gbyleveldt

That one is a challenge on the Goodwe (I’m currently working on the driver to remedy that issue), but I believe the Sunsynk already has a setting to prevent battery use on non-essential items. It’s one of the reasons I point people to Sunsynk rather than Goodwe.

Flip side of the argument is that, with more panels, you have more power earlier in the morning and later in the afternoon. Also, on cloudy days, there's more potential PV available. All else being equal, adding extra PV panels to a system is cheap for the benefit. Futhermore, if you using a blending type inverter (Goodwe**gasp**, Sunsync), it can feed power to non-essential loads (like pool pump or geyser), even if you set grid export to zero. The trick is to set these high consumers to draw power during daytime when PV is at a peak. So, you get the benefit of PV on non-essentials without having to connect these to the backup side of the inverter. Even if there's not enough PV for a certain device on the non-essential side, the balance of what's available can still be fed to the non-essentials and the shortfall from the grid, automagically. This significance of this took me a while to comprehend, but it's this capability that sets the expensive inverters apart from the cheap ones.

The challenge was/is not the update but the non existent support. The Goodwe is a great inverter, but like anything it’s possible to have issues. The brand is only as good as those that support it. Save yourself your sanity...

You can look at the CBI Astute wifi switches. Rated for 30A Resistive and they have power monitoring built in. And if you really brave, I made a tutorial to make it work with Tasmota (albeit a little involved). They R350'ish at Builders (stock is limited) or R550 at LiteGlow.

For heavens sake don't get the Goodwe. Go for Sunsynk rather. I have a nice big rant about it here on the forum somewhere

Ah ok, I was just curious.

Was there any lightning at the time the inverter popped? We have had some severe electrical storms the last few days.

I have no personal experience, but can confirm that he Pylontechs use pouch sells. 45 per us2000, but don’t quote me on that

The inverter will generate 6400W when its charging batteries and feeding the balance to the grid. So on the AC side you are limited to around 5kW; when charging batteries as well the MPTT will go up more because that’s on the DC side

Where do I start... My inverter would keep going into Check mode for no apparent reason. Sems would show massive spikes in the load whenever this happens and "overloading" of the inverter was offered as the cause. This would result in the inverter switching to offgrid mode for a few minutes and then go back into normal mode. It would do this randomly during the day but in addition to that, it would do this at 9:15am and stay in offgrid anything between 15 to 30 minutes. Every. Single. Day. Weekends, Weekdays, Holidays, doesn't matter. No way any household has exactly the same usage patterns every single day. I literally took apart the whole house's electrical system to try and figure out what it could possibly be, to no avail. Clamp meters on circuits on the backup side yielded no high load conditions (nor spikes when set to store/hold max readings) so I started becoming suspicious of the offered diagnosis. Prior to the installation I spent considerable time to split essential an non-essential loads, making sure neutrals aren't mixed up and all circuits are labelled and correctly identified. I've posted details of this a few months ago on this very forum. I (with the help of others) developed a driver to specifically log all the metrics of the inverter directly to try and figure out what was the cause of the issue. Many, many man hours later the driver was developed and *gasp*, it's not my loads. It's not even anything on the grid side; I've even gone as far as logging the incoming grid and frequency to see if there's a low/high incoming voltage/frequency causing this. Furthermore, nowhere ever does the backup side ever get close to 4.6kW. In fact, during all these trips, the backup loads were where they always where, right under around 1kW constantly. Then the offered cause turned to Eskom as there was "DC present on AC". Further testing showed this was not the case, but even so it involved a rev C of the firmware to be implemented (going from 1818A to 1818C). The DC Present on AC faults went away, but still the inverter merrily went on going into Check mode the whole time. Goodwe SA confirmed that they saw the restarts (when they bothered to respond), but had no idea what caused it as no actual fault was stored (!!!). Then, after losing my patience I was told that there's a 2020 version available and that they couldn't understand why I was still running 1818(!!!), this after GoodweSA changed the firmware from 1818RevA to 1818RevC. The updated 2020C was loaded (by me, because remote updates failed) and still the issue persisted but to a lesser extent. I've sent graphs, screenshots, mails, smoke signals; all to be simply ignored and me being sent from pillar to post. Goodwe SA was personally aware of all the issues since the 2nd of October (the install was done end of August) and only last week (4 weeks later) was I informed (in passing) that they might take it up with China. Bear in mind I was, till very recently, always respectful and amicable to getting the issues sorted out. Only to be constantly ignored or to endure flippant responses (if they came). It's only since I lost my sheeet a few weeks ago that an attempt was made to start looking into the issue by either Segen or Goodwe. What (apparently) didn't count in my favour is that I did the installation - not an accredited installer/supplier, the supplier simply purchased the inverter from Segen, added his profit and had Segen drop it off by me. He was otherwise uninvolved until I started asking for a refund. Just as a sidenote: if you DIY you must be absolutely certain that your supplier will have your back when problems crop up. Segen doesn't want to even talk to you (even less so Goodwe), the end user. I drew the short straw with my supplier... Funny enough, this last week the system has calmed down. I literally did nothing my side, nor was there another software version loaded (I checked). There's now a billion options available on the PV Master App, under Advanced. I have no idea what those are so have not touched those. Maybe someone remotely made some changes there, who knows. And when I say the system calmed down, I mean the incessant Check-mode-going-into-offgird-mode-for-30-45-minutes-at-a-time issue has not occurred again, but every now and then there's two or three blips a day when the inverter does a quick Check Mode for a few seconds (remember I log all these events every 15 seconds). Not something I can notice in the house (before the LED lights would flicker when it does this). Again, nothing in our usage patterns has changed, nor was there any hardware changes. Thus my conclusion that the issue must be related to software somehow. Anyway, there's my rant. Make of it what you will. No matter how good the inverter (and I happen to like mine - on paper), without active support it's only a heavy and expensive paperweight.

For Fark Sakes. Don't get me started with the firmware updates on these. I can tell you that 1818 is not good; I'm sitting on 2020 and it's a little better, but mine came with 1818 out the box. My experience with Goodwe has been worse than with the local Home Affairs office, just to give some perspective. But, I'm committed to it now with all the integrations I've done with it. But hell if I had a do-over I'd rather go Sunsynk. Buyer beware.

Hi, let me answer 1. Very few of us run Lead Acid batteries. I believe there’s special firmware for that because the latest Goodwe doesn’t support LA anymore 2. That’s a known issue. The PV generated data from the inverter does not correspond with SEMS. I’ve used an accumulator approach in Home Assistant to calculate the data directly from measured PV over time, which resets at midnight. 3. Just remember that there’s self dissipation of the inverter as well. It’s not 130W though; closer to 50W from what I can see 4. See point 2, same issue. And same approach to get the correct data.

I’ll be the first to admit I’d prefer to DIY than to buy ready made. And I’ve been keen to sink my teeth into a DIY battery project for a while. Thing is, DIY needs to be a LOT less expensive in terms of parts, to justify the time spent getting it going to a reliable point vs commercial options. In the numbers above, I would seriously just get the Pylons; the DIY route isn’t saving you much vs the reliability and features you get with the Pylons. If you want to save with DIY, you need to go for a bigger pack and batteries from LithiumBattery SA.

Nice, awesome interpretation there! Glad you came right with it.

I’m really liking the Sunsync inverters. I can kick myself for going the Goodwe route

Awesome thank you!

Hi Desh, you don’t perhaps have the barcode of the item still? Maybe that can help if I go back to builders so they can check. Although I’m debating if I feel like the aggravation....

Not sure, I just saw the pic from the side. The guy that posted it seemed convinced it is the Astute though. I tried looking at my local Builders, but I was met with that faraway look so didn't bother further

You kid. I've actually been thinking of a 'smart' kettle. One that I can switch on while still in bed. Once it's done, then I can make coffee. None of this yawning and bleary eyes waiting by the kettle to finish boiling. Maybe I'll put a CBI Astute on the current one. Then I can be notified when it's switched off

Nice! I love reading up on others’ setups

I have a Goodwe. If I had to do I all over I’d get the 8kw Sunsynk. Goodwe support isn’t just bad, it simply doesn’t exist. At least not locally

100% in agreement with you there. I’m running 4 APs for the 45 odd WiFi devices in the house. It just, works. I was considering RF for some door contacts (because WiFi and batteries don’t mix well), but gave up on that idea due to possible reliability concerns.

Aaah I see. HA has both cloud access (albeit $5 a month to support the developers, which I actually don’t mind) and both Android and iOS apps that’s identical to the browser interface. I was just curious if there was a compelling reason to consider OpenHab before I get too deep into HA (only been using it for a few months)

Thanks man. I actually installed two of them over the weekend. One for the geaser and one for the pool pump. I don’t really need power monitoring for either applications (I know what these draw when on), but in the case of the geaser I like the 30A rating and in the case of the pool, I like that it’s DIN rail mountable. Aaaaand I saw a pic of BW selling them for R350 now. I’m gonna go grab a couple more at that price. Just for in case

I’m curious as to why you chose OpenHab as opposed to Home Assistant? I don’t know OpenHab at all so genuine question