Im having a strange scenario at home at the moment with power. The municipal feed to my area has been off since Sunday night so its well over 24 hours now.

I set my inverter to run on battery overnight and that normally just charges up wit the solar in the morning... except its been raining for the last two days and I barely got the battery to 20% 

My low battery is set to 15% and my cutoff is 10% with reset being at 20% but despite the battery being at 21% now the inverter still will not turn on and start powering loads in the house.

The inverter screen is on and its charging very slowly but because the battery ran down to the shutdown off % previously and the grid hasnt been restored the inverter wont turn on.

Does anyone know which setting that might be to get it to turn on with the battery? IS there a specific % it needs to get to?

I have tried turning the battery off and then waiting for the inverter to discharge caps before turning it all back on again, but I still cant get it to power anything!!

Im just looking to get internet working again so that I can work and its really annoying knowing I have enough battery capacity to get through the day but the inverter wont use it.

Any ideas?!

May be not the right way but I would remove all loads from the inverter. Set the reset to 18%. Allow the battery to charge a few % more and only switch on the most essential loads and ensure that the battery does not drop too low after it switched on. 

Allow PV to pull you out of this ditch. 

You can then during the day increase the reset back to 20. Challenging times for you. 

Look at the “battery restart” percentage setting. 

Morning all,

I see the installer set my settings as follows:

 

Are these too "extreme"? 

 

Only have 1 x 5.32 Sunsynk Battery and a 5kw Sunsynk Inverter

 

Thanks

 

On 2023/05/30 at 4:15 PM, Scorp007 said:

May be not the right way but I would remove all loads from the inverter. Set the reset to 18%. Allow the battery to charge a few % more and only switch on the most essential loads and ensure that the battery does not drop too low after it switched on. 

Allow PV to pull you out of this ditch. 

You can then during the day increase the reset back to 20. Challenging times for you. 

That was the problem, it wasnt powering any loads it was just charging at the time. I turned off the battery and solar(~100W) and let the capacitors drain on the inverter before turning on again and hoping it would power loads, it got confused for a second and thought the battery was at 100% so it turned on but then turned right off again when it realised the actual state.

On 2023/05/30 at 5:56 PM, PowerUser said:

Look at the “battery restart” percentage setting. 

Yeah I thought it would be that too but it isnt, I had reset at 15%, low batt at 12% and shutdown at 10% 

Then in the battery restart it was at 15%, the grid start I changed a few times between 10 and 20% but it didnt have an effect.

Basically I would change a setting then wait 5 mins to see if it did anything and it refused to play along.

 

What I did notice is that the usage timer battery % for the time slot needs to be less than your battery % and you need to drop everything down and wait. It still only kicked in to serving loads at 21% though.

Either way its not a normal circumstance, there was a grid fault for almost 48 hours and it was raining the entire time, was just a bad situation really.

On 2023/05/30 at 6:35 PM, Bucks_Fizz said:

Morning all,

I see the installer set my settings as follows:

 

Are these too "extreme"? 

 

Only have 1 x 5.32 Sunsynk Battery and a 5kw Sunsynk Inverter

 

Thanks

 

Discharge amps should be 100. Shutdown at 20% is a little high for my liking, I prefer 15% but I dont know what the Sunsynk battery warranty is, it might be only to 80%DoD in which case its correct. 

Is someone able to explain what exactly the Battery / Restart % setting is for? Why can't that be set to say 20% and the shut down to say 15% (or 25/20...). If the SOC reaches 49% on above settings, what exactly gets restarted and why? I changed mine to much lower, but don't fully understand the setting.

On the charge / discharge side, my BMS put discharge / charge amps for 2x 5.12KWH batteries at 185 / 40 respectively (I lowered the discharge to 170 later). 8KW SS and 2 x 5.12KW SS batteries. 

6 minutes ago, Kalahari Cruiser said:

If the SOC reaches 49% on above settings, what exactly gets restarted and why?

If the inverter reaches the shutdown %, it should shut down the output and stop inverting. Once it reaches the restart %, it should start inverting again. Somehow it's not exactly working like that according to one of the previous posts?

Thanks, I had an installer explain it roughly in the same way, but he wasn't sure. So it's almost like one tells the inverter to wait for the battery to get to a decent battery SOC before inverting again, following a shutdown at the prescribed shut down percentage. He had changed mine from 50% to 48% but it's not clear how this is significant - I changed it down to 25% since then (and shut down to 15%). Perhaps these values are a bit aggressive, although to date my SOC has only gone to 40% so it's been moot for now. 

10 minutes ago, Kalahari Cruiser said:

Thanks, I had an installer explain it roughly in the same way, but he wasn't sure. So it's almost like one tells the inverter to wait for the battery to get to a decent battery SOC before inverting again, following a shutdown at the prescribed shut down percentage. He had changed mine from 50% to 48% but it's not clear how this is significant - I changed it down to 25% since then (and shut down to 15%). Perhaps these values are a bit aggressive, although to date my SOC has only gone to 40% so it's been moot for now. 

Go with the battery's shutdown specification from the manufacturer. For example, this battery below quotes 6000 cycles at an 80% discharge. But go according to the manual of the part you bought, and don't go lower on a regular basis. And then set your re-start percentage high enough above it so that you won't constantly start and stop the system. Like these days with low sun, you rather don't want to start up at 21% and then run heavy loads.

Sunsynk-5.32kwh-battery

Yes I agree @GreenFields. The default however is 50% for restart. I'm trying not to go below 30% SOC (and haven't so far). Mine are the SS 5.12KWH batteries (IP65) but agree, one wants a sufficient gap between shut down and "restart". The wording got me I guess, restart for me was a power recycle, rather than "start up again following a shutdown and partial recharge" which is what's clearly meant by this. Thanks again. 

The good out of this topic is that we get to understand the terms. 

Even battery protectors, cutting off the battery will allow charging to at least take place before switching on. 

As the battery volts will come up a bit the moment the inverter cuts out we need to allow a fair bit of charging otherwise this bounce back can restart just to go off again as mentioned. 

We find the same with a car that fails to start. The voltage might bounce back but still not enough energy to crank the engine. 

I see it daily that customers will say but this battery shows 12.4V and that is about 50% SOC. The moment I add a load the battery would collapse. Showing them creates the understanding.