Buyeye

Growatt year month day (US format)

Hi Guys, 
Sorry for my response delay due to some diseases
thank you for your help. Configured now my inverter has you tell me. Before that, program 1 was to SUB.
I define program 11 to 70A. SPF 5000 ES :Default 30A, 0A~80A Settable. I set to 70A to avoid to be close that the charging limitation of my inverter.
 
 
Yes, i'm totally autonomous. Leaving outside of city, in middle of forest. No grid, and water connexion. I'm using Water drilling, and PV solution, and Starlink !
 
Thank for you help guys. I'll keep you informed

2 slice toaster. Uses less than a microwave.

I also paid R26k to an installer for my 5kw heat pump some 2 years ago at the previous house. It will always be cheaper if you have some DIY capabilities. We can't be expected to DIY solar panels and plumbing.
Some stuff you will have to get an expect. I used probably close to 6kw to heat the geyser today which is fine on sunny days but if there was an outage I would have opted for no hot water today. If I had a heat pump I would have tried to heat it even through an outage. It looks like i would have managed the 1kw needed for that ITS heat pump from the graph.

Up to a few months ago Mecer were still selling 265W panels. 
I have a string of 6 270W and I could always get more if I wanted. Don't just ask 1 seller is the key. 

I bought a Epever XTRA3415N from Thesunpays. It is a 30A 48v MPPT and cost was R2445 plus cable for coms R130. The 2nd one I had to import because they had no stock.

Other than not being part of the cool kids club with the pumped up kicks, I joke ofcource. 
You seem to have all the bases covered.

In all the pictures the battery is at 99/100%(basically full). Test with the battery at 50% I'm guessing the inverter is doing it to prevent feeding back a lot to the grid.
If grid feedback is allowed or possible enable it and if you see a perfect bell curve then you have your answer.

I entered this one, interestingly enough with 2 sna5000 inverters you can choose to share or not share the batteries between the inverters so the batteries don't have to be the same.

You need to set parameter 1 to utility and 14 to SNU, it will work with these settings. no need to disconnect the PV breakers.
Another thing to consider is to make sure of is parameter 11, charging AC current does not exceed what your gen can supply thus lowering the gen frequency, growatt very sensitive to drops in frequency.

@Buyeye raises a pretty valid point here:
 
Does it rain at all where you live? Have you considered winter production being lower than summer?
Your array size will likely generate 55-65kWh per day in summer in perfect sunshine, but in winter it's going to drop significantly due to the shorter days (my own experience in Johannesburg indicates you can expect around 40-50kwh per day in winter for your array, on average). Which means even assuming you have no solar usage during the day (unlikely!), you're going to have a hard time fully charging soon-to-be-4 batteries (which need 40kWh alone plus charging losses). And if you add additional pumps (which are massive power hogs - my pool pump eats 8kwh per day by itself), these margins are going to be even tighter.
Likewise on a rainy day, you can expect production to plummet up to 80%.
 
Is your idea to keep some battery capacity on standby so that you don't need to worry about the burden of fully charging them from empty? Do you have an idea as to your household's daytime vs nighttime usage?
 
Solar energy is free but it's not always abundant and never fully predictable; so it always makes to minimize your demand as much as possible so that you're not relying on the utility whenever the weather doesn't behave. And then when the weather does fail you, an oversized array helps you cover your use as best as possible to minimize your utility costs.
Keeping usage low also prevents massive bills in the event that the array is ever partly out of service (like the faulty-inverter scenario you describe) or during extended periods of lousy whether.
 
Our daily household consumption used to be 60kwh a day; in preparation for solar (before putting up a single panel) we dropped it down to 45kWh and sized our array accordingly; solar ended up covering about 25-30 of those kWh per day in the summer. I've only now just pulled the trigger on doubling up the entire system (for a maximum of 60kWh per day whilst maintaining a 5.5-year return on investment period) with the intention of having more than I need on a sunny summer day (and perhaps feeding back the balance to grid in future) and exactly the right amount on a winter or cloudy day; with only rain forcing me back to grid. It makes sense to have more than you need (rather than trying to cut it fine with high demand) - to cater for mother nature being a somewhat cruel mistress sometimes!

The panels sound like they are connected correctly.  Do you think you will be able to charge 40kwh of batteries with the current panels? And are you using 20kwh overnight?
Are you trying to have enough batteries for a few days which in that case you would not need to charge them to full every day but you do have to charge them to full atleat once a week for top balancing.

I was including everything washing machine, dryer with the geyser in the 15kwh(all daytime usage). I was actually worried it might be low for a 200l geyser.
How did the rains affect your production in December?

I like the water analogy... the inverter will increase the voltage across the DC bus, raising it higher than the battery voltage which causes the electrons to flow 'downhill' to the battery. Voltage can be seen as pressure and higher voltage means higher pressure (uphill) and electrons will always flow from higher pressure to lower pressure, just like water. Inversely, when there is a load on the inverter the voltage of the DC bus will drop lower than the battery, figuratively placing it downhill so the electrons will flow from the battery to the inverter. Current can then be seen as the rate of flow of the water (electrons), the higher the pressure difference the higher the flow rate (current). This obviously gets a bit more complicated when doing blending with grid, battery and PV, but the principle is the same, it is all managed by voltage differences.... at least that's my layman's understanding of how inverters work.

Most people when they say they don't have money they mean they don't have the cash.
I will echo @GreenFields that it's worth using credit to include pv panels with the installation.

Try asking [email protected] to finish the parallel settings so you can use the luxpower app for monitoring. 

So this is a bit of a thread necro, although I figured I might as well share some feedback.
I think it was around November last year, when my geyser decided to give up and it burst / rusted through.
Insurance sorted me out with a new geyser and because my geyser isolator was not a weather proof one, I got an electrician out to sort that out (via insurance) and since the new geyser and water proof isolator I no longer seem to experience the EL tripping when it rains and the geyser is on!
 
Whether water was getting inside the previous isolator box or whether the geyser having a bit of a hole forming was the cause, I am not 100% sure as I do not think there was water getting inside the isolator box based on the previous position but I could be wrong.

Thanks, Steve. 
That makes perfect sense, and you've put my mind at ease about parallel operations.
So assuming I opt for a parallel setup, I have one more concern, which I'm hoping you might be able to help with:
On very cloudy days, I run a generator if the batteries need topping up.
In the past, this was connected to the "Utility input" on the single inverter.
So, under the new arrangement, should I connect the generator to one, or both, of the inverters? And will it present a synchronisation problem if I start it up? Or would it be better to shut down the second inverter and revert to single mode, before starting the generator?
I really appreciate your help with all these questions. I've done my best to research these points using the manuals provided, but as someone said elsewhere on this forum, the documentation available is notable for its paucity, and I'm by no means an expert on things electrical.

Your panel connection configuration will be 3S2P. First calculate the Voc of 3S2P of your panel specs. I am using JA 270W for this exercise you need to substitute these values with your panel specs, label in the back of your panel. Voc- 37v x 3panels in series = 111v + 7.5%(0°C@STC)= 119.32v well below your inverter Voc of 145v. This model according to model name uses a MPPT Solar charge Controller 3000W 60Amp so above configuration would be the most efficient 3S2P.

From the information you have given, I would definitely say get more batteries. It will of course depend on many factors such as where you are located, your monthly energy usage and the percentage daytime vs nighttime usage, etc. A chart showing your production power, consumption power, and battery SOC over an average day will be very helpful. As a rule of thumb, if your batteries get fully charged quite easily and almost every day you probably have enough panels, if you run out of power at night and need to use the grid, you don't have enough batteries.

[Quote=]
What is Battery Sulfation?
Sulfation, a build-up of lead sulfate crystals, is the number one cause of early failures of lead-acid, sealed AGM or flooded (wet cell-filler caps) batteries.  A sulfated battery can lead to:
loss of cranking power longer charging times excessive heat build-up leading to "boil out" shorter running times between charges dramatically shorter battery life     Other causes of battery failure include: vibration, contamination, damaged charging plates (due to overheating) and under or over charging. [/quote] https://www.batteryminders.com/avoid-battery-sulfation/#:~:text=Sulfation%2C a build-up of,longer charging times

@MonaLisa hi the good news is that you got just under 2000 cycles from your lead acid batteries. The bad news is they are rated for 500 cycles.
Lithium batteries have become much more affordable than 5 years ago and most are rated for 6000 cycles. Now that you brought it up I'm wondering if anyone has had their Lithium batteries for ten years and how they are performing. 

@MonaLisa hi the good news is that you got just under 2000 cycles from your lead acid batteries. The bad news is they are rated for 500 cycles.
Lithium batteries have become much more affordable than 5 years ago and most are rated for 6000 cycles. Now that you brought it up I'm wondering if anyone has had their Lithium batteries for ten years and how they are performing. 

Hi,

I'd like to introduce myself, and my small setup. 

I'm Bianco, a Dutch male, and my wife and I moved to Spain 2 years ago, where we live on a small piece of rural land, in Aragon. We are completely off-grid. 
Therefore I Hired a friend two years ago to install a solar system. he and a friend installed a Voltronic Expert 24V 3Kw, with 6 320 Wp Solarpanels, and 2 Ultracell 316 Ah Gel Batteries, and I paid good money for it.  After 1 year and a bit, every thing shut down at 2 in the morning, whilst the day before was a clear and sunny day. In the months after that, it started happening more and more. Well long story short, The Batteries were fried. After contacting the "friend" He basically told me he could do nothing: A bit like: Shit happens. 

After studying I chose to do it myself. The panels were fine, so they are still there. I bought a new Inverter, another Voltronic Axpert, 5Kw, on 48 Volts And two Pylontechs US3000C
All connected, everything works fine. in the (hopefully near) future we'd like to add another Pylontech to the bank. Its enough for us. We have a TV, and we mostly watch during the day (if we do), and no dishwasher, washing machine or other heavy stuff, besides a Nespresso, but that is also only used during the day. The only thing that is a big consumer is the waterpump, but on a timer, controlled by Domoticz. During non-solar hours, it is off. 

So I have a raspberry in the bedroom, wich is equipped with Domoticz, wich controls most of the lights, and a few other stuff. In the Batteryroom, there is another raspberry, wing contains Solarassistant, and monitors the Pylontechs via the Inverter.

I'm still looking for a way to connect the Pylontechs Directly to the raspberry, I read something about the console port, but can seem to find if you can connect it at the same time as the port to the Inverter.

So, Newbie in Solar, but I like learning about it, and helping. 

If anybody knows something about connecting it to a raspberry, (or maybe my way of thinking is wrong) much obliged.

Greetings from a cold (+2), but Sunny Spain.

 

Here is a screen shot showing all 3 sources being blended. I can't remember which thread asked about it.