JaseZA

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CCMU Trading SA is a scam https://ccmutradingsa.co.za/
CCMU also runs a packaging scam mintapackaging.co.za Minta Packaging
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Ace Construction Group is a scam https://aceconstructionsgroup.co.za
They are spoofing the actual Ace Construction Group which does not have a website.

Hey All, In Jan this year (2026) I started planning a new solar install with my electrician. He was open to me supplying many of the bigger components and in particular I wanted to find batteries that fit my needs. I looked at a number of options: Deye, Dyness, Esener, Must, SunSynk but the bang for buck on the HinaEss PowerGem Max really had what I was looking for, and I could pick them up for a really good price (R29k) with 10 year warranty / 8000 cycles at 90% DOD – 0.5c.
I hope this helps someone else out there who is looking at these batteries - as there was not a lot of info online about this brand. This is my subjective opinion on these batteries based on my experience since buying them in early March 2026 - you shouldn't use this as a proxy for what your experience will be like.
My setup:
Deye 12K Inverter
2x HinaEss PowerGem Max 16kWh Batteries
12x Jinko 580Watt Bifacials (North facing array)
10x JA Solar 620Watt Bifacials (East & West facing arrays)
6000Watt Ryobi Petrol Generator
All loads are connected to the Inverter "Load" port.
All data from the Deye and batteries is pulled into Home Assistant over RS485 -> MQTT.
My previous setup was a Deye 8k, with 2x Hubble 5kWh batteries and 14x JA Solar 460w panels.
Aesthetics
I liked these because they are simple, white boxes, installed on brackets off the floor. The cables are covered by lids, so everything is neat and matches the Deye inverter well.
All the buttons and comms cables are also hidden by the lid, so a clean install is easy.

External Build Quality
 I was really impressed with how they were packaged and how well built (at least from the outside) they seem. They came in wooden crate/ boxes with tons of protective foam, everything nicely wrapped and easy to find.
The steel brackets look and feel sturdy and strong, the same goes for the battery chassis. These things weigh 120kg's each, which meant they were a bit of a mission for my installer to deal with. The included power cables, battery comms cables and ground cables are all pretty decent quality and length. The user manual is also very decent and the whole package feels like it’s worth the R29k – but just.
 The rawlbolts that came with the battery are complete junk though - my installer used some builders warehouse M8 rawlbolts instead which worked well.
 The battery comes with a pre-punched template for drilling holes on the wall which was really a nice touch. The battery is lifted onto the bottom bracket and then secured on the top brackets to the wall. These brackets weren't a nice experience. My installer lost quite a bit of time because you have to perfectly align the brackets on the wall with the battery which didn't happen because putting M8 bolts into an old wall meant that they drifted off centre slightly, which meant the screw holes didn't align with the bracket. Some modifications to the top brackets were required in the end.
 
Software & Wifi
 The battery comes with an app that you use to detect the battery (via Bluetooth) and then connect the battery to your wifi. Then you can use the app to monitor the battery from anywhere.
 Two things I found with this process:
My wifi password had a special character in it, which meant the battery wouldn't connect because of this. I experienced the same thing with my previous Deye 8k inverter wifi dongle.
I could only get one battery to connect to the app / wifi. It seems this may be the way that it works as the app detects the other batteries via the "master" battery comm cable. So all batteries show up in the app even if you only get one battery connected to the wifi.
 The battery information and data reported to the Deye seems limited. I have a Home Assistant integration pulling data from the Deye and it really just had the basics (SOC, Temp, Voltage). The app on the other hands gives you 4x temps and 16x individual cell voltages as well as cycle counts. So to fix this I did some research and created a Python app that connects to the battery over RS485 and publishes the stats via MQTT over the wifi to my Home Assistant. This has been very reliable. The app / wifi is flaky and sometimes it loses the wifi settings, so I am happy to not have to use the app for monitoring. The app is useful for firmware updates, so I keep it around for that. My battery is up to date out of the box, so I don't know what the update process is like.
You can check out my GitHub Repo for the battery monitoring / Home Assistant connector: https://github.com/drewzadev/ha-hinaess-powergem

BMS
From very basic observations, I believe the 2 batteries deliver on the advertised 32kWh. Weirdly in the HinaEss app at 100% SOC I usually see 34kWh "available". I don’t know what that means, but I think it’s related to some other observations that I have made with these batteries.
In the first week, Battery 1 would peak at 55.08V and Battery 2 would peak 53.74V at 100% SOC – that’s a difference of 1.34V. Both batteries would show a status of “Standby”, IE: they were not charging. At that time the differences between the lowest cell voltages and the highest cell voltages were also quite large. Battery 1: 245mv and Battery 2: 203mv. I raised these concerns with their support WhatsApp group which is very active and they were responsive, however their response was that this was not a concern and that the voltages would normalise over time. They also said that the big cell delta’s would only show at 100% SOC.
Now that I have been running the batteries for nearly 2 months I have noticed that they are both equal in voltage at 100% SOC (54.2V) and they match each other pretty much their entire SOC curve. I have also noticed that the cell delta’s have been slowly reducing, with Battery 1 at a max delta of 60mv and Battery 2 at 180mv at their highest during 100% SOC charge. 180mv is still high in my mind but the trend is downward and outside of 100% SOC charging the cell delta’s are around 3 – 4mv for both batteries, which seems very good.
Another interesting observation is that at 100% SOC voltages settle at 54.2V and  at 10% SOC is at 51.1V – this says to me that the battery operates in a very narrow voltage band and the BMS does not push the battery to the upper and lower limits of voltages that I have seen in other batteries (56v -  49v). Maybe this is their attempt to ensure the battery delivers the 8000 cycles that they advertise or it could just be the Deye  inverter and the BMS interacting in a weird way.
Another interesting feature of the BMS is that it will stop the Deye inverter drawing down below 10% SOC, even though all my inverter settings allow for the battery to go down to 5% SOC. The only time it will go below 10% SOC is if the grid connection is off. This does align with what they suggest in the user manual.
 
Power Delivery
My entire house runs off the Deye inverter. 2x 2kw geysers, stove, 2x ovens, pool, aircons, everything. We have put in the required breakers to ensure we don’t overload the inverter and my Home Assistant will actively shed load if we push too close to the limits. I’ve seen peaks of 11kw for 4 – 5mins without issue. I’ve also seen the batteries charge at 10kw for 10min without issue, although I try to keep the max charge rate to 8kw (~0.25c per battery).
At 10kw loads the 50mm2 cables going from the inverter to the battery busbars gets warm and I do feel like I could have spent more to get 75mm2 cables. Typical loads of 3kw – 5kw are the norm in the house and the cables are room temp at these loads and the batteries also stay pretty cool (20c – 27c depending on ambient air temps).
Usually in the evenings we cook meals on the stove and oven, often adding a microwave and kettle to the mix. Then shortly after that the one geyser will heat water for the evening for about an hour and a half. Which will then leave us with around 90% SOC for the rest of the evening. Most mornings I wake up with around 60% SOC remaining at 500watts average power use during the night.
 
Support
As mentioned support is provided directly from HinaEss via an active WhatsApp group. There are a number of HinaEss people active on the channel and they seem pretty responsive. Their go to is generally to request a battery firmware upgrade for strange problems and it seems that this generally solves the problem. Most firmware upgrades they are able to do remotely for customers, especially if they have a Lux Inverter – they seem to integrate well with the HinaEss batteries.

Overall Review
I would say I am happy with the purchase of the 2 HinaEss batteries. It still blows my mind that I can cook and heat water all from batteries and it feels like it didn’t even put a dent in the power available.
Only time will tell if they actually last the promised 8000 cycles / 10+ years. But so far so good. Please share if you have any experiences with these batteries to help others considering this brand and model.

 

Installing 3 x 8KW's still a lot of work to be done. Will post more pictures when we are done.

Best option is to sell it to the buyer and leave it in place. Moving will cost more than what you paid for installation in all likelihood. We managed to negotiate with our buyer 3 years ago that he would buy the system at a discount to what he would pay for it to be installed himself. In the end it worked out that what we paid for it originally, minus the electricity savings and minus what we got for the system, came to zero. So effectively we got to be free of loadshedding for 3 years for free. We also negotiated this separately to the house sale. He paid me in cash over 3 months.

The biggest advantage of this is you can tailor the new system at your new house to suit that house. We moved from a small flat to a big home so the old system wasn't really suitable to the new house. I know I would have accepted less than what I got just to allow me to get new at the new house. You also start with new equipment and new warranties etc.

All of this is assuming you have an inverter, batteries and solar panels all currently wired in and approved.

Correct - all the estate agents and buyers were informed when coming to view that the solar system wasn't included but could be negotiated over. I knew that I'd have enough time to get it off between the signed OTP and us moving out if the new buyer did not want the solar system. Didn't want to sit with no backup while waiting for the house to sell. And it ended up taking 6 months during peak load shedding so we were very grateful to have it still available!

So I thought I would do a quick update on my progress with getting information from my 8kw OmniVolt.

Happy to report that I have everything I need! All up and running when I workout what addresses were... What pain. But I have uploaded a Modbus reference document for all the addresses I used and what they mean, as well as their unit and scale factor... This should be helpful if anyone needs to get their inverter info into HA .

If you find any errors, let me know and I will update it! I am happy to share my config yaml if anyone needs it, as well as my dashboard yaml.
Ignore the fault... The inverter still seems to be acting weird with the SoC of the battery. I currently have it connected through 485, and WOW.

I have attached some screenshots of my dashboard showing everything working . Still lots to mess around with, but this is a good start!

OmniVolt_8kw_SRNE_Modbus_Reference.docx

Ok so I will give a bit of an update on my 8kw OmniVolt.

I have installed everything and am running 6 x 600w panels through the one MPPT. Solar is working great.

Had a few niggles with the programming and discharge of the battery. I have found that the inverter is an SRNE, specifically the ASF48100s200-H (can be seen on the comms PCB and Inverter PCB). This is the same one that is in the Sun Gold Power inverters. Seems to be a pretty good inverter from what I can find online. I have attached the manual which has ALL the information and settings 😅. This should make everyones life a bit easier. The ASF number actually corresponds with the 10kw inverters, so I would assume they just using a downrated 10kw in the 8kw Omnivolt...

If your battery is discharging to 10% like mine was, you need to update parameters 58 onwards (look in the manual). These are the SoC values, where all the earlier values correspond to voltage.

I am still having some weird things happening, like it changed the communication between the inverter and the BMS back to RS485, instead of keeping it on SLA.

The last issue I am having is that the ESS app does not show any of the LOAD states. I can get the BMS and Solar info, but nothing on the load. I have also tried using the IPower App which communicates with SRNE inverters, but I can also only see BMS and solar info. Not sure if everyone else is managing to see the load information?
SRNE-10KW-Inverter-ASF48100S200-H-User-Manual_compressed.pdf

Convinced my brother to buy the 8kw/8kwh as well. This is a serious bargain, provided the inverter isn't total garbage. But sold be builders so I imagine warranty will be honored. But basically add another R15k for panels mounting etc and you have 8kw/8kwh/3.6kwp for R30k! It cost me that to install just one Sunsynk 5kw without battery 3 years ago!!

You can't even buy 16x150ah lifepo4 cells for much less than R15k.

Only low voltage (145V) models convert PV input to battery levels. On high voltage (500V) models, PV input goes to the high voltage side. Check the schematic here:
https://powerforum.co.za/topic/14666-repair-of-axpert-inverters-a-journey-started/#findComment-138439
edit: Or better this one:

The first one doesn't have a PV input, actually.

Only 1.5 years later, but I was also looking for a cheaper cable solution to connect my Hubble AM2 to my PC, and was unable to find proper instructions to construct my own cable, so I did some research and decided to publish a working solution here.
You basically need any type of USB to TTL (serial) converter using the FTDI FT232R chip. There are many options available locally, but the most popular options are the cable version, where the chip is inside the USB connector, and the module with an on-board USB mini or type-C connector. The modules cost around R40 at the time of writing (https://make.net.za/product/4me3303/) or (https://www.communica.co.za/products/hkd-ft232rl-usb-to-serial-board?variant=50139935736108). Just make sure you get one with an original FTDI chip, because there is some issue between the cloned chip and the drivers. You can download the driver from https://ftdichip.com/drivers/
The Hubble has a standard RS232 port (-15v/+15V) and the USB to TTL converter or cable provides TTL levels (0V/5V), so you need a level shifter in-between. Fortunately that is also readily available locally at around R12 at the time of writing. (https://www.robotics.org.za/MX3232-MOD) or (https://www.diyelectronics.co.za/store/serial/638-max3232-rs-232-ttl-uart-serial-module-level-shifter.html)
Now you just have to check the pinouts on your USB to TTL converter cable or module and verify the orientation of the level converter module (marked with RS232 <-> TTL on the one side of the board) to ensure that you are connecting the 5V, GND, RX and TX pins to the correct end of the level shifter board. Then connect the GND, <- (IN) and -> (OUT) pins on the opposite end of the level shifter board to PINS 2, 3 and 4 of the RJ12 connecter and you're done. Refer to the attached images which clearly shows all the connections.

Please tell me that you are joking.
If not, do you really think that it is a good idea to pollute this forum with far-right political conspiracy theories?

Hi everyone, so I had the need to get daily, weekly and monthly solar statistics emailed to me but after requesting this directly from the Solar-Assistant team for months, I decided to create it myself. I have made it available to all if you can find the use for it and can be found here - https://github.com/Stef1986/email_scheduler_solar_assistant
Once you have cloned the repo locally, you simply edit the .env file with your Solar Assistant's MQTT details as well as your reporting preferences and run the docker-compose up.
Just have a look at the README.md, it should be detailed enough to get you going.
As a quick overview, basically what will happen is on the host of your choosing, you will run the docker container that will subscribe to the MQTT topic created in Solar-Assistant and will ingest all the data. It will then (based on your choosing) schedule daily, weekly and/or monthly statistic reports to be emailed to your inbox.

The body of the email will contain a nice table with statistics (configurable in the .env file) with min/max/avg values as well as a csv attachment (also configurable) containing the totals for daily, weekly and monthly for stats like PV generated, Battery in, Battery out, etc etc

Hope you guys enjoy and if this helped you, consider supporting my efforts with a beer or two 😁🍻

Hi! Yes, I fixed it! I studied the schematic after I opened the inverter. It is a 12 V source, and on its output it has a mosfet, switched at a frequency of 6khz(to low) , with a duty cycle that varies between 20-30%, causing this strange behavior of the fans. The 12 V voltage is perfectly stable in the load, but the control on the mosfet gate is the problem. I solved it by adding a 470uF capacitor in parallel with one of the fans(red is pozitive, black is negative) , they are all in parallel, thus filtering the voltage to a clean 12 V. Now the fans start normally, and stop normally when the temperature requirements are met. Since mosfet is switching GND, capacitor reactance is not affecting 12V power consumption.
I hope that this easy fix will help a lot of owners, and bonus....will not void your warranty, since you don't have to open inverter case and just take one fan out and install capacitor on first fan conector.
Beste regards!

I'd be careful and rather not take 3. Voc=50.92V per panel, and Max Solar input Voltage on the inverter is Vdc=145V. You would be likely to damage the MPPT charge controller before long. I'd say rather stick to two panels in series.

@JaseZA,
Yes, that (RS-485) port is available, but it only spews out Inverter Data. The Battery Data it does provide is an aggregated view from the Inverter perspective, so pretty much useless. SA does it a bit better, with the appropriate USB/RS-232 cable, but it is very limited in what it does display. The Battery spews out a lot more info of value than what SA provides back to the user. Make no mistake, SA is very useful, but it is very limited in how/what it displays information, with very little customization possible.
This is why I use the SmartDeyeDongle (RS-485) with HA, with USB/RS-232 cable to the (master) battery, so I can see what I want/need. 

Just a bit of OCD, cleaning up for in case you decide to change work modes later.
Bottom line, just don't use solar sell unless you get approved for it by the municipality and get a new two-way meter to go with it.

Hi All!
I have decided to select active forum members into an excel sheet. Google Random number selector will select the winner.
I feel it is much better to reward active members than some one that has not logged in since 2013.
Lets see tomorrow who the random number gen selects tomorrow! Damn that water valve goodie is really cool! 😆
Awesome.
Jason

Hi all such a great prize from @Sonoff Africa! We will have the giveaway link up today!
Jay

Standard M8 Lugs paired the cable size you would use.

As an update, today is Day 34 off grid.  So far I've had blasting sunny days, and days with so much cloud cover it's hard to get the batteries to 100%.  So far I've generated 1.06MWh, and I've had to use the generator only once.  Only once because I chose to run it when cloud cover was thick, so I can get batteries a bit fuller before bedtime.  I could have skipped it, but I figured the generator needs to run anyway, and "today's as good a day as any", so went with it.
So far, I'm not sorry for a second.  It's worth every single cent.

Thanks TimCam - that's exactly my thinking. We have 150A from Eskom currently and 50kwp solar with a 60kwh HV battery. I was asking for a 160A breaker to allow us to use Eskom plus solar when available. We're also hoping to drop the Eskom supply to 80A and use grid peak shaving to ensure we don't trip. Currently paying R15k/month to have 150A vs 80A prepaid with no monthly fees.

@JaseZA Off the cuff, ask yourself this: who offers you the warranty on your inverter, the importer, the installer or equipment manufacturer? That is who you should listen to and conform to. Others will only offer recommendations. But experts on this site will also be a good guide.

I experienced a reset of all my daily values at almost the exact same time - so something definitely happened to Sunsynk's servers... I don't use the app so can't comment on current availability. 

CAN has some distance limits based on transmission speed:

Speed in bit/s  - Maximum Cable Length
- 1 Mbit/s - 20 m (65 ft)
- 800 kbit/s - 40 m (131 ft)
- 500 kbit/s - 100 m (328 ft)
- 250 kbit/s - 250 m (820 ft)
- 125 kbit/s - 500 m (1640 ft)
- 50 kbit/s - 1000 m (3280 ft)
- 20 kbit/s - 2500 m (8202 ft)
- 10 kbit/s - 5000 m (16404 ft)
This assumes ideal conditions - shielded cable with limited external interference. I'm not sure what speed DEYE use but industry standard has been 250 kbit/s for a while - so you should be able to achieve 250m.
I would look at the cable you're using for the CAN comms and the path it takes. Investing in a shielded twisted cable and trying to keep it separated from high current AC wires will go a long way to increasing the distance you can cover.