Hello All, I wonder if someone could shed some light on an oddity?  We'll I'm finding it an oddity as I'm not sure I'm looking at it right but here goes.. 

This is a screen grab of my 3.6kW inverter.  The inverter has its internal CT's and the one on the grid incoming supply.  So I read this diagram as the solar is producing 190w , the grid is importing 218w therefore the house load must be roughly 190W + 218W   so approximately the 417W  this makes sense.. great.

 

At the same time my 5.5kW inverter reported the above conditions. So this inverter thinks I'm exporting 281W to grid and solar is producing 299W so all the solar is being exported..  again on its own this seems fairly sensible .

so on to my last inverter 

 

Ok this one has batteries so not quite the same. but these screen shots where all taken a the same time and I confirmed via another device I haven't imported at all during the period these reading were taken and indeed very little changed in load  So what does this representation tell me ?  Solar is producing 754W, grid is importing 27W, the battery is being charged at 475w so house is using 754 + 27 - 475  = 306W..    and this is saying 152W ?  Shouldn't all the Grid CT's that are placed next to each other on a straight bit of cable between the meter and the house consumer unit read the same ? What actual load is the house using ?   Someone on another thread has already mentioned that these reading can be misleading as they can take a while to update however  I'm not sure this would account for such variations where there was very little changing on the system during this time. I think the CT on the 5.5kW is reading the wrong way around as it is not a million miles away from the 3.6kw just in the opposite direction. The CT's are all orientated the same way though but maybe wrong way in the inverter..  But this doesn't explain the 27W seen on the 8kW.  Am I just being slow here and missing the obvious ? 

23 minutes ago, Perfo said:

Hello All, I wonder if someone could shed some light on an oddity?  We'll I'm finding it an oddity as I'm not sure I'm looking at it right but here goes.. 

This is a screen grab of my 3.6kW inverter.  The inverter has its internal CT's and the one on the grid incoming supply.  So I read this diagram as the solar is producing 190w , the grid is importing 218w therefore the house load must be roughly 190W + 218W   so approximately the 417W  this makes sense.. great.

 

At the same time my 5.5kW inverter reported the above conditions. So this inverter thinks I'm exporting 281W to grid and solar is producing 299W so all the solar is being exported..  again on its own this seems fairly sensible .

so on to my last inverter 

 

Ok this one has batteries so not quite the same. but these screen shots where all taken a the same time and I confirmed via another device I haven't imported at all during the period these reading were taken and indeed very little changed in load  So what does this representation tell me ?  Solar is producing 754W, grid is importing 27W, the battery is being charged at 475w so house is using 754 + 27 - 475  = 306W..    and this is saying 152W ?  Shouldn't all the Grid CT's that are placed next to each other on a straight bit of cable between the meter and the house consumer unit read the same ? What actual load is the house using ?   Someone on another thread has already mentioned that these reading can be misleading as they can take a while to update however  I'm not sure this would account for such variations where there was very little changing on the system during this time. I think the CT on the 5.5kW is reading the wrong way around as it is not a million miles away from the 3.6kw just in the opposite direction. The CT's are all orientated the same way though but maybe wrong way in the inverter..  But this doesn't explain the 27W seen on the 8kW.  Am I just being slow here and missing the obvious ? 

See if you can find a screen that indicates any self-consumption by the inverter. For the on-screen display, cooling fans, wi-fi, heat dissipation by the charger and mppt, etc.

I can't see one but not sure how that would affect my grid reading if indeed the grid picture is showing me a grid power flow. Surely these should be the same for all the inverters ?  

I've made a bit of mess up and put another topic inside my other thread when I should have started this new one. 

@Yuri thanks very much for your generous offer of me trying your CHiNt power meter are you in the Centurion in south Africa ?  I'm in north Wales in the UK so it may not be possible but a very kind offer non the same... 🙂  One of mine is definitely over 10 meters and at least double that the other two are probably about 10 meters.

I'll have to try and dig out the connection details for mine as they look different to yours and the CT's go in to terminals 3 and 4 on the strip not 5 and 6 like yours but as I say the lay out of mine is different. 

With this CHiNt thing you are using the meter rs485 port on the inverter as the in put ? not the CT terminals ?  and can all three inverters be fed from the same device ? how is this done ? 

Also does the main supply to the house go through this device ? 

Edited February 1, 20242 yr by Perfo
added a line

Yes, Centurion South Africa 

I was using the 8KW manual...

Yes the Chint meter is using RS485 comms but if you read the Deye manual u will see Eastron is also compatible

 

You need the Deye manual to get the meter_RS485 connection  

 

I will test for you this weekend If it is possible to read the meter from 2 different devices simultaneous  

 

this is the Eastron meter I am using and where I got it 

https://www.aliexpress.com/i/32845403260.html

 

Yes the main supply to the house will feed through the power meter

 

Edited February 1, 20242 yr by Yuri

1 hour ago, Perfo said:

I've made a bit of mess up and put another topic inside my other thread when I should have started this new one. 

@Yuri thanks very much for your generous offer of me trying your CHiNt power meter are you in the Centurion in south Africa ?  I'm in north Wales in the UK so it may not be possible but a very kind offer non the same... 🙂  One of mine is definitely over 10 meters and at least double that the other two are probably about 10 meters.

I'll have to try and dig out the connection details for mine as they look different to yours and the CT's go in to terminals 3 and 4 on the strip not 5 and 6 like yours but as I say the lay out of mine is different. 

With this CHiNt thing you are using the meter rs485 port on the inverter as the in put ? not the CT terminals ?  and can all three inverters be fed from the same device ? how is this done ? 

Also does the main supply to the house go through this device ? 

I'll have to try and dig out the connection details for mine as they look different to yours and the CT's go in to terminals 3 and 4 on the strip not 5 and 6 like yours but as I say the lay out of mine is different. 

 

 

It is well documented that different size inverters connect on different terminals for the CT. It also caters for single and split phase. 

 

@Yuri I can see if the meter uses something like ModBus protocol over rs485 then the same meter can fee many devices but not sure how I'd physically connect them as there doesn't appear to be a in and out tor anything.. would be super nice though...

@Scorp007 it would be handy if it was marked up on the board which ones. A lot of the diagrams show the cables but not actually where to connect.

I just happen to have a pic of two of mine on the phone (as I'm not home) both have the meter port . These are the 5.5kW and 3.6kW not sure which is which. CT goes to 3 and 4 on both

RS485 (Modbus RTU) you connect daisy chain 

On my PC i have modbus pole software and will see if my inverter will still get a reading when looking up registers with PC

So there is one RJ45 output on the meter and one on the inverter. Is it simply a matter of finding an RJ45 Tee (one in two out) and connecting the outputs of the Tee to the two inverters ?  In the settings there is a ModBus address i.e. 1 , 2 etc this address is used on the RS485/can out put of the inverter when trying to link up a ModBus reader (as in another one of my posts)  I assume this is the same address for all the ports ?  Ask a silly question maybe but do you also leave the CT's connected or only the Meter ? Do you know how many ModBus devices these meters will supply ? I only need three but handy to know. 

@Yuri  Thanks for offering to give this a go at the weekend.  I'm interested to know if you have multiple inverters and this meter ..why you wouldn't be doing this already ? is there a downside in going this route ?  The link you gave shows they are quite reasonably priced and this may well be a good option anyway even if I get the rest of this sorted... it would certainly be a lot neater than my three CT's just hanging off the supply cable. 

36 minutes ago, Perfo said:

@Yuri I can see if the meter uses something like ModBus protocol over rs485 then the same meter can fee many devices but not sure how I'd physically connect them as there doesn't appear to be a in and out tor anything.. would be super nice though...

@Scorp007 it would be handy if it was marked up on the board which ones. A lot of the diagrams show the cables but not actually where to connect.

I just happen to have a pic of two of mine on the phone (as I'm not home) both have the meter port . These are the 5.5kW and 3.6kW not sure which is which. CT goes to 3 and 4 on both

In a defence it is partly that I think with a split phase you need 2 CTs so all 4 points are used for CTs. 

I don't have such an inverter but know the 3.6 and 5 is the same and the 8kw different. 

This is where one needs to know something of the product. 

Having read you comments I think your installer=designer also needs to know the equipment so he/she needs to also take some blame and not just Sunsynk for the answers they gave. 

I have come across some pretty bad installers that installs inverters without ever following the instructions in the manual. CT polarity seems to be one point that comes to mind and is very well documented. 

I have no problems blaming anyone or everyone if it means I'll get it working.   I think where the installer made a mistake is they didn't know the product enough to pick up on the fact the SS engineer was talking about parallel inverters not just two inverters. 

25 minutes ago, Perfo said:

So there is one RJ45 output on the meter and one on the inverter. Is it simply a matter of finding an RJ45 Tee (one in two out) and connecting the outputs of the Tee to the two inverters ?  In the settings there is a ModBus address i.e. 1 , 2 etc this address is used on the RS485/can out put of the inverter when trying to link up a ModBus reader (as in another one of my posts)  I assume this is the same address for all the ports ?  Ask a silly question maybe but do you also leave the CT's connected or only the Meter ? Do you know how many ModBus devices these meters will supply ? I only need three but handy to know. 

Yes you can tee them 

Normally you will have a server and client the server has the slave address and the client is reading/ writing info 

You will have one client with one or more servers in normal use 

I want to test 1 server with 2 clients ... 

You remove the CTs

Normally thy say max number of servers 32  

28 minutes ago, Perfo said:

@Yuri  Thanks for offering to give this a go at the weekend.  I'm interested to know if you have multiple inverters and this meter ..why you wouldn't be doing this already ? is there a downside in going this route ?  The link you gave shows they are quite reasonably priced and this may well be a good option anyway even if I get the rest of this sorted... it would certainly be a lot neater than my three CT's just hanging off the supply cable. 

If you are using parallel inverters only the master gets a CT/power meter input . The info is sheared with the slave over canbus master/slave connection cable  with battery BMS

Ah yep so you have yours parallel so don't need to daisy chain the meter. I got it. 

In this case the meter is the server and the inverters are the clients ?

Is that 32 clients ? sounds enough for me ..

 

15 hours ago, Perfo said:

Ah yep so you have yours parallel so don't need to daisy chain the meter. I got it. 

In this case the meter is the server and the inverters are the clients ?

Is that 32 clients ? sounds enough for me ..

 

Lets first see if two will work...

Did you manage to try this Yuri ?     On my other thread trying to set up an rs485 to tcp/ip and home assistant I've made a break through and it's working nicely. I'm wondering if I can just paralleled  up the rs485 side of things and use the same converter for both inverters ?  as long as one is set to mod bus 2 and the other modbus 1 I'm thinking it should work ...maybe.. possibly..

I've managed to use a single rs485-usb device on my dual inverter setup which by the nature of parallel installations have different modbus ID's. It worked fine as long as I didn't poll the inverters at the same time, ie. I had to offset the polling times by a few seconds. I used that for a day or two until I could get a second rs485-usb device so I could get quicker updates (I pull data every 5 seconds at present).

maybe poll one on the odd seconds and the other on the even.   I would have thought the modbus module would be able to handle collisions as part of it's architecture as that must happen a  lot on bigger systems. Mine is updating every 5 seconds a the moment and I can unplug from one on modbus 1 and plug in the other on modbus 2 and all seems to switch over ok. I've ordered an rj45 splitter , should turn up tomorrow.. I thought it would send a message , get a reply then move on to another message ...hmmm  

If you have a single register you're polling, that might work. However, when you have about 25+ registers you poll per inverter, it gets busy quite quickly. Also remember that rs485 is a serial interface so you have limited bandwidth and signal issues when you try to exceed that.

If my splitter works I’ll give it try. See how fast I can poll.  As it is a serial protocol I just thought it would wait for a send return (or time out) before sending another request.   I’m only looking for a hand full of data points on two inverters so if it works it is bound to be quick enough for me.. I’ll be caring it to what I’ve got at the moment which is between 1 and 3 minutes or walk there and look myself 😀.  So not much competition really….  Not sure how many bits per package get sent but at 9600 baud that’s a good few packets per second.. Did you notice a slow down or errors as you increased data points ? Of course having one per inverter would be better (providing the bottle neck doesn’t then move to the master) but I’m hmmmm deep pockets , short arms….

20 hours ago, Perfo said:

Did you manage to try this Yuri ?     On my other thread trying to set up an rs485 to tcp/ip and home assistant I've made a break through and it's working nicely. I'm wondering if I can just paralleled  up the rs485 side of things and use the same converter for both inverters ?  as long as one is set to mod bus 2 and the other modbus 1 I'm thinking it should work ...maybe.. possibly..

I have not manage to do it 

I will have a look at it tomorrow 

19 hours ago, p_i said:

I've managed to use a single rs485-usb device on my dual inverter setup which by the nature of parallel installations have different modbus ID's. It worked fine as long as I didn't poll the inverters at the same time, ie. I had to offset the polling times by a few seconds. I used that for a day or two until I could get a second rs485-usb device so I could get quicker updates (I pull data every 5 seconds at present).

What I will be testing is more like using 2x modbus poll at the same time on 1 meter only the meter will have a slave id...

@Yuri yes I appreciate you are testing the opposite thing to me.  You are testing one meter feeding two inverters with grid power data.  I’m very interested in this and want to do the same but with three inverters.  What I’m testing is one rs485 to tcp/ip converter being connected to two inverters reading the data from them and displaying it on a home assistant display.  

Why not just use the esp32 all the work have been done?