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Posted

Hi all, in late February this year I installed my solar system with the help of my gardeners with a small add on of two more batteries in March 

 

The system is also connected to my 10kw 3phase genset which came in use last week during the floods

1 x 12 kw Deye 3phase Inverter 

6 x 5.5kw Hubble batteries 

16 x 455w Art Solar panels  facing South East (only realised this today. App i used was not calibrated)

1 x 250amp fuse holder 

40 meters 1.5mm shielded 8 core cable for the CT's

100 meters DC cable for panel

Hager change over switch

Earth wire is two 4mm cables for panels and inverter etc. 

Alot of labels 

I also added a smart device to tell me when the grid supply is gone and a smart smoke detector 

Majority of the electrical items was bought from North Side Electrical 

Signal cable from Actsys

 

Next upgrade Electrician to do COC,  to add 10 more panels, move one sting to face North and make each sting of 13 pannels and install trunking for battery 5 and 6

 

My only concern is the earth spike for the solar is 1 meter away from the generator earth spike and  2 meters away from the earth spike for the electric fence 

 

Thoughts and opinions welcome

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Posted

Did you install busbars for the batteries? Or did you go with equal length cable? Just worried that will have unbalanced batteries and the first one degrading faster than the rest. Setup looks good!

Posted
4 hours ago, Stochastic said:

This is looking good.

Have you done a rough payback period calculation? [how long a period until your electricity will be free]

6 years to pay off with 2 months of no production of a year. 

Posted
2 hours ago, iiznh said:

Did you install busbars for the batteries? Or did you go with equal length cable? Just worried that will have unbalanced batteries and the first one degrading faster than the rest. Setup looks good!

does that really matter, even when you have BMS?  Battery management system is there to manage the balancing of batteries. You have one battery as a master and others as slaves. My understanding of how BMS works might be wrong though  

Posted
2 hours ago, iiznh said:

Did you install busbars for the batteries? Or did you go with equal length cable? Just worried that will have unbalanced batteries and the first one degrading faster than the rest. Setup looks good!

No I connected one to another. I was going to do the busbar route but Hubble said if I have it connected via bms it will draw and charge from all the batteries. 

I must check this data out on the cloudlink to see if it is doing that. If not then I will install a busbar.

Posted
2 hours ago, iiznh said:

Did you install busbars for the batteries? Or did you go with equal length cable? Just worried that will have unbalanced batteries and the first one degrading faster than the rest. Setup looks good!

What would be the benefit of a bussbar in this application?

Posted
13 minutes ago, hoohloc said:

does that really matter, even when you have BMS?  Battery management system is there to manage the balancing of batteries. You have one battery as a master and others as slaves. My understanding of how BMS works might be wrong though  

BMS will only balance the cells internally in a battery and prevent them from going too low or too hight allowing the battery to disconnect from the charge/load. The comms cable with the master-slave configuration allows all the info from all the batteries to be fed into the inverter to ensure we do not charge at max current when approaching 100%. Batteries charged at max current might disconnect to protect themselves causing the system to go down.

Posted
21 minutes ago, Deeos said:

No I connected one to another. I was going to do the busbar route but Hubble said if I have it connected via bms it will draw and charge from all the batteries. 

I must check this data out on the cloudlink to see if it is doing that. If not then I will install a busbar.

This is where I learned:  https://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/Wiring-Unlimited-EN.pdf  please see page 18 and 19.

Also this video explains it well 

 

Posted
5 minutes ago, iiznh said:

BMS will only balance the cells internally in a battery and prevent them from going too low or too hight allowing the battery to disconnect from the charge/load. The comms cable with the master-slave configuration allows all the info from all the batteries to be fed into the inverter to ensure we do not charge at max current when approaching 100%. Batteries charged at max current might disconnect to protect themselves causing the system to go down.

My battery bank has no BMS comms with my inverter but they have never disconnected or switched off as they approach 100%.  

Posted
26 minutes ago, Deeos said:

was going to do the busbar route but Hubble said if I have it connected via bms it will draw and charge from all the batteries

I thought that this is the whole point, share current equally and prevent one battery from losing capacity before the others do. So maybe I am missing something completely?

Posted
2 minutes ago, hoohloc said:

My battery bank has no BMS comms with my inverter but they have never disconnected or switched off as they approach 100%.  

As My batteries approach 100%,every time, they automatically request less current to the extend that the inverter will switch off PV

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Posted
3 minutes ago, Deeos said:

Please see attached does this mean it's drawing equal amounts from each battery or should I install a bus bar

Capture.PNG

Interesting, which batteries are you using? Maybe install a busbar if you get a chance and share your findings. 

Posted
9 minutes ago, hoohloc said:

As My batteries approach 100%,every time, they automatically request less current to the extend that the inverter will switch off PV

Control by voltage makes is difficult to know when Lithium is fully charged, the charge curve is so flat that it might seem like we are at 90%... If you do not mind to charge them some days to 80% and some days to 95% then this works perfectly fine. If you paid for 5kw and end up only using 4KWh but it works for you then there is no harm done.

Posted
11 minutes ago, hoohloc said:

Interesting, which batteries are you using? Maybe install a busbar if you get a chance and share your findings. 

Hubble AM2 5.5 kw 

Posted
17 minutes ago, Deeos said:

Please see attached does this mean it's drawing equal amounts from each battery or should I install a bus bar

The graph is actually pretty clear, battery 1 is doing the most work. You could change the wiring as described in the victron wiring guide as an interim solution. 1st prize would be to go the busbar route. Maybe look at a cabinet that already contains busbars... do we get those in SA?

Posted (edited)
13 minutes ago, iiznh said:

Control by voltage makes is difficult to know when Lithium is fully charged, the charge curve is so flat that it might seem like we are at 90%... If you do not mind to charge them some days to 80% and some days to 95% then this works perfectly fine. If you paid for 5kw and end up only using 4KWh but it works for you then there is no harm done.

That is another theory I disagree with, My batteries are connected to RIOT and I can see clearly when they are at 100% or at 50%,hence why I'm not bothered to get them to communicate with my Inverter. When they are at 100%, they can not take or request more charge from the inverter and because of that load reduction, the inverter switches off my PV and uses the batteries  until the SoC is down to 98%

Edited by hoohloc
Posted
6 minutes ago, hoohloc said:

When they are at 100%, they can not take or request more charge from the inverter and because of that load reduction, the inverter switches off my PV and uses the batteries  the SoC down

So this means that the BMS has separate charge and discharge mosfets and control the direction of the current, awesome! Plenty BMS models on the market cannot do this. I learned something new about Pylontech. Sounds like they pick quality components. Thank you for pointing it out to me

Posted

Thanks will look at a busbar option. Guess I'll have to put 100x100 trunking to house the busbar and wiring 

Maybe double power skirting might work better 

In the video he makes a good point of putting a fuse on the positive on each battery but that will work out quite expensive.  

 

I saw an installation using the same fuse holder but they had 10 batteries, 10 fuse holders and then to a busbar, another fuse holder and then to the inverter but I thought that's a overkill until now

  • 8 months later...

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