StephanT

hi All, the inverter seems all fine.. until the AC input drops off.. then the WR warning is shown and seconds later the inverter shuts down... I downloaded the latest solar power app and saw that it is an Over Temp Fault.. (see pics below) - is there anything that can be done about this? or is it game-over...? much appreciated Stephan

yes, I have a 3phase supply.. and didn't want to go for a 3phase inverter or 3x whatever inverter can link together per phase... hence I only have on my inverter: - all my lights - Fridge/freezer combo in kitchen - Box freezer in garage - TV (because we have to watch the loadshedding warnings! ;-) ) - Study (internet etc) The setup we want is exactly so we can utilize the "extra" solar for the remainder of the house loads as well...

Hmmm... I missed that.... let's see that we can find out... (other whether we can find the Modbus card II manual.

that's the point... we DON'T want to feed into the grid, but we DO want to feed the rest of the house that is NOT running through the inverter's load output... i.e. make your Eskom bill a lot less, and thus maximizing the Solar investment you made.... ;-)

thanks Mike... I also don't like the ESP's manual switch! Now if ONLY they would give those infini's an extra CT input... so we can still push max generated PV into the remainder of the house load, *BUT* without feeding back into the Munic grid...

oh Quite contraire... more like what the infini can do, but also no quite... Axpert: cannot Grid-Tie, i.e. cannot feed any energy back into the Grid Infini: can Grid-Tie, i.e. feed back into the grid, but you can ONLY control whether it feeds back to the grid or not...not how much... so if your infini itself is drawing 1kW, and the rest of your house is drawing 2.5kW, then your house has a total draw of 3.5kW... if at that time you are generating 3kW of PV then your house will still import 0.5kW from the Grid... and all is good... but if your house load now drops to say 1.5kw and your infini to 0.5kW.. your total load is 2kW, but you are generating 3kW PV, so 1kW will be exported to the Grid... - which is what we don't want... Solax: is like the infini, but has an CT right at the extra right at the DB/meter.. so you can set THAT meter to not feedback... hence the Solax will still push PV energy into your house grid, but can be set to make sure you don't export to the Munic grid (beyond your meter)

I used a serial port monitor and connected to SolarPower through the serial port and logged the data. interesting is that the command does not have a checksum/CRC at all... only the response has... I tried to post the complete log... always good to have an original reference. but I got the "Post too long" error... Later I'll isolate them into individual commands.. Port opened by process "javaw.exe" (PID: 2284) Request: 10/4/2015 2:30:14 PM.27064 (+0.0020 seconds) 51 50 49 0D QPI. Answer: 10/4/2015 2:30:14 PM.33264 (+0.0596 seconds) 28 50 49 31 36 9C AF 0D (PI16

hi Mike, may I ask why you returned yours? best Stephan

thanks Izak!

This is one of those typical time issues.. If I have to wait for myself to get it done... I still won't have PV when the cows come home... Some years ago my wife and I were in Montague for a weekend... there was a Saturday market... And one of those stands was selling those cute bird feeders (Some wire, a bottle and a spout)... and the sign next to it said: "Yes, I know your husband can make one... but when?" I work in S/West and popped into Exsolar, and they let slip that they don't do installs either - they make use of 3rd party installers... I've seen their installations and am quite impressed.. Those are typically the guys that I'm looking for...

hi All, I'm based in Kuilsriver and have a inverter/battery setup, but I'm looking to add a 3kW PV installation to my setup... I have a tile roof and I'm looking for a GOOD/Reliable PV installer... (I can source my own panels) Any recommendations are welcomed! best Stephan

the SolaX inverters seem pretty cool.... http://solaxpower.com/ What I like about them is that they are a sort-of Grid-Tie, supplying your house load. This means the inverter sits in parallel to the load, and not all the load is driven through the inverter... So no matter how much load your house has, what you have as excess PV energy is pumped into your house load... that means the inverter does not have to be rated at your house load.. It then also and EPS that will feed the Emergency circuits when the Grid drops... Unfortunately this seems to be a physical device switch from what I can tell.. apparently takes about 5 seconds, so your load will still have a short blackout... are there any other Grid-Tie (with backup) devices available in ZA, for which one can set Zero Export to Grid? What I see as my optimum solution is a Grid-Tie that I can select zero grid export, and a 3kW inverter (typically an Axpert should do) that drives my Emergency loads... I currently have an infini3k but don't know of a way that one can limit the Grid-export to zero BUT still export to your house Grid... (i.e. the loads house side of the DB) - i don't think infini caters for this... best Stephan

in order to try and get to better numbers for my Discharge limits, I decided to do a discharge test... just a quick recap: setup: infini3kP with 4x 200Ah Sonic Gel batteries. load: all house lights, some house appliances like Fridge/freezer, TV, internet etc. purchased and hooked up a Victron BVM-700, configured for 200Ah batteries.. Grid supply OFF.. and here we go! the Yellow are the values I got from the BVM700, the green just the Battery voltage read off the inverter LCD, and the blue are the values from the SolarPower app. (Some values I didn't log right from the beginning) Here is a graph of the BVM700 info: Note1: I scaled the Battery power by a factor 10 for better visualisation... (as you can see the average Battery power was around 772W, compared to the average load power of 674W) And for interest sake, I thought to look at the difference between what the Inverter is measuring vs. what the BVM700 is measuring: There's about a 0.5V to 0.6V difference... From the above I think I'll set the "Battery cut-off discharging voltage when Grid is unavailable" to 48.0V, or maybe 47.9V for that matter... Any thoughts/help appreciated? Once I've got automated logging going (wink-wink), I'll do some more discharge logs at different loads - one lower and one greater...

Who is Pete? ;-) Edmund what unit do you have? My preference is still to have a little device that will read all the info and post it to the cloud.. then you can keep an eye on it from anywhere and use what ever device pleases you... of course that would mean that you need internet access at your home.. but I guess we can (almost) take that for granted...

Come on Izak, write us some python code for our infini's... ;-)

indeed, that makes good sense...

Ahh.. good point about the caps - although having caps in a battery has no real purpose (unless they are supercaps that will provide an initial loadspike much faster than the batteries can (however I doubt our little inverters have those ;-) )

I've been seeing several projects on this forum of people interfacing to their infinisolar, Axpert and other inverters... I'm wondering what Cloud portals there are for uploading and displaying PV data? Typically like PVoutput.org etc.. that way we can select one or two and make a wifi/ethernet device, whether it be a RaspberryPi, NodeMCU or Arduino of some sorts... you plug in the device and it sends the info to the portal, where all the viewing and display is already handled for us... Thoughts? And lists of such portals...? best Stephan

has anyone managed to hook up the infini's to http://www.pvoutput.org ?

ok, tonight I wired in my shunt - bought a BVM700 Precision Battery Monitor, in the hope of getting a better hold on the status of my battery.. So I opened the fuses (have 2x 100A in the 48V and 0V paths) then undid the one cable... and noticed that my inverter display is still reading 78% and charging at 0.9A.. I monitored this for a while and even plugged in the solarpower software.... and it is adamant that it knows the battery voltage and that it is charging it... Am I missing something????

yip, I saw that and fixed it.. at present I can see my battery charging at around 0.4A... but it's still only at 76%... where it was last night... and I have not run anything off the battery... Hmmm Does anyone know where/if one can specify the battery setup? How does the inverter know what type of battery I have and what size... Sure I set the float and bulk voltages as well as the max Current... but that could still be 20Ah batteries in there ;-) in stead of 200Ah... No wonder the battery level guestimate... is just about that... I must say I'm a little disappointed at the battery management detail... I would like to specify the cut-off accurately... and a measurement that's out by 25%... is by no definition good enough, especially if you take into account the cost of the batteries that you are trying to maximize the life of!

it would be very cool if they would cater for just even an external current measurement input... the inverter already has the voltage... so some more internal software.. and you could theoretically control the grid power feed... that's sort-of what the Solax does... it has a CT which you place just behind the grid meter (house side of course) and then the grid feedback is in parallel with the rest of your house load... I did consider the solax, but unfortunately it's EPS (Emergency power supply) that supplies the load emergency load when there is no grid, takes 5s to kick in... so any outage still trips your emergency load and then it comes back up in 5 seconds...

Are all infinisolars protocol ID# 16 ? QPI (PI16

yip, I have the same for both... I've downloaded the latest.. but am a little weary of updating...

Interestingly you don't seem to need the CRC at all when sending commands - at least commands that query the status only (i.e. not changing settings) for instance, to get the time I only need to send QT<CR> in stead of the official QT<CRC><CR>, hence no need to compute any CRCs... at least for now.. ;-)