Rclegg

You're running your geyser off the batteries during the night? 
I'd drop a 2Kw element in there and heat the geyser up mid afternoon rather. 

Each battery keeps it's own cycle count. I have three Pylontechs and they all have different cycle counts as they were installed at different times. There is no issue to adding a new battery to the bank, as long as you make it the master in the bank. 

Then yes, you should be cycling the batteries every day. LiFePO4's don't like staying 100% all the time. I cycle mine daily to 20%. But check what your battery specs are and look at the DoD spec. 

Each battery keeps it's own cycle count. I have three Pylontechs and they all have different cycle counts as they were installed at different times. There is no issue to adding a new battery to the bank, as long as you make it the master in the bank. 

What batteries do you have?
Different batteries types have different requirements. 
 

What batteries do you have?
Different batteries types have different requirements. 
 

Each battery keeps it's own cycle count. I have three Pylontechs and they all have different cycle counts as they were installed at different times. There is no issue to adding a new battery to the bank, as long as you make it the master in the bank. 

Each battery keeps it's own cycle count. I have three Pylontechs and they all have different cycle counts as they were installed at different times. There is no issue to adding a new battery to the bank, as long as you make it the master in the bank. 

Hi there, 
I'm interested in a single battery. 
Can you post some more details on them, eg
Cycles,  SOH,  Min Dischard SoC  Thanks. 

It's possible to do this via software instead. ICC being one of them. I believe they cover most Axpert inverters. 

So it looks like its due to the batteries being charged (Looking at your last post) 
The inverter will only draw as much power from the PV as the demand requires. No more. So, if you had a constant 700w load all day on the inverter and batteries were 100% SoC; PV will be clipped to this. Where else must all that extra energy go? 😛 
 
You'll note that your battery reached 100% SoC at around 12:00 - roughly the same time your PV dropped off or started "clipping" - this is normal. 

Valuable post , Sarel . Just shows to me the scalability of  solar PV vs solar thermal (tubes) and the fine granularity by which one can scale and adjust load / consumption management.
 
I have  attached a 18b20 temp sensor at the neck if the outgoing hot water pipe , just for evaluation purposes. What powerfull little sensor. I am wandering about a profile where you heat up geyser during the day to say 60 degrees. Then you program that Arduino to go in geyser survival mode after no more sun.that is , use mains to maintain losses, but only up to 55 degrees Celsius.
This is in the context of a system with no batteries, only solar, and objective is to decrease Eskom cost. No backup.
Think this will  be too little of a gain, or worth an evaluation shot?

I took a chance and bought a 200Ah one.
The Wh number on the comx site is wrong  when you do the math and you can see that someone edited a 180Ah manual to indicate 200Ah - which makes it seem very dodgy - BUT the included manual that I received have numbers that make sense. (it seems that there are 180Ah and 200Ah units. 180Ah was out of stock with mustek/mecer when I enquired)
Overall outer condition seems fine (the battery shell is plastic, but no obvious dents/cracks/scratches - shell actually looks 100% - no idea what the inside looks like and will not take to opening it up...yet).
battery terminals had no sign of use/tool marks etc.
Specs indicate it weighs "approx. 23Kg" - mine weighs 23.4Kg (google suggest the specific energy of LiFePO4 to be 90-120Wh/Kg. So while not knowing the exact weight of the cells, the numbers should get you at least past 2000Wh (160Ah for 12.8V nominal)  at the lower spectrum ...I guess it could contain only 4 cells and some lead bars...)
My cheap multimeter showed a voltage of 13.19V  before hooking it up for the first time (probably fairly meaningless for a lithium, but at least it did not arrive @ 10V) 
I charged it with a Multiplus inverter/charger @ 35A (the manual indicates standard charge as 15A and maximum as 100A) - I was keen to have it charged as I knew we were in for load shedding later the day. It took close to exactly 3 hours before indicating "absorption". Multiplus held absorption for another 1 hour (current tappering off). By my math (which is worse than my spelling) using info from my VRM log, by the time absorption was reached the battery "accepted" about 105Ah and absorption probably added another 15Ah. As far as I know lithium batteries are shipped at about 50% charge. So assuming the shipping charge state and the known charge cycle the math would suggest that it probably is in the 200Ah range.
While charging nothing felt warm (my hand being the closest to a scientific instrument for temp testing).
When load shedding takes a break I  might see if I can get a more definitive answer on the capacity with a sustained fixed load.
The battery has been used this past week and seemed to happily power the very modest average 200W load for 2 hours, then charge @ 15A and be ready at least an hour before the next load shedding session commenced, and repeated this cycle another 2 times per day for 4 days in a row. (I lowered the charge rate to 15A to "baby" the battery when possible, but if we hit stage 6 load shedding I will up the charge rate again). 
The battery has done momentary (couple of seconds) discharges @ >250A (NOT a typo) and so far nothing has melted/tripped/caught fire. The manual indicates maximum continuous discharge as 100A - no information on pulse current. How well the BMS does what it is supposed to do (or whether it is even there...?)  I do not know  and have no intention to short out the terminals, or charge it to 16V to find out. 
The "manual" is 1 piece of A4 paper, but at least it is double sided, glossy, in colour and not written in the worst dialect of Changelese. Probably the biggest issue is one part of the page indicates a charge voltage of 14.6V, and another 14.1V - I suspect the 14.6V is probably the high cut-off. (I set the voltage at 14.1V)
Whether the battery will give me 1500 cycles (this I assume is to another 80% capacity loss) I do not know.
Should you consider one, or more, of these keep in mind (according to the manual):
You  can NOT parallel connect to get 400Ah, but you can series connect to get 24/48  "Bulk"/absorption voltage is 14.1V (float @ 13.6V) for 12V system "Bulk"/absorption voltage is 28.2V (float @ 27.2) for 24V system "Bulk"/absorption voltage is 56.4V (float @ 54.4) for 48V system  

Batteries was brought 2020/03/ . Upgrading to 700 A/H of batteries. Make me a offer. Batteries was used in a Victron system controlled by ESS via Venus GX. 

Hey! 
Most of us here on this forum are in South Africa. It's unlikely that you'll find an answer on this site. 

This is my first post on this forum and I thought it would be good to have a contribution as a first post and hope to help someone in future.
I have a 'big' deployment of Home Assistant running at home with all my lights, geyser and pool pump being controlled via Sonoffs with Tasmota Fw. Some of these devices are controlled via automation scripts to switch on the geyser at certain times or the lights when I get home after dark.
Now... with me getting into solar energy and buying a variant of the Axpert inverter it was a no brainer to look into ICC (although as I am writing this I am still on my 7 day trial). I installed it and had to get used to the interface. A few days in and I am liking it very much. I keep checking the dashboard for stats. Logging into VNC from my PC and phone is becoming tedious and I noticed that sometimes the ICC app hangs for a while. In order to make it easier I have checked with Manie about the MQTT capabilities and I have been able to successfully extract data from ICC.
At first I tried to push all the ICC data to my MQTT broker running on my Home Assistant instance, but for some reason it took a dive. I reverted the MQTT back to the local ICC broker. I then setup a MQTT bridge on my Home Assistant broker to only extract certain topics from ICC and then integrated this into my Energy page for quick viewing of my energy stats.
I had to connect to the ICC broker to scan for all the topics used by ICC. I did this with MQTT FX. I then setup the MQTT bridge as below:
Go to the HASS.io tab in Home Assistant, click on Mosquitto and change the config as below. Change customize > Active to true.
{
  "logins": [
    {
      "username": "xxxxxxxx",
      "password": "xxxxxxxx"
    }
  ],
  "anonymous": true,
  "customize": {
    "active": true,
    "folder": "mosquitto"
  },
  "certfile": "fullchain.pem",
  "keyfile": "privkey.pem"
}
Click save
SSH to HASS.io and log in.
cd ..
cd share
mkdir mosquito
cd mosquito
touch mosquitto.conf
nano mosquito.conf
add the following text:
#connection ICC
connection ICC
address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
topic <topic as scanned> in 0
Press Ctrl-X, type Y to save.
I subscribribed to the follwing as an initial test:
topic Inverter/Month_PV_Total in 0
topic Inverter/SolarKwUse in 0
topic Inverter/MaxPvDay in 0

Go to the HASS.io tab in Home Assistant, click on Mosquitto and click restart to restart the broker.
If all goes well, connecting to your Home Assistant broker and scanning for the topics should show the ICC topics your Home Assistant broker subscribed to. Just add these topics as sensors in your configuration.yaml file on Home Assistant adn you should be able to see the info.
Now I can use this data to use my Home Assistant to check the PV input and switch on the geyser or poolpump to burn the excess energy generated.
PS: I am enjoying all the wealth of info on this great site.

Osaka batteries are from Pakistan. But that is if you assume this is actually an official Osaka battery. It is quite common for Chinese companies to slap a name on a product to make it sound cool. Many many German sounding pianos (another passion of mine) are made in China. They will spend money to buy the brand name, so some companies actually make money by allowing Chinese companies to use their brand. Telefunken? China. Philips? China.
So I think we can safely assume we don't know where that battery is from. You can probably expect around 700 cycles to 50%.

Full day running the new dashboard
Asic miner started up at 500 watts to use up excess production as the battery bank started the day full, everything above 500watts was running into the battery bank.
Now to setup some relays that will start and stop the miner automatically depending on the battery state of charge and available solar production.

Similar in that the PV was wired sub-optimally; opposite in the sense that your voltage was too low and needed to go higher; his is likely too high and needs to go lower.

The issue appears to be the MPPT voltage range, You're exceeding that and each time you do, the MPPT shuts down.  Ideally, you want 2 panels per string. So you will need to reconfigure them to groups of 2, instead of three. 
 

I'll make some of this available via a write up once I have a bit of time.
Those blocks were basically the stats block and I added some thresholds 😁

 
 
 

As a side project, I developed a semi-realtime dashboard using some open source components and some custom software that I wrote.
My current setup is the following:
I have a 8kW sunsynk inverter and 10kWh revov batteries.
have a program running on a raspberry pi 2 that polls the wifi (solarman) dongle on my 8kw inverter. It writes the inverter data to json files every 30 seconds. I then have another program that uploads the json payloads to a google cloud server (on their free tier) running grafana and influxdb. I have most of the google cloud stuff on a docker image, so I can move it quickly to another server if I see the server isn't handling the loads. I then created the following custom dashboard in grafana:

I'm still trying to pin down what information is useful, so it's still a bit of a work in progress. I have to see what other battery info there is on the inverter, but for now I'm just interested in the soc & voltages.
My next steps are to connect my pi to the can port (rs485 is occupied) and try and get the same info, but I'm not sure how that's gonna work. The rs485 port is unfortunately connected to the batteries, so I can't go that route.
 

At least I had the 7 correct  

There are many many reasons a suicide plug is a very very bad idea.
1. The danger of turning on the main breaker before removing the "alternative supply", thereby energising the grid. This can get you in serious legal trouble, especially if someone dies because of that.
2. Part 2 to the above, turning on the breaker and forgetting the generator/inverter is still connected... and blowing it up.
3. Leaving either end disconnected while energising the other end can cause someone to be electrocuted. Again, legal trouble could be in your future.
4. You're feeding energy in on the wrong side of the RCD. While doing this, you have no earth leakage protection.
5. With many generators, the supply is floating. This means there is no protection against a single earth fault because your TN bond is disconnected with the main breaker.
In general, the best thing is to never ever even suggest to anyone that this sort of thing is possible. I mean literally the only time I would even consider it is if I'm snowed in in some remote cabin and it's an emergency, I'm literally going to die unless I get the power on NOW... then maybe. Otherwise, just no.
🙂
 

Hi @CliveS, 
Is the attached datasheet the one for your inverter?
If so, I see the MPPT operating voltage is between 60V and 115V.
In your one screenshot where the unit is working correctly, you can see the voltage is at 107V (within the limit), but in the other screenshot where it is not working the voltage is 121v (outside the operating limit).
I am not sure if this is your problem, but maybe worth investigating.
Like @Rclegghas said, it's possible that the panels are wired incorrectly and during certain conditions the voltages are exceeding the limits of the MPPT, and then it shuts down.
Synapse 50 48V OffGrid Inverter.pdf