Since the 'consumption' values are so different between the two: is it possible that the first graph might be including export-to-CT (ie, the whole house) whereas the second graph is only from the LOAD/UPS 'essentials' perspective?

 

Thus is it possible that an 'export' of 2.51kW in the second graph covers half the of the household non-essentials load (total including non-essentials 5kw) with the balance (including non-essentials: ie the remaining 2.5kW since the total load is 5kW) coming from grid to service the non-essentials balance that can't be covered by the CT export?

 

Could you post a picture of the inverter display homescreen?

Ok, problem solved.

 

I reached out to SolarAssistant who suggested it might in fact be the CT Coil which is pointing to the wrong direction.  I was always "100% sure" i had it installed correctly - because all graphs I've ever seen displayed correct.  This implies that the Deye 5K inverter senses the CT is the wrong way around, and corrects/adjust for it to display correct.

When I turned it around - it all makes sense again

Hello everyone! In Kyiv, there are frequent blackouts. A city apartment can be without electricity for 4-8 hours. I bought a Deye 4k and two Pylon 5000. I will use them as a UPS. I'm hesitating - for the simplest installation with minimal intervention in the apartment distribution board, should I a) connect all consumers to the backup output of the inverter and use Passthrough when grid is available, or b) install the inverter as per the instructions and enable the Zero Export To CT mode. There is no "sun" source, this is an apartment. Only battery.

Saddened to hear of your blackouts.

Export to CT is mainly for solar - it will use the Grid input port also as an output, to power non-essential devices with spare solar capacity.

This also won't help you when the grid is down, though since that port goes down with the grid.

So you need to connect your devices to the regular Load/Backup port which will keep them running using your battery when your grid goes down, and it will pass-through when your grid is up.

 

Please post any other questions here and we'll help you out.

 

4 hours ago, Andy Amm said:

Hello everyone! In Kyiv, there are frequent blackouts. A city apartment can be without electricity for 4-8 hours. I bought a Deye 4k and two Pylon 5000. I will use them as a UPS. I'm hesitating - for the simplest installation with minimal intervention in the apartment distribution board, should I a) connect all consumers to the backup output of the inverter and use Passthrough when grid is available, or b) install the inverter as per the instructions and enable the Zero Export To CT mode. There is no "sun" source, this is an apartment. Only battery.

 

12 hours ago, JayMardern said:

 

So you need to connect your devices to the regular Load/Backup port which will keep them running using your battery when your grid goes down, and it will pass-through when your grid is up.

 

Please post any other questions here and we'll help you out.

 

 

 

Thank you for your help!

To clarify:

1. Should I be using the 'Zero export to Load' mode?
2. In this mode, does the Time of Use table affect the power source selection?
3. Is the pass-through only pass-through, or can the Deye mix grid and battery power for the backup load?

6 minutes ago, Andy Amm said:

 

Thank you for your help!

To clarify:

1. Should I be using the 'Zero export to Load' mode?
2. In this mode, does the Time of Use table affect the power source selection?
3. Is the pass-through only pass-through, or can the Deye mix grid and battery power for the backup load?

When on pass through you use grid. 

You use the timer setting to indicate to which level during each time frame to discharge the battery. 

Once it hits the battery level is will use grid to keep the battery at the SOC you indicated. 

My understanding.

1 minute ago, Scorp007 said:

When on pass through you use grid. 

You use the timer setting to indicate to which level during each time frame to discharge the battery. 

Once it hits the battery level is will use grid to keep the battery at the SOC you indicated. 

My understanding.

So does the battery discharge when grid is available?

5 minutes ago, Andy Amm said:

So does the battery discharge when grid is available?

Yes if you set the timer to do so. If you set 100% then battery will be kept fully charged but only for the times you have ticked USE GRID. 

You decide when you want the battery to discharge. 

The various export to load, CT etc are when you have PV connected. 

Edited July 5, 20241 yr by Scorp007

Honestly in this type of scenario I wouldn't even use the timer. Just turn it off, then the system will run as a normal UPS.

If you are not generating solar power to store in the batteries, if your only source of power is the grid itself, there is really no point to keep cycling the battery when the grid is available. That just wastes energy and uses up your battery cycles unnecessarily.

You want to keep the energy on-hand for when the grid goes down, so just put your essential devices on the backup load port, and operate in Zero Export to Load mode.

When the grid is on, the pass-through limit is the maximum that can be supplied to the backup loads, and when the grid goes down, the inverter's rated power is the maximum power that can be supplied from battery.

Also, if you keep it in UPS mode without the timer, you don't need to think about setting a time slot when to charge from grid, it will simply re-charge automatically once the grid returns.

I would suggest to limit the charge rate to maybe 40A-50A so you don't contribute to overloading the grid once power is restored.

 

37 minutes ago, GreenFields said:

Honestly in this type of scenario I wouldn't even use the timer. Just turn it off, then the system will run as a normal UPS.

If you are not generating solar power to store in the batteries, if your only source of power is the grid itself, there is really no point to keep cycling the battery when the grid is available. That just wastes energy and uses up your battery cycles unnecessarily.

You want to keep the energy on-hand for when the grid goes down, so just put your essential devices on the backup load port, and operate in Zero Export to Load mode.

When the grid is on, the pass-through limit is the maximum that can be supplied to the backup loads, and when the grid goes down, the inverter's rated power is the maximum power that can be supplied from battery.

Also, if you keep it in UPS mode without the timer, you don't need to think about setting a time slot when to charge from grid, it will simply re-charge automatically once the grid returns.

I would suggest to limit the charge rate to maybe 40A-50A so you don't contribute to overloading the grid once power is restored.

 

I'm considering using cheap night-time grid energy to prioritize battery charging.

15 minutes ago, Andy Amm said:

I'm considering using cheap night-time grid energy to prioritize battery charging.

Yeah then you can use the Timer to target 100% at night whilst maintaining a lower SOC % during the daytime hour slots.

 

For during the day, you'd have to pick a percentage that's high enough to withstand a typical 8-hour grid-blackout, though.

Edited July 5, 20241 yr by JayMardern

1 hour ago, JayMardern said:

Yeah then you can use the Timer to target 100% at night whilst maintaining a lower SOC % during the daytime hour slots.

 

For during the day, you'd have to pick a percentage that's high enough to withstand a typical 8-hour grid-blackout, though.

Thanks again! Fortunately, we have a schedule for electricity supply.

Edited July 5, 20241 yr by Andy Amm

7 minutes ago, Andy Amm said:

Thanks again! Fortunately, we have a schedule for electricity supply.

As a South African who's dealt with load shedding, I feel your pain. At least we understand why we have power problems (lack of maintenance, lack of added supply to meet growing demand). In your case I have no idea why this needed to happen (Land grab? In modern times? What the heck! My neighbour has a nice house should I walk into there and take it?). It's insane.

 

Anyway I digress, what's the difference between the dark and light yellow here? Is it 4 hours or 7 hours? In either case, you'd pick a SOC that can withstand that duration (both daytime and night) so that when the power goes, you've got a few hours. So if you find that an outage consumes 40% of your battery, you'd set your minimum SOC during the day at 40% (plus maybe 10-20% in case it lasts a bit longer). So say, daytime SOC would be 60% for each slot, and then nighttime would be 100%. Then if there're two outages, the inverter will charge back to 60% when the power comes back and stop there in the day, and at night it would continue to 100%

 

1 hour ago, JayMardern said:

As a South African who's dealt with load shedding, I feel your pain. At least we understand why we have power problems (lack of maintenance, lack of added supply to meet growing demand). In your case I have no idea why this needed to happen (Land grab? In modern times? What the heck! My neighbour has a nice house should I walk into there and take it?). It's insane.

 

Anyway I digress, what's the difference between the dark and light yellow here? Is it 4 hours or 7 hours? In either case, you'd pick a SOC that can withstand that duration (both daytime and night) so that when the power goes, you've got a few hours. So if you find that an outage consumes 40% of your battery, you'd set your minimum SOC during the day at 40% (plus maybe 10-20% in case it lasts a bit longer). So say, daytime SOC would be 60% for each slot, and then nighttime would be 100%. Then if there're two outages, the inverter will charge back to 60% when the power comes back and stop there in the day, and at night it would continue to 100%

 

🤝I really appreciate your support! It's truly tough. I don't have an answer whether it's a bunch of criminal idiots in power in the neighboring country or the madness of an entire nation.

Black hours are off period, grey are non-guaranteed supply, white are guaranteed supply. Now here is hot weaher and we have like 5 black /4white slots. Coming winter will be huge challenge.

In South African terms, that's something like Stage 8 loadshedding or worse, which is tough, but the inverter will make a massive difference. It's going to be tricky to find one timer setting that works for all days of the week but you'll figure something out with experience.

The other thing is that there's an app for push notifications of changes in the loadshedding slots. In South Africa one of the more popular loadshedding schedule apps is called "Eskom Se Push." Maybe they could extend into your country, or someone could come up with something similar that is tailored to your situation. Something like "Pushkin se Push"

29 minutes ago, Andy Amm said:

Black hours are off period, grey are non-guaranteed supply, white are guaranteed supply. Now here is hot weaher and we have like 5 black /4white slots. Coming winter will be huge challenge.

🤝🤝

That's a lot of off-time 😢.

Once your system is up, run from full battery (leave timer disabled) and see how much battery you end with after a long outage. I'm nervous your 10kwh of battery may not leave you with that much spare over such long outages. See how you go. If you regularly end an outage on 40%, then you can target 60% to give yourself some headroom. Otherwise you may need to follow @GreenFields advice and just keep at full battery (with a charge limit to not strain your grid too much)

 

Your inverter and batteries will play nicely with Solar so if you can get panels installed before winter, that will shield you to an extent from grid issues. Holding thumbs for your safety, dude.

11 minutes ago, JayMardern said:

🤝🤝

Holding thumbs for your safety, dude.

🙏

So, my options would be:

• All realy necessary loads within 6kW peak power connected to the LOAD output of my Deye;
• "Zero Export To Load" mode;
• Energy Pattern mode doesn't matter;
• Grid Peak-shaving = Max. Continuous AC Passthrough (40A) * 230V = 9200W (does this make sense?);
• No Time of Use table for now;
• CT not needed.

Is all this correct?

26 minutes ago, Andy Amm said:

🙏

So, my options would be:

• All realy necessary loads within 6kW peak power connected to the LOAD output of my Deye;
• "Zero Export To Load" mode;
• Energy Pattern mode doesn't matter;
• Grid Peak-shaving = Max. Continuous AC Passthrough (40A) * 230V = 9200W (does this make sense?);
• No Time of Use table for now;
• CT not needed.

Is all this correct?

Put in the CT coil, even if you think you won't need it now. It will allow the inverter to send battery power to the non-essential loads as long as the grid is present. So if you can buy cheaply at night and reduce dependence on the grid even if it is there.

Zero Export to Load is all you need for now, but that might change.

Energy pattern generally set to "battery priority" but actually doesn't really matter until you get solar panels.

Grid peak shaving doesn't make sense to use. Your problem is not that you have a low-power rated supply line, your problem is that you sometimes don't have any power at all. Don't use this function, or set it to a high value, so that as long as the grid is available you will draw as much as you need and not let the inverter place a limit on what it will take from grid.

It might still make sense to use the timer if you set all time slots day and night to 100%, but only tick the grid-charge boxes against the cheaper time slots at night. That way you will reduce the amount of cycles from the battery, discharge it deeper during the day before recharging at night. To be weighed up against the risk of running out of power before night falls, and depends on your usage. Which is to say, it will only discharge during grid outages, but not discharge any further once the grid comes on again.

41 minutes ago, Andy Amm said:

🙏

So, my options would be:

• All realy necessary loads within 6kW peak power connected to the LOAD output of my Deye;
• "Zero Export To Load" mode;
• Energy Pattern mode doesn't matter;
• Grid Peak-shaving = Max. Continuous AC Passthrough (40A) * 230V = 9200W (does this make sense?);
• No Time of Use table for now;
• CT not needed.

Is all this correct?

 

1 minute ago, GreenFields said:

Put in the CT coil, even if you think you won't need it now. It will allow the inverter to send battery power to the non-essential loads as long as the grid is present. So if you can buy cheaply at night and reduce dependence on the grid even if it is there.

Zero Export to Load is all you need for now, but that might change.

Energy pattern generally set to "battery priority" but actually doesn't really matter until you get solar panels.

Grid peak shaving doesn't make sense to use. Your problem is not that you have a low-power rated supply line, your problem is that you sometimes don't have any power at all. Don't use this function, or set it to a high value, so that as long as the grid is available you will draw as much as you need and not let the inverter place a limit on what it will take from grid.

It might still make sense to use the timer if you set all time slots day and night to 100%, but only tick the grid-charge boxes against the cheaper time slots at night. That way you will reduce the amount of cycles from the battery, discharge it deeper during the day before recharging at night. To be weighed up against the risk of running out of power before night falls, and depends on your usage. Which is to say, it will only discharge during grid outages, but not discharge any further once the grid comes on again.

Agree with @GreenFields here,

Just to confirm: what's the model number of your inverter (you previously said it's a "Deye 4k" ? If so you may be limited off-grid to 4kW (rather than 6kW) when running off batteries - but we can check the spec sheet to be sure 👍 )

4 minutes ago, JayMardern said:

 

Agree with @GreenFields here,

Just to confirm: what's the model number of your inverter (you previously said it's a "Deye 4k" ? If so you may be limited off-grid to 4kW (rather than 6kW) when running off batteries - but we can check the spec sheet to be sure 👍 )

Deye SUN-6K-SG03LP1-EU WiFi

Max. Con�nuous AC Passthrough(A) = 40A

Edited July 5, 20241 yr by Andy Amm

3 minutes ago, Andy Amm said:

Deye SUN-6K-SG03LP1-EU WiFi

 

Your calculations are right, ~9200W passthrough @ 230V (when the grid is up this is what can run through the Load/Backup port), and that port will then do 6000W when the grid is down.

Look into adding some panels before winter 🙂

On 2024/07/04 at 9:02 PM, JayMardern said:

 

Export to CT is mainly for solar - it will use the Grid input port also as an output, to power non-essential devices with spare solar capacity.

This also won't help you when the grid is down, though since that port goes down with the grid.

So you need to connect your devices to the regular Load/Backup port which will keep them running using your battery when your grid goes down, and it will pass-through when your grid is up

 

 

Morning! It's me again with another crazy idea 👼)

Can I plug my Deye in this way? I'm still considering using the Zero export to CT mode. Could an Automatic Transfer Switch be useful to avoid pass-through limitations?"

11 hours ago, Andy Amm said:

Morning! It's me again with another crazy idea 👼)

Can I plug my Deye in this way? I'm still considering using the Zero export to CT mode. Could an Automatic Transfer Switch be useful to avoid pass-through limitations?"

Hey there,

Take a look at this diagram from the inverter manual (link: here), Page 39 - this is how mine is set up (I run a Sunsynk which is also manufactured by Deye):

So the idea is, you run only your low-power circuits (Wifi, Lights, bedside plugs, etc) via the 'Backup/Load' port on the inverter (we often call these the 'essential' loads around here). These lower-power devices are subject to the limits of the inverter, but such devices are unlikely to exceed the limits. These loads stay up when the grid is down, powered by the inverter.

And then your hot-water-heater/geysers/oven and other high-power loads stay on the non-essential circuits (called the the 'On-Grid-Home Load' in this diagram) - these don't go through the inverter at all and therefore they aren't subject to the limits of the inverter, so even if they consume a lot of power, this doesn't matter. They only run when the grid is up.

 

Then when you add solar later, the inverter can zero-export to those high-power non-essential circuits whenever there's spare solar capacity that's not needed by the battery or backup/essential loads.

A setup like this would negate the need for an ATS... do you think this would work for you?

 

Finally, your inverter also has a 'Smart Load' Port which is like the Backup Port (and subject to the same limits) but the inverter can be set to only run that port when the grid is up and/or when the battery is above a certain percentage. This way you can choose to run certain higher-power loads (provided they don't exceed the inverter limit; 9.2kw [on-grid] or 6kw [grid-down] in your case). I run my stove on this Smart Load port, with a limit of 50%, so that when the battery is above 50% my stove can run, but this switches off when the battery dips below 50% to prevent the stove from wasting all my battery.

@JayMardern The position of the on grid inverter seems a good option. Am I right that it will keep on working even when the grid is down as the grid to synk is now the back up always on input?

2 hours ago, Scorp007 said:

@JayMardern The position of the on grid inverter seems a good option. Am I right that it will keep on working even when the grid is down as the grid to synk is now the back up always on input?

It does indeed look like that's the case. I guess the only caveats would be:

1. Inverters have self-consumption, so the presence of a daisy-chained inverter downstream will consume some standby power
2. If that inverter happens to be connected to its own battery bank, one would have to pay attention to that inverter's configured charging power, since it could overload the upstream inverter's Load output if it charges at a high current.

Interesting...

11 hours ago, JayMardern said:

It does indeed look like that's the case. I guess the only caveats would be:

1. Inverters have self-consumption, so the presence of a daisy-chained inverter downstream will consume some standby power
2. If that inverter happens to be connected to its own battery bank, one would have to pay attention to that inverter's configured charging power, since it could overload the upstream inverter's Load output if it charges at a high current.

Interesting...

I find it strange that the diagram does not show the essential bit that the string inverter has its own PV connected.?