5kW Luxpower Inverter and 2x 5kWH Volta Battery Issue

[Koerant]

Hello everyone,

 

I am looking for some help. I had a solar system installed about 2 months ago and it has been great to "beat" loadshedding, but I have found a few cases where the things do not work as expected.

The problem is that one battery dies quicker than the other (much quicker). It happened this morning, we had load shedding from 4am to 8am. Battery was sitting at 50% at around 6am according to the app. Suddenly the whole house is without power. When inspecting the batteries, I can see the one sitting at 2/4 lights (50%) and the other sitting at 0/4 lights. This caused the inverter to stop supplying power to the house. I am no expert, but I would assume the batteries should be dropping evenly.

This is also not the first time this has happened. I contacted the installer when it happened the first time. They came out to inspect and just changed the dip switch (I am not sure this did anything as that only defines the address of the slave battery). It was working fine for a bit but now it has happened again.

Before I contact the installer again, I was hoping to get some advice here.

While I had no power this morning, I decided to do some research. I looked at the installation and there are two odd things I found.

1. The slave battery address is set to 3 [0010]
2. The CAN cable connected to the inverter is connected to the slave battery and not the master. This I find very odd. Should this not be connected to the master?

I do not see any other physical issues. My first instinct would be to connect the CAN cable to the master battery and fix the address on the slave to be [1000].

I am really hoping this is just an installation/configuration issue and not an issue with the batteries. Can anyone here confirm my thoughts?

[Nexuss]

24 minutes ago, Koerant said:

My first instinct would be to connect the CAN cable to the master battery and fix the address on the slave to be [1000].

Yea try that . The batteries will need a few charge cycles to get back into sync.

[mzezman]

You are on the right track, you should have the CAN cable from master to inverter then also another comms cable from master to the secondary battery. Is your battery picked up by the inverter properly (i.e. is it set to Lithium and not Lead Acid)

How are the batteries wired together and to the inverter? a picture could help as well

[Koerant]

I made some changes to the setup. First off, I found a nice little PDF that describes the different setups for the VOLTA battery and different inverters. In there they describe how everything should be connected with diagrams as well as specific config that needs to be in place.

For the physical connection related stuff I went and set the address of the slave back to 1 (Don't think that would have made a difference. As far as I can tell the only important thing is that you need to have different slave addresses if you have many batteries.)
I also connected the CAN from the inverter to the master battery.

The document also states that the battery protocol should be set to pylon. I then went to the battery manual and there it also states that the protocol should be pylon. I went ahead and changed this as well.

Here is an image of the current battery wiring (after I made my changes):

The cables in the trunking is connected to the inverter.

Things are already looking up. Something that I never picked up on was that the battery information was never recorded correctly on the app. When opening the app, I could now see that the parallel connection shows as 2 and the battery capacity is showing 203 Ah. I had to go to previous screenshots I sent my mates to confirm this. It used to show the parallel connections as 1 and the capacity as 20048 Ah.

I have a good feeling about the changes and I will keep monitoring the setup.

 

PS, if anyone is looking for the PDF I mentioned: https://www.solar-europe.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Volta-Battery-Communication-Manual.pdf
 

[Francois Palm]

Hi guy's 

Wonder if you can help. I have a "VOLTA stage 1" 5.12kva battery linked up to a hybrid Luxpower 5kva inverter. Im totally offgrid.

The problem I have is that the battery code selected for the VOLTA is "02" litium battery. I can see the info on the inverter eg. battery percentage and voltage, but the solar doesn't charge the battery or doesn't activate the battery to the load of my house. I've tried numerous codes, but still nothing. Communication cable is plugged into the inverter CAN port as well as the battery CAN/RS485.

If I change the battery type to lead acid and the battery engages, it charges from where I installed the battery 65% to full 100%. It takes the load and works perfect. Also set all the settings to the battery requirements. 

This can't be right. 

Can it be my communication cable?

Can't access the Inverter via the wifi dongle - need a installer code. The direct connection from my phone app. helps a little but the battery info is inaccurate- eg. Battery is currently around 50% but the app. indicates 86%.

Thanks in advance