, 3.5KW x 4 with usable 3.2KW x 4. I have not have any problems so far with these batteries, even when I recently accidentally ran the geyser/s off them. Meaning that my batteries have never given me an alarm or error and they have never shut themselves down. I would like to add 1 or 2 new batteries before next winter, will see when the time come. The difference is that we don’t have continuous loads of more than 1000w per hour from 16:00 to 08:45. I designed my system to produce 42KwH in 6 hours of sunlight (without any losses), so the panels will handle most of the loads when the sun shine. My current usage is between 32-36kWh per day. Currently we are using the grid (in this rain), so my batteries are fully charged for most of the day, this is to prevent us sitting in darkness with the current load shedding schedules that have just been changed to stage 6.

I went back to what was changed. Found that when we were informed of coming load shedding, I pushed the amps up from 10A on each inverter to 40A on each inverter coming from grid as I wanted to get the batteries charged as quickly as possible on that 1st day (due to great rainy weather), I never turned it back down, so when the power went out during the daytime with loads running and it came back the load/s was too much to handle and tripped the switch coming back in from grid to inverters. This only happens when my system is in USB as the grid kick in and want to charge the batteries at 80A as well as supply the load, it is too much for the 32A breaker. Had to manually stop loads such as geysers when load shedding occur during daytime, if and when load shedding happens at night time we don’t have any issues as our load is below 1000w after 16:00 and the system is in SBU mode anyway. So in short, the trip was because of me

Also check if your inverter is set to SIG in setting 28 if you only have one inverter installed. edit: sorry found this with the axpert inverters, for some reason single inverters are setup in settings as parallel, don’t know if this is their new default.

When a single inverter is set in parallel mode you will have some other problems as well. There was another post I am struggling to link now where the inverter in Parallel mode did not charge the batteries using the grid. After that setting was resolved the system is running fine. It is a pity that the incorrect communication cables are supplied with the batteries. Because you have a new inverter, it should be able to connect with the pylontech batteries directly (hence error 61) when you have the correct cable and you batteries are setup correctly. When this works the system will manage itself.

Also this will help to resolve that cable, custom cable should not cost you more than R30. https://powerforum.co.za/topic/2519-mpp-solar-inverters-support-pylontech-some-models/?do=findComment&comment=64538

Suddenly I have this exact or almost the same situation, will have my electrician look into it, already let him know about the issue. 1st I thought it was because when I was on the grid that I ran both geysers simultaneously, but I have done it before for a couple mins, without any problems. Currently in USB mode because of load shedding, I don’t even know when load shedding kicks in. Yesterday it tripped and I only realized something was wrong when my inverters showed the grid is gone but the igniters on the stove top worked. Found that a trip switch linking the grid to my inverters tripped. Had to pull them all the way down in off position and push them back up in on position to restore grid to my inverters. Only the incoming grid feed is cut-off with this trip switch. This afternoon, same thing, switch tripped. I can only imagine that it happens when the grid is restored after load shedding. I forgot to bypass the geysers, was also not aware that we will have load shedding and Only realized this when I was at the shops and no one had power. We have had load shedding for more than 2 days in a row, don’t know what changed in the 2 days other than before these two days. If I think about it, it might be the loads running at the time, as our load shedding the past two days was during 10am-2pm, before the two days it was at nigh time, when my loads are basically a tv or two and a couple lights. Been fun and games this last couple days as everything running on timers etc is set for when there are suppose to be sunshine I have been running around switching off high load items during 10am and 2pm. With full sunshine I don’t have this issue, guess it is because I am on USB at the time and not SBU. Any thoughts?

Pylontech settings are: bak to grid 48v back to battery 51v bulk and floating charge 53.2v cut-off 47.5v (this will actually keep the buzzer going, so my setting is lowered to 45.5v, it will go back to grid at around 22% SOC or below 48v) charging is 25A x N (N = amount of batteries), 4x25 = 100A, if you have 4 batteries you can charge at 100A, I lowered mine to a max of 80A (40A per inverter).

I have two of those inverters in parallel. Seems like you have 9.6kWh battery backup, no way it can only last 10 mins. I can see, at the time of your picture, your load on each inverter is less than 25% most probably 8% if no serious loads are running. Battery is charging if the bottom bar is running up and down and as @Coulomb pointed out your load is coming from PV as well as from battery and batteries are suppose to charge simultaneously if PV is enough. The left top one is utility and currently it is not getting any power from utility, it will be linked when utility is supplying you with power. 01 has three settings, USB (Utility -> solar -> battery), SUB (Solar -> utility -> battery) and SBU (Solar -> battery -> utility). When the sun is shining I use SBU. Now with all the rain (for which I am happy about) and zero to nothing PV coming in as well as stage 2 to stage 4 load-shedding, I have set it to USB at around 8am and switch it back to SBU around 5pm (I could/should probably just leave it on USB, but don’t want the utility to supply power 24/7). Those inverters really don’t like SUB and want to push back to grid when the batteries are fully charged, or it seems like they want to push back. 16 has 4 different settings, SLb UCb, SLb UdC, SbL UCb, and SbL UdC, S-Solar, L-Load, b-battery, UCb-utility allowed to charge, UdC-disallow utility to charge. S->L->b (solar will supply load and charge batteries), S->b->L (solar will charge batteries and then supply load). I could not find that cycles turn quicker or slower with any of these two settings, they seems to turn around about the same time. It might be possible that your system has tripped, even though you have 10KW, your batteries can only supply a load of 4.8KW at any given time. It can also be that your cut-off is set too high and that the batteries/inverter reached that level and switched off. Unfortunately with solar, you have to manage power use, meaning your load need to be spread out. You can have an average of 1000w with fridges, etc, but if you use the oven, kettle or a geyser, you can easily exceed 4.8KW, then the batteries shut down, if that happens the inverters shut down and then your system is down. Try and find out what was running at the time the system went down. I had a system trip when my geyser still had a 3KW element, the geyser was running, swimming pool running and normal fridges, tv, etc was running, used around 4.5-5KW and one of the kids switched a hairdryer on, boom system down. It exceeded what the batteries could supply at that moment and the inverters could not get the shortfall quick enough from the panels. I was not home, told the wife over the phone to switch the system off in a certain order and then back on again, they quickly learned to switch off the geyser briefly if they want to use the hairdryer. The batteries was just not enough to handle the inrush, hence the system shut-down. (This was with the 9.6KW Huawei’s I had, no problems since the Pylontech’s, also my battery bank is bigger since the Pylontech’s). If you did not have a load of more than 4.8KW at the time, then the batteries might be the problem. They should last at least close to two hours if you have a constant load of 4KW.

I have no idea if my inverter/battery room have a lot of ventilation. But Sunday was a very hot day and my inverter/s never exceeded 43 degrees (Monday and Tuesday, Sunday was 42 degrees, rest of the week was cold weather so inverters ran at about 40 degrees and below). My equipment is very new. I have thought of installing an extractor fan, still think I should do it anyway. No idea what inverters temperature would be when they are in idle or bypass mode, will test it sometime soon.

Hi, Just check your inverter specifications, somewhere there is a operating temperature, most will be 0-55C. Make sure your inverter can breath. I don't know if computer fans will work but if it were me, I would definitely put a fan in the room to try and get the warm air out, face it maybe in a way to extract the hot air, if possible.

Just heard we getting loadshedding from 19:00, changed my settings to USB and SLb, trying to pump those batteries as quickly as possible. Each inverter is set at 40A. Emoncms - dashboard view 05-12-2019.pdf

Yes, same problem as you. Watchpower app was already on the wife’s phone, it did not pick up any of my inverters. I unpaired on my phone, paired on wife’s phone, it see them in the Bluetooth settings but it don’t pick up in Watchpower. I tried everything except for deleting the app from my phone. I even switched off Bluetooth on my phone, nada. Looks like it is matched for life to the first device connected. That is a bummer, what now when my contract expires and I upgrade to a new phone?

Sorry to hi-jack you post @Bobster we have wonderful rain, I don’t even care if I am using grid or not, we need the rain currently a lot more than saving on power usage. I believe we are charged at a flat rate where other countries have peak and off-peak rates (I have an old meter, so there is actually no way they can see when my power is used). So it don’t really matter when the batteries are charging. My question however, is it better to just leave the system and have it charge the batteries at 10A from grid or lower that to 2A per inverter? Also, I think I should change my one setting from SLb to SbL and utilize the flaw in firmware and have it charge for an hour on it’s own from midnight to 1am, again at 10A or more per inverter or at the lowest setting ie 2A per inverter? Is it better to maybe push it up to 40A per inverter and have it push as much into the batteries during the midnight charge? The rain should (I am praying it do) last for a week Is your problem maybe related to your setting as mentioned above?

Hi, What make of batteries? Do you have the battery data sheets? What settings do you have for 01, 02, 11, 12, 13, 16, 26, 27 and 29? I use mainly 01-SBU, 16-SLb, UCb and it works perfectly, loads when sun is shining and charging battery during daytime, only charges batteries from grid when they go too low. From Sunday 24th November to Sunday 1st December only used 6kWh from grid (oven is directly on grid).

Is it raining when you have this problem, you might have a leak and it is tripping your DB or something is short circuiting and initiate the trip. I had a similar issue where wires were exposed and earthed after another electrical installation. Luckily we could isolate and fix it quickly. When dry you might not have this problem but when wet you could have this problem. Only a suggestion. What are your settings for back to grid/back to battery? is there any way to be able to check your inverter temperature and/or battery temperature?

It should not be a problem, will test it with my wife’s phone and get back to you if I have a similar problem. Will do the test in an hour when her phone is back

https://powerforum.co.za/topic/2519-mpp-solar-inverters-support-pylontech-some-models/?do=findComment&comment=64538 I know they say everywhere 48v or 47.5v, problem is, your batteries will most likely run at 49v 99% of the time, the BMS will shut it down at around 10% SOC and should actually go back to grid at around 22% SOC, without any monitoring software or anything. setting 27 should also be same as setting 26. The Axperts use voltage to determine SOC and it is actually way off measuring it that way. setting 29 at 45.5v will be fine as you have 12 at 48. The battery should be at 48v for a while before it will go to grid.

https://powerforum.co.za/topic/2519-mpp-solar-inverters-support-pylontech-some-models/?do=findComment&comment=64538

Is it also known as the VMIII ?

If you can change setting 5 to PYL with that black cable (have other settings actually), black cable might not work. Try to change setting 05 to PYL, need to see if your inverter have that setting. otherwise to get rid of error 04, set 29 to 45.5, the alarm actually buzz at setting 29+ 2v, which is too high IMO. I run mine at 45.5v and have 0 issues, battery never go lower than 30% before PV starts charging it in the morning.

Hi, what is setting 29 set at? How old is your inverter? How is your inverter linked to the batteries? Any monitoring installed?

1. Home and business from home? Or business separate from your home, ie another premises? 2. It will pay for itself very fast if you run your business from home and you have regular grid outage, also the more expensive the system the longer it will take to pay for itself. 3. It seems more complex than it is. Do your research and understand how the system work. If you can’t go big, then go smart. Split your DB into essential and non-essential. Any good electrician have the know-how. Example is that in the middle of all of this my oven is tied directly to the grid and don’t go through the solar system at all. 4. Common mistakes are to have no knowledge, don’t believe what one person is telling you, gain your own knowledge. I have done quick couple months (6 months) research into this and believe me, I have learned more after the initial commissioning (3 months), than ever before. Luckily I only had a few issues to resolve after installation. This is where the cost can start running away.