Youda's off-grid LAB

[simonstroud]

Hi, I did an update of a unit US2000C from V1.4 firmware to V1.7 and it complained about "coulomb"      It then asked me to put in the device serial number.  Can I assume it corrected whatever issue it had?

 

23-05-29 13:53:48->The name of the device is: US2000C.
23-05-29 13:53:48->The bar code of the device is: K2200XXXXXXXXXX (redacted by me)
23-05-29 13:53:48->The current version is: :V1.4
23-05-29 13:53:48->The current device coulomb(Ah) is: 50
23-05-29 13:53:49->The bin file used to update the current device is: Us_c_Nt_V1.7_Crc.bin
23-05-29 13:53:55->Re-send Packet try count:1
23-05-29 13:53:55->The update program starts
23-05-29 13:55:02->The bin file is programmed completely.
23-05-29 13:55:17->Fail to write device coulomb
23-05-29 13:55:17->Fail to control mos on
23-05-29 13:56:21->The name of the device is: US2000C.
23-05-29 13:56:21->The version after update is: :V1.7
23-05-29 13:56:21->The device coulomb(Ah) after update is: 0
23-05-29 13:56:21->Update is finished
 

 

Should I in anyway be concerned?  Can I check my "coulomb" values somehow? 

[WindGat]

On 2018/09/12 at 4:40 PM, Chris Hobson said:

East West is good especially if you are home most of the day.

So Chris,

If I have three Kodak Kings running in Three-Phase Mode, 
Would it be better to Face One String East, One String West and the Last North,
Or
Simply face all of them North?

[PierreJ]

36 minutes ago, WindGat said:

Would it be better to Face One String East, One String West and the Last North,
Or
Simply face all of them North?

You can extend your solar day in summer by pointing some panels east and some west. In winter it is better to have all your panels pointing north. However, in summer production capacity is generally much less of a constraint than in winter, so my advice is that if you have unshaded roof space pointing north you should fill that first.

Only once you've run out of unshaded roof space pointing north should you look at adding panels pointing east or west. The exception to this may be if you're not going to be cycling your battery and the potentially excess production in the middle of a summer day is going to be completely wasted. In this scenario I would consider pointing some panels northwest and some northeast, but east and west is going to disappoint in winter.

My north facing roof is filled with panels and I also have a couple pointing west. In summer the panels pointing west extend my solar day by about an hour, but in winter they perform very poorly.

[Marazul]

. 

Edited July 19, 2023 by Marazul
Delete my message

[Marazul]

. 

Edited July 19, 2023 by Marazul
Delete my message

[jfbo37]

Hello,

on batteryview i have this error message (version 3.0.28, 3.0.29) :

accuracy string cannot be parsed to double. 

 

Do you know the problem ?

i found solution on forum : you need to change Regional Settings on the computer to US (English)

 

But i can't to see number of cycles used, do you know you to see this information ?

 

 

on the left i see :

device name : US5000

soft version : 1.3

barcode : battery serial number connected

 

i try BatteryView HV version 3.9.0 B1.2 with "target Type" CMU_2

it seems to show some informations but not all

 

Thank you

 

Edited September 23, 2023 by jfbo37

[Dualstar]

HI,

i have 2 Pylontech US5000 blocks combined with a Victron Multiplus 2 48/5000.

unfortunately i get a high cell voltage warning and the batterie is always going ito savety mode.

as far as i found out, a firmware upgrade solves this problem (probably software glitch) with the smaler variants, and i was hoping there is a update for the US5000 too, but it looks like there is none. does anyone have an info about new firmwares for the US5000 series?

thanks in advance.

Martin

Edited September 26, 2023 by Dualstar

[PierreJ]

 

unfortunately i get a high cell voltage warning and the batterie is always going ito savety mode.

In my experience if high voltage alarms persist with a Pylontech battery module then there's an issue with one or more cells, and a firmware update will not solve it.

I would dump the event and cycle data of the battery module using BatteryView and then e-mail it to [email protected]. They usually take a couple of days to reply, but I have always received great service from them. If the battery module is indeed faulty they will guide you through the RMA process.

Edit: Looking at the VRM graphs that indeed looks like it could perhaps be a software glitch. The same advice applies: Send the logs to Pylontech and ask what to do next.

Edited September 26, 2023 by PierreJ

[Dualstar]

 

In my experience if high voltage alarms persist with a Pylontech battery module then there's an issue with one or more cells, and a firmware update will not solve it.

I would dump the event and cycle data of the battery module using BatteryView and then e-mail it to [email protected]. They usually take a couple of days to reply, but I have always received great service from them. If the battery module is indeed faulty they will guide you through the RMA process.

Edit: Looking at the VRM graphs that indeed looks like it could perhaps be a software glitch. The same advice applies: Send the logs to Pylontech and ask what to do next.

I did in fact contact Pylontech and got an answer 2 days later. cool response time!

They say its a "firmware problem and can be fixed easily".
For that, they send me  a file with batteryview 3.0x B1.1 and a firmware (US5000_st1.4+e21.6) file for the US5000 + instructions.

ill try tonight and report if it works.

M.

[Youda]

On 2023/09/26 at 1:51 PM, Dualstar said:

HI,

i have 2 Pylontech US5000 blocks combined with a Victron Multiplus 2 48/5000.

unfortunately i get a high cell voltage warning and the batterie is always going ito savety mode.

as far as i found out, a firmware upgrade solves this problem (probably software glitch) with the smaler variants, and i was hoping there is a update for the US5000 too, but it looks like there is none. does anyone have an info about new firmwares for the US5000 series?

thanks in advance.

Martin

 

On 2023/09/26 at 2:04 PM, PierreJ said:

In my experience if high voltage alarms persist with a Pylontech battery module then there's an issue with one or more cells, and a firmware update will not solve it.

I would dump the event and cycle data of the battery module using BatteryView and then e-mail it to [email protected]. They usually take a couple of days to reply, but I have always received great service from them. If the battery module is indeed faulty they will guide you through the RMA process.

Edit: Looking at the VRM graphs that indeed looks like it could perhaps be a software glitch. The same advice applies: Send the logs to Pylontech and ask what to do next.

 

SOLVED: Pylontech + Victron = High Cell Voltage Alarm

Hi guys,

the problem shown above is a specific issue that is affecting only the combination of Victron + Pylontech, when using CAN communication between the Victron GX device and the Pylontech's BMS.

Root cause is something like this:

Most of the inverter manufacturers are using original Pylontech BMS CANbus protocol implementation, that is quite limited on the information it can provide about the cells. It focuses on SOC, current control and alarms mainly. Victron was the first one (AFAIK) to implement enhanced version of the BMS CANbus protocol. The enhanced protocol is able to report information about the state of individual cells, which is great for diagnostics.

For a shame, from time to time there's a voltage sampling error. Normally, this error is being eliminated by the BMS verification algorithm, so the battery as a whole is aware that it's just an error and stays calm. But when the enhanced protocol is used then the Victron GX device receives actual value (bad sample), will log it in the VRM, and might start to panic.

That's the reason, why this issue is affecting Victron installations only (AFAIK).

The issue is solved via Pylontech firmware update, where bad samples are automatically eliminated from being forwarded to Victron GX.

Hope this helps,
Youda

[Steve-O]

This is very interesting as I have had 2 UP5000 batteries (out of a 5 stack) replaced  in 18 months because of high voltage alarms. Batteries were also updated to latest firmware 2.19 or 2.20 (firmware also increases 0.5C to 0.9C) and it did not help in my case, unless there is another firmware update that I'm unaware of. The scenario I encountered on both batteries was one cell not reaching target voltage of approx 3.45v (averaging 3.3v) and another cell on the same battery hitting the 3.65v threshold which my 15KVA Quattro recognised as high voltage cutting the battery from charging several times before eventually sort of balancing with highest cell reported at 3.53v and lowest at 3.45v. All suggested methods of balancing were tried prior and after the firmware upgrade with no resolution.

[PierreJ]

9 hours ago, Youda said:

The issue is solved via Pylontech firmware update, where bad samples are automatically eliminated from being forwarded to Victron GX.

Do you perhaps know when (or in which firmware version) this was addressed? The reason I ask is because I am seeing some spurious alarms at one of my installations and I'm wondering whether this is the same issue. The install is less than a year old, so the firmware of the batteries is fairly recent. These are the kind of alarms I am getting from time to time:

The alarms resolve as fast as they happen, and there's nothing in the battery event logs.

 

Edited October 12, 2023 by PierreJ

[Youda]

Hi @PierreJ

I remember a lot of these issues with the batteries that were sold last year and with the batteries sold around January of this year too. Based on that I would say that your batteries might fall into the affected range too.

• For US3000C with the old chip, the fix is in the firmware 2.8 and newer.
• For US3000C with the new chip(check my previous posts on how to recognize them based on SN), the fix is in the firmware 1.7 and newer.

Should you find older FW in your (or your client's) batteries, I would advise to email Pylontech support with the SN and they will send you back the newest ZIP firmware package together with BatteryView or FlashTool. Contrary to previous BIN packages the ZIP packages are pretty safe to flash, when combined with the new BV of FlashTool.

PS: Funny thing is, that very old Pylontech batteries don't exhibit the issue, as they do not have enhanced CAN bus protocol implemented in their (ancient) firmware. Therefore, even if there is a bad voltage sample on the cell, there's no way to relay this information to the Victron GX.

Edited October 12, 2023 by Youda

[RhysMcW]

does anyone here know how to get the SoH from a Pylontech which is not attached to an Inverter?

I'm looking at buying a second hand UP5000 and would like to know the SoH, just in case it's been overcharged or discharged and therefore may have a poor SoH, but the battery is not connected to an inverter (my Sunsynk shows the SoH on the LiBMS screen for my batteries).
I have connected to my batteries with BatteryView but I do not see SoH on the display anywhere.
The seller has also connected to the UP5000 via BatteryView (3.0.29) but also does not see SoH

[Nexuss]

2 minutes ago, RhysMcW said:

does anyone here know how to get the SoH from a Pylontech which is not attached to an Inverter?

I'm looking at buying a second hand UP5000 and would like to know the SoH, just in case it's been overcharged or discharged and therefore may have a poor SoH, but the battery is not connected to an inverter (my Sunsynk shows the SoH on the LiBMS screen for my batteries).
I have connected to my batteries with BatteryView but I do not see SoH on the display anywhere.
The seller has also connected to the UP5000 via BatteryView (3.0.29) but also does not see SoH

SOH is listed in the event and history log in Batteryview you have to download the files. Also just FYI SOH is not a sure way to tell the health of a battery as it can be reset with a firmware update.

[RhysMcW]

2 minutes ago, Nexuss said:

SOH is listed in the event and history log in Batteryview you have to download the files. Also just FYI SOH is not a sure way to tell the health of a battery as it can be reset with a firmware update.

Ah, great, thank you @Nexuss for that info on how to get the SoH, will have a look at that..
Yeah, I get what you're saying about the health of the battery, just hoping a little and the fact that the seller doesn't seem to know how to check the SoH hopefully he wouldn't know about the reset with firmware update...
The seller says the battery is only 10 month old, which I know you can wreck a battery in that time but hopefully not...

[docshock]

Hi everyone, heed what @Youda says, using BatteryView saves you a lot of hassle!

This weekend I did the upgrade of my 10 oldest batteries to my surprise the old chip should be updated with version 2.8, but it has updated with 2.1, what I mean is that even if the serial number is the old one, it seems that it has new chips mounted without you being able to recognize by serial number. These are US2000C purchased in 2022!

 

Edited November 13, 2023 by docshock

[docshock]

16 hours ago, docshock said:

 

 

 

 

 

Old chip serial number! update 2.8

Edited November 14, 2023 by docshock

[Youda]

Another update from Youda's LAB:

Like I mentioned a long-time ago, I'm offering free EV charging from my LAB's solar:

https://powerforum.co.za/topic/2322-youdas-off-grid-lab/page/8/#comment-81049
https://powerforum.co.za/topic/2322-youdas-off-grid-lab/page/2/#comment-58507

Recently, I paved a small spot next to the driveway and moved the wallbox from it's original location to this new one. Charging is much more convenient now:

Also, the wallbox is tied to Fibaro automation via JSON API, so it's power output can be controlled automatically, based on the state of the PV production. For the sake of simplicity the rule is that when it's sunny (and the battery has a decent charge) it offers 32 Amps while during the night it falls down to 10 Amps only.

If needed, the main parameters can be set (or checked) via smartphone:

 

Found out that each car model has a different charging-power curve. One interesting example here:

 

Right now it's winter here, with tons of snow, so the PV is producing almost zero kWh/day. Luckily, EV drivers are aware of that Within few months the decent PV production will be back, so I assume that EV's will start to appear again.

Youda

 

 

 

Edited December 5, 2023 by Youda
wording

[Youda]

Broken washer-dryer story:

I am using washer-dryer combo with an integrated heat-pump from AEG happily for number of years. Bought first one roughly 15 years ago, and when it died from overworking, I bought a new model. Recently, I was doing laundry and realized that towels are not as fluffy as they used to be.

At first, I was thinking that there's a problem with the dryer part of the machine, as it's a pretty complicated device. Double-checked that, but the dryer and it's heat-pump was running okay. Since I am monitoring most of my appliances power consumption, I launched Grafana (https://powerforum.co.za/topic/2322-youdas-off-grid-lab/page/9/#comment-151001) in order to check for anomaly. You guess - it was there:

 

In the past, the machine was having a huge power draw at the start of each cycle, in order to heat the water:

Starting roughly 3 months ago, this part of power draw stopped showing:

Okay, the issue was obvious - the machine was not heating the water, which usually means that the heating element is "kaput" and has to be changed. So I bought a spare-part and changed it to make the machine great again

Autopsy identified that the old heating element was electrically interrupted, since it's resistance measurement was equal to infinity. Not only that the element was covered in limescale (which is pretty common) but this time there was a lot of fibre chunks too.

It's clearly visible that the element burnout happened exactly in the spots that were covered(heat-isolated) the most:

Following the successfull repair, I was thinking about two topics:

1) Why it took me so long to realize that there's something bad with the machine.

2) How to spot the issue ASAP in the future.

 

As of 1) the answer is, that during summer and fall, the temperature of tap water was not that cold, so the detergent was still doing it's job partially. But when the winter arrived, the temperature of tap water has fallen rapidly and reached unsuitable level, which led to my late discovery of the issue. Well, completely other thing is that any machine should be able to identify such a basic failure by itself. But it did not. What a shame.

Speaking of 2) I did a minor change to my existing automation script that is sending me PUSH notification every time the  machine finishes the cycle: now the script is logging the highest power draw achieved during the cycle and this value is being attached to the aforementioned notification. With this information, I'll be able to see immediately that there was something wrong during the last cycle.

Notification:

Of course, I can add a rule that checks highest power draw achieved during the cycle and send me an alert if the value will be less than 2kW, for example. But you know - I am too lazy to do it, despite it's just one line of code, technically

Youda

 

Edited December 5, 2023 by Youda
wording

[HedgeSlammer]

That's pretty cool.  Even Sherlock would be proud of that one. 

It's pretty amazing (sometimes bordering on 'creepy') how much information can be gleaned from consumption data...

Thanks to a handful of CT clamps and a raspberry pi, I can pretty much tell what's for dinner before I get in by glancing at the Grafana plots... and whether there's been any daytime baking activity... even whether it's cookies or a cake!

It's also useful for settling arguments with six-year-olds about how much of their allotted screen-time they've *actually* spent playing 'Lego Batman' on a school night.  I hate myself for doing it, but feel giving young people a sense of awareness regarding their data footprint (and how it can be used) is, on balance, a healthy thing. 

[HedgeSlammer]

Regarding the Pylontech firmware...  First up, thanks for this thread.  It is without doubt the most useful resource on the internet relating to the issues discussed.

So... I had the issue with the Victron GX + <v1.7 f/w on a couple of my US3000Cs - the misreporting of a voltage spike in one cell causing the Victron GX to panic and shut that battery down.

I emailed Pylontech with a plot of the Vhigh readings (it would shoot to 4.1v for one reading, then back down again).  They responded very promptly (on a Sunday night, too) with a link to download a zip containing 'BatteryView 3.0.33' and a firmware zip file named 'USC_st2.8+NT2.2.zip', contained two binaries named 'US_E2_V2.2_Crc.bin' and 'US_C_V2.8_Crc.bin'.  Good so far.

Then the real fun started...

Couldn't get 'BatteryView' to connect, despite no problems accessing the serial terminal and getting appropriate responses from the batteries.

Tried 'Batteryview' under wine/mono in Linux Mint 21, build a Windows 10 VM, fully updated it, installed Win 10 natively, updated that, .NET 4.8.1, tried every combination of v 3.0.28 through 3.0.33, 3 different USB/RS232 interfaces...  Wouldn't connect, but terminal was fine.

Eventually did a native install of Win 11, same deal... Updated that (which took the best part of a day on a 40Mb/s fibre line) and finally, finally 'BatteryView' connected.  Downloaded all the 'history' and 'event' data, went to update the firmware on the first battery (according to the instructions provided by Pylontech, using the zip file) and...   it threw an 'unknown exception' error and just quit. 

OK.

Took a step back, sat down with a cup of tea and thought 'lets have a look at this firmware zip file'.  The one that 'thou shalt not unzip, least ye bricketh the unit'.  Re-read this thread, then thought that if I can work out which of the two bin files, maybe try that?  I mean, who's gonna know, right?

And lo, it came to pass that I could not unzippeth.  Because the %&*$!£ zip-within-the-zip was corrupt.  Re-downloaded from the source (wetransfer.com), same.

Came back here and grabbed the v1.8 zip, all 7 units are now updated fine. 

 

So basically, a massive 'Thank You' to Youda and all who have contributed to this thread.  I hope the above contribution to it might prove useful to someone else facing similar issues.

Now I can hopefully sleep easy, or at least sleep without VRM waking me up with an email at 3.23am to inform me in panicked, breathless tones of some expensive-sounding 'internal failure' or 'cell imbalance' in battery 7 that means you have to get up and shuffle downstairs to silence the beep-of-doom and check that nothing's actually on fire. 

[MeDat]

Lots of thanks to you Youda and everyone else for the wealth of knowledge found in this thread.

I wish I had this info when I started my journey with the pylontech batteries.

Still not where I would like to be yet, but i want to gather all the relevant details before I ask for help.

The info so far has taken me several steps closer, thanks again.

By the way the goal is H48050s in parallel not series.