Infinisolar 3kw+ settings please...

[ivan]

Hi Guys

Could be in the wrong topic, but have an installed Infini 3kw Plus. and recently installed my panels.

Working great, but have a issue with tripping earth leakage(EL)... The unit will work fine, but as soon as the HZ goes above 50.1(default setting - requires factory password to set.) the utility switches off and it runs from my batteries, which is fine... but once the Hz drops back to below 50.1Hz, the utility switches back on, then it trips my EL... 

I have a old house with a huge earth leakage unit and rated at 20mA, and everything runs through it - main breaker and EL, so thinking of changing it out with newer one and 30mA, but anyone experienced this type of problem as yet? Do you install infini without EL?

I have a seperate DB where the infini's incoming is distributed with EL. A few other circuits is still on ESkom

and would like to get too the root of the problem... rather than  bypassing it..

Thanks

[superdiy]

Hi ivan, welcome to the forum.

The earth leakage connection issue has been discussed many times before and no conclusion has been reached. I'm not sure what causes your ELR to trip, but the best way to connect the inverter is before the main ELR and then to bond the Neutral & Earth on the inverter output and to add a second ELR to the inverter output and then feed the load from the second ELR.

[ivan]

Hi Guys

Could be in the wrong topic, but have an installed Infini 3kw Plus. and recently installed my panels.

Working great, but have a issue with tripping earth leakage(EL)... The unit will work fine, but as soon as the HZ goes above 50.1(default setting - requires factory password to set.) the utility switches off and it runs from my batteries, which is fine... but once the Hz drops back to below 50.1Hz, the utility switches back on, then it trips my EL... 

I have a old house with a huge earth leakage unit and rated at 20mA, and everything runs through it - main breaker and EL, so thinking of changing it out with newer one and 30mA, but anyone experienced this type of problem as yet? Do you install infini without EL?

I have a seperate DB where the infini's incoming is distributed with EL. A few other circuits is still on ESkom

and would like to get too the root of the problem... rather than  bypassing it..

Thanks

 

Thanks for the info, Will do it today...

[Kwagga]

Hi Ivan

I did not have the Solarpower Factory password

Did have an USB to RS232 converter cable

I also had an problem with the 50.1 HZ so i changed the freq and the batt voltage calibration  with the RS 232 AccessPort  program.

Check page 21 of the RS 232 protocol (Set grid output frequency high loss point)

Hope this help

 

 

RS232 Protocol.pdf

AccessPort_and_SOP_battery_calibration(1).rar

[Prasert1965]

Hi Maurizio,Kwagga

Thank for your experienced. The Rs232 protocols may help my problem too.(to setting the lower of grid voltage. I will try to change it.

Prasert1965

 

[ivan]

Fantastic, Thanks Kwagga

[Adnan]

On ‎13‎/‎03‎/‎2016 at 9:14 AM, Kwagga said:

Hi Ivan

I did not have the Solarpower Factory password

Did have an USB to RS232 converter cable

I also had an problem with the 50.1 HZ so i changed the freq and the batt voltage calibration  with the RS 232 AccessPort  program.

Check page 21 of the RS 232 protocol (Set grid output frequency high loss point)

Hope this help

 

 

RS232 Protocol.pdf

AccessPort_and_SOP_battery_calibration(1).rar

Hi Ivan

which is the suitable and safe frequency to avoid this problem?

Because i have the same problem but not with Earth leakege but with the inverter,Every time when grid trip off the inverter start working with batteries without any problem but when grid come back the inverter trip and restart automatically.

I can't understand the real factor of this problem.

Regards

[Wetkit]

Perhaps try to only charge the batteries from only solar or mains, not both.

I know that caused me some issues in the beginning.

[Hristo]

Hello!

 

I have problem with my infinisolar 3kw.

In inverter mode,without solar energy go to error 2 then go to error 21.

I dont understud this error.

I have batery 105Ah x 4 x 12V.

In the combination with PV work but without dont.

 

Please help.

[Mark]

Is a the battery bank enough for this inverter?  I don't have a manual but 100ah 48V sounds like very little...

[Mike]

BUS undervoltage?  do you have fuse connected between battery and infini?

100ah x 48vdc will work but little to no backup time.... i do not pick up an error 21 in my docs

oh wait, that is a soft start error in the battery segment, what voltage shows on the inverter for the battery? are they connected correctly

[Prasert1965]

Hi all 

I have setting my inverter min grid-connected voltage from 184  v to 180 v by the AccessPort program use rs232 protocol "GOLVvvv.v<cr>. It can change without factory password.

[Hristo]

7 hours ago, Mike said:

BUS undervoltage?  do you have fuse connected between battery and infini?

100ah x 48vdc will work but little to no backup time.... i do not pick up an error 21 in my docs

oh wait, that is a soft start error in the battery segment, what voltage shows on the inverter for the battery? are they connected correctly

I Know that is 100Ah is small backup.

Battery is new and voltage show is 54V,I have fuse DC 32A,but same things hapend without fuse.Wire is 16mm2.

I tested today with solar panel energy,and backup work good.

Test load is 2kw and when is not enaugh PV energy ,battery discharge up 25A.

But if is out conected PV inverters go in the errors 2,after 21.

I use configuracion Grid tie with backuop 1.

Know dont undestain this situation with this error.

 

Thanks.

 

[Mike]

check your battery settings in the configuration, min and max discharge?

for how long  is the test without pv at 25a? it might be you are reaching the max discharge with that load very quick. if i remember the max discharge is set to 48vdc, so your drop from 54vdc to 48vdc with 25a use as test....quick

Go to your parameter settings and check your battery values on the middle right hand segment of power manager, also consider changing your dc fuse to 100a

[Wetkit]

I get the idea that the load might be too big for the batteries alone. When the PV is connected it helps support the load and the battery.

I have my min battery voltage set to 45V. The reason for this is that once the bank gets to this level and the load is disconnected, the battery bank recovers again back to 47V.

[Hristo]

Hi.

All day I spent to program this inverter but,no good news.

Without PV energy nothing.

In this situation I cant use batery if I dont have PV energy.

Tomarow I put picture of my program.

I thing that somting wrong with inverter.

 

[Hristo]

Hi,me again..

My setup,

Max ac current,max grid power calibration and max baterry discharge,is zero.I cant replece this.

 

 

[MaurizioZA]

I am not sure where to post this since not about settings but about weird inverter behavior and weird fault messages

 

Firstly: I am connected from PC to rs232 port in inverter in an unusual way: I use a rs232-to-wifi/LAN device (the wifi signal is converted to a virtual com port).

Not the ideal connectivity but the only possible since PC is far away from inverter. So far away that in the last few days I have started to have dropped connection and loss of packets on wifi connection for unknown reasons and decided to connect directly with LAN cable (that seems to have resolved loss of packets and dropped connections).

I added LAN cable connection after inverter "froze/hang" twice in recent days, both times as I made some minor changes in "My Power Management" settings of SolarPower:

1) first time as un-ticked "feed to grid"

2) second time as I changed "Load Supply Source (PV is unavailable)" from "Battery-Grid" to "Grid-Battery"

In both occasion inverter hang in the instant I clicked the "Apply" button: first time I justified this as a freak coincidence but the second time it is no longer coincidental.

"Inverter hang": as frozen as a computer which needs a hard reset.

0 values everywhere on LCD screen, no power recognized from grid or solar panels or battery but still inverter remained on. No error message was displayed.

I shut down first grid supply and PV supply with no change: only after shutting down battery supply I was able to power off inverter.

After that I was able to restart inverter and everything seemed to work as expected.

Has anyone experienced a similar  "Inverter hang" ?

I analyzed packets and realized that I was receiving many NAKss replies from inverter.  So today I decided to switch from wifi to more reliable LAN cable.

This has improved communication very much (faster and more reliable) and now I only get NAKss reply to command "QPIBI" (no idea yet of what that request might mean).

 

Then suddenly tonight I started to get repeated warnings "Input PV is found lost": no idea why that should happen in the middle of the night.

Eventually I received two fault warnings: "An external Flash device failed"

Does anyone have any idea what that "external flash device" might be?

the first event:

2008    Warning    2016-04-05 18:27:36    Power grid voltage falls below the lower threshold
2002    Fault    2016-04-05 18:27:36    An external Flash device failed

and the second event:

2003    Warning    2016-04-05 20:57:56    Input PV is found lost
2003    Warning    2016-04-05 21:25:06    Input PV is found lost
2002    Fault    2016-04-05 22:49:25    An external Flash device failed
2003    Warning    2016-04-05 22:49:42    Input PV is found lost

I am getting a little worried by what I don't understand

Has anyone any idea of what is happening ?

I hope my inverter is not about to die on me (crossing fingers)  

[Coulomb]

1 hour ago, MaurizioZA said:

Eventually I received two fault warnings: "An external Flash device failed"

Does anyone have any idea what that "external flash device" might be?

I don't know much about the Infini series, except that they are somewhat similar to the Axperts. I've been poking about in the Infini firmware, but it's much harder going as there are no symbols. I can guess some from the similarity with the Axpert firmware, but obviously there are many places where the code diverges. So I can't even tell you if there is such a command as QPIBI; I suspect it's a corruption of QPIRI (or perhaps a typo?).

The Axperts don't use the internal EEPROM in the DSP microcontroller for saving settings; they seem to be some sort of external chip. It might be an actual flash device for the Infini series; I don't know what the difference is between EEPROM and Flash technologies. So if it has a corrupted copy of its settings, that might go some way towards explaining how it might complain about a lack of PV input in the middle of the night.

I suppose it's possible that some of the corrupted commands from the unreliable WiFi connection could have eventually fluked a valid CRC and sent some unintentional command that has corrupted the settings flash data. Do your settings all seem to be sane? If not, it might be worth attempting to correct them one by one, to see if that fixes the problem.

If it really is the external flash chip that has failed, then it sounds like there is little alternative to a factory repair. Even if you could find and replace the flash device yourself, you might never be able to set it up with sane original settings. (There might be a command to do that.)

[superdiy]

I've experienced an inverter reboot when I changed the "feedback to grid" setting once - the problem is with the crappy bundled software - it does not set all the controls' values properly when the settings screens are displayed and then when you then change a value/setting somewhere it sometimes saves multiple values to the inverter, including some incorrect values/settings as well. It might be that in your case a certain combination of incorrect values were set and the inverter "froze".  I'm busy writing my own software for the infinis and hopefully I can eliminate these issues.

The PV loss messages at night might not be a problem, because there should not be any PV coming in and then the inverter should "note" it.  I have not checked my inverter's warnings yet, but I think it should be quite normal. What I have discovered is that I sometimes get very low PV voltage readings at night (a few volts) which might be from a bright moon or street lights etc.  I'm not sure when the warning is triggered, but I would assume it is triggered when the PV voltage drops to 0. Therefor if street lights etc. influences the PV voltage at night and at some point in time the voltage goes to 0, that warning might be triggered and that might be why you see the message at different times during the night.

The QPIBI command is not recognized by the infini 3K - NAK is always returned from the inverter - it is a query command to determine the following:

• BatteryPieceNumber
• BatteryTotalCapacity
• BatteryRemainTime

I'm not sure what the "external flash failed" message means, but if you are trying to use your inverter as a camera, try using the on-camera flash instead, because the external one has failed. 

[Coulomb]

1 hour ago, superdiy said:

The QPIBI command is not recognized by the infini 3K - NAK is always returned from the inverter - it is a query command to determine the following...

Said with great authority, it seems. Have you found this in a protocol document somewhere, or it this just grinding reverse engineering, seeing what it seems to be used for?

Just curious.

[superdiy]

5 minutes ago, Coulomb said:

Said with great authority, it seems. Have you found this in a protocol document somewhere, or it this just grinding reverse engineering, seeing what it seems to be used for?

Just curious.

reverse engineering

The only protocol doc I could find contained only 30 QUERY commands and 16 SET commands. A Java decompile revealed lots and lots more.

[MaurizioZA]

Thanks Coulomb and superdiy

 

9 hours ago, Coulomb said:

... corrupted copy of its settings  ...

The Axperts don't use the internal EEPROM in the DSP microcontroller for saving settings; they seem to be some sort of external chip. It might be an actual flash device for the Infini series;

 

That was my first concern but device parameters seem as they have always been:

 

9 hours ago, Coulomb said:

I suppose it's possible that some of the corrupted commands from the unreliable WiFi connection could have eventually fluked a valid CRC and sent some unintentional command that has corrupted the settings flash data. Do your settings all seem to be sane? If not, it might be worth attempting to correct them one by one, to see if that fixes the problem.

My assessment was that some partial command might have caused the hangs and that is why I decided to switch to a LAN cable.

I think I need to keep logs of virtual com communication so I can check in logs what actually happened after a hang event ... but I must first figure out how to do that in Win 7

(remote IP 198.162.0.83 port 8080 mapped to virtual port com 1 - parameters 2400,N,8,1)

2 hours ago, superdiy said:

I've experienced an inverter reboot when I changed the "feedback to grid" setting once - the problem is with the crappy bundled software - it does not set all the controls' values properly when the settings screens are displayed and then when you then change a value/setting somewhere it sometimes saves multiple values to the inverter, including some incorrect values/settings as well. It might be that in your case a certain combination of incorrect values were set and the inverter "froze".  I'm busy writing my own software for the infinis and hopefully I can eliminate these issues.

The PV loss messages at night might not be a problem, because there should not be any PV coming in and then the inverter should "note" it.  I have not checked my inverter's warnings yet, but I think it should be quite normal. What I have discovered is that I sometimes get very low PV voltage readings at night (a few volts) which might be from a bright moon or street lights etc.  I'm not sure when the warning is triggered, but I would assume it is triggered when the PV voltage drops to 0. Therefor if street lights etc. influences the PV voltage at night and at some point in time the voltage goes to 0, that warning might be triggered and that might be why you see the message at different times during the night.

The QPIBI command is not recognized by the infini 3K - NAK is always returned from the inverter - it is a query command to determine the following:

• BatteryPieceNumber
• BatteryTotalCapacity
• BatteryRemainTime

I'm not sure what the "external flash failed" message means, but if you are trying to use your inverter as a camera, try using the on-camera flash instead, because the external one has failed. 

in perfect agreement with " crappy bundled software ". Also I am still using SolarPower v 1.07 because i am a little wary of upgrading to a version which might be not compatible with firmware (excuses: factory a few days ago has sent me a new version V1.08 which I have been too lazy to install).

QPIBI command: good to know that NAK is the reply you also get

so that is not my problem..

On the other hand some of those information could be easily returned if command was valid.

In the past I did get some PV value at night with moon. But last night with overcast sky and a little rain as well it was odd.

Even more odd that " Power grid voltage falls below the lower threshold" which occurred at same time as "An external Flash device failed"  happened while grid supply seemed pretty stable and well within valid parameters to me.

I just hope they are just freaky messages and not an indication of incoming inverter failure.

I could do well without an inverter before ... but now I could definitely not survive without one

[superdiy]

8 minutes ago, MaurizioZA said:

Even more odd that " Power grid voltage falls below the lower threshold" which occurred at same time as "An external Flash device failed"  happened while grid supply seemed pretty stable and well within valid parameters to me.

I just hope they are just freaky messages and not an indication of incoming inverter failure.

I could do well without an inverter before ... but now I could definitely not survive without one

If I recall correctly, JDP mentioned that some warnings were not handled correctly in the Axpert software. Warnings were logged although the errors did not actually occur - they are again bugs in the software and he filtered / corrected that issue in his software for the Axpert.  I will not be surprised if it is a similar thing here. I think in the Axpert's case it was a fan failure message which occasionally occured

 

14 minutes ago, MaurizioZA said:

in perfect agreement with " crappy bundled software ". Also I am still using SolarPower v 1.07 because i am a little wary of upgrading to a version which might be not compatible with firmware (excuses: factory a few days ago has sent me a new version V1.08 which I have been too lazy to install).

I'm on v1.10 and still experience issues with it.

[Guest]

What I have seen on the Axperts is that sometimes (at random) I will send a command to get a fault string and it will return a value string. The software uses binary to see if a error register is set. 1 for fault and 0 for no fault. The way the value string is put together is that that there are also 1 and 0 in the value string. so then the software will think a fault happened. What I did was to look for the correct string to come back. If I get the wrong string I ask for it again. So now AICC does not get any false positives on the fault code side. 

 

If you get the fault and the next second the fault is cleared you can assume it was a wrong string value.