Hi there hope you all well ?

 

I'm new to this and I need some assistance . 

I have a 5kw inverter and a Huawei esm48100a1 48v 100ah battery 9solar 320w solar panels 

It's been installed for over a week I only run my lights and fridges and plugs. 

Yesterday I had about 20hrs on battery mode and then all of a sudden today the pv seem to not have kicked in the inverter went into by pass  I switch the inverter of and back on still was in bypass. Then all of a sudden  my light just kept on switching of and on then all of a sudden the pv kicked in supplying power to charge the battery and lights and then again later afternoon the inverter started to switch my light of and on for 5min it was doing that  I had to move it back to Eskom at the mains.  To prevent damage

Can someone tell me what could be the issue attach is the images of my inverter and my setting 

Also if you could tell me what inverter do I have as I cant find what brand it is .

 

Edited May 16, 20197 yr by Nabzo
Incorrect image

I suspect I have a faulty inverter 

50 minutes ago, Nabzo said:

I suspect I have a faulty inverter 

Nabzo check setting no 4 must be SdS for normal operation SEN is for power saving mode .The power will switch on and off if SEN is selected if the load is low or not detected .

5 hours ago, Nabzo said:

Yesterday I had about 20hrs on battery mode

Perhaps you just ran out of battery energy? What do the LEDs on the battery tell you?

Are you running ICC and a BMV? Your settings seem to be designed for "let ICC make all the decisions", yet you show a screen shot from Watchpower.

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and then all of a sudden today the pv seem to not have kicked in the inverter went into by pass 

You may be suffering from the premature charge bug. It might be mitigated by using the absorb time setting.

It seems you are not running the latest version of Watchpower. You can get the latest version here. The latest version should allow you to turn off power saving mode (if that's part of your problem) and to set Charging Time in CV Mode. Start with perhaps 60 minutes.

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Also if you could tell me what inverter do I have as I cant find what brand it is .

It's an Axpert MKS 5K-48 (manufactured by Voltronic Power) without the 64 V option, There is no patched firmware available for this model. You reseller appears to be Solar MD (bottom of the sticker). It appears to be a genuine Voltronic model (not a clone).

11 hours ago, Chris Louw said:

Nabzo check setting no 4 must be SdS for normal operation SEN is for power saving mode .The power will switch on and off if SEN is selected if the load is low or not detected

ok i will go an check and change it and report back

7 hours ago, Coulomb said:

Are you running ICC and a BMV? Your settings seem to be designed for "let ICC make all the decisions", yet you show a screen shot from Watchpower.

what is ICC and BMV please educate me ?

 

7 hours ago, Coulomb said:

It seems you are not running the latest version of Watchpower. You can get the latest version here. The latest version should allow you to turn off power saving mode (if that's part of your problem) and to set Charging Time in CV Mode. Start with perhaps 60 minutes.

i am currently running v1.13 i have changed the charging time in cv mode to 60 min.

please can you tell me if my other settings is correct like :

back to grid voltage : 48.0
back to discharge voltage :54
battery cut off voltage :44.5
float charging voltage :51
bulk charging voltage :53.5

also i see they have this battery equalizing setting should i enable it ? and what doe sit do ?

39 minutes ago, Nabzo said:

> Are you running ICC and a BMV?

what is ICC and BMV please educate me ?

I'll take that as a no, then 🙂

ICC is monitoring software, like Watchpower, but not free, and much much more powerful. http://iccsoftware.co.za

A BMV is a Battery Monitor made by Victron. For example, https://www.victronenergy.com/panel-systems-remote-monitoring/bmv-700 .

ICC can talk directly to the most common battery BMSs, certainly Pylontech, but there are so many battery brands, they'll never be able to support them all. So what you do then is you use the BMV to monitor the current and estimate SOC. It does a quite good job.

If you use ICC, you want your settings such that the inverter won't take action (such as switching off, or switching to grid power) except under extreme conditions. That's a little insurance in case ICC crashes or whatever, but mostly because you have to give some values to the settings. Those are the sorts of values you have. That's fine if you want to spend the extra on ICC and the BMV, but if not, you'll want different settings.

39 minutes ago, Nabzo said:

i am currently running v1.13 i have changed the charging time in cv mode to 60 min.

That's good.

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back to grid voltage : 48.0

You'll want to experiment with this one. Start with 49 or 50 V.

Quote

back to discharge voltage :54

That's too high; you only charge to 53.5 V. So try 53 V, or 52 V, or FULL. It depends how full you want to keep your battery. If load shedding comes back, you may change your appetite for battery fullness.

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battery cut off voltage :44.5

That's 2.97 V per cell. You probably want it a lot higher. I'd start with 48.0 V.

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float charging voltage :51
bulk charging voltage :53.5

These sound like standard values for 15S LiFePO₄ batteries, like yours.

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also i see they have this battery equalizing setting should i enable it ? and what doe sit do ?

That's for almost literally letting off steam for flooded lead acid batteries. You do not want this for your lithium battery.

47 minutes ago, Coulomb said:

I'll take that as a no, then 🙂

ICC is monitoring software, like Watchpower, but not free, and much much more powerful. http://iccsoftware.co.za

A BMV is a Battery Monitor made by Victron. For example, https://www.victronenergy.com/panel-systems-remote-monitoring/bmv-700 .

ICC can talk directly to the most common battery BMSs, certainly Pylontech, but there are so many battery brands, they'll never be able to support them all. So what you do then is you use the BMV to monitor the current and estimate SOC. It does a quite good job.

If you use ICC, you want your settings such that the inverter won't take action (such as switching off, or switching to grid power) except under extreme conditions. That's a little insurance in case ICC crashes or whatever, but mostly because you have to give some values to the settings. Those are the sorts of values you have. That's fine if you want to spend the extra on ICC and the BMV, but if not, you'll want different settings.

i will look into this .
thank you for the assistance i will adjust accordingly ..

 

13 hours ago, Chris Louw said:

Nabzo check setting no 4 must be SdS for normal operation SEN is for power saving mode .The power will switch on and off if SEN is selected if the load is low or not detected

where can i find this setting on watch power or must i do it on the inverter ?

4 minutes ago, Nabzo said:

where can i find this setting on watch power or must i do it on the inverter ?

It's at the top right of the settings screen, according to the latest manual. But it may have moved.

1 hour ago, Coulomb said:

It's at the top right of the settings screen, according to the latest manual. But it may have moved.

I do not see that option 

i also notice that , my battery voltage shows 50v with a battery capacity of 28% is this normal , doesnt the two have to be inline with one an other ?

when my inverter is in battery mode it will show battery capacity at like 28- 41%  but then when utility kicks in it all of a sudden shows 100%. why does it do this  ?

is there a fault somewhere or does it have to do with my settings ?

 

2 hours ago, Nabzo said:

Nabzo check setting no 4 must be SdS for normal operation SEN is for power saving mode .The power will switch on and off if SEN is selected if the load is low or not detected

my inverter is set on SDS

13 hours ago, Nabzo said:

i also notice that , my battery voltage shows 50v with a battery capacity of 28% is this normal , doesnt the two have to be inline with one an other ?

With an LFP (LiFePO₄) battery, there is no reasonable relationship between battery voltage and state of charge. With lead acid, there is a rough relationship, so an approximate SOC can be guessed from the battery voltage. The Axpert inverters don't measure battery current at all; the displayed battery current is calculated from AC currents and deduced using various guesses. So they don't count coulombs at all, which is what you need to do for a reasonable SOC for LFP batteries. So the SOC shown by the inverter, and hence Watchpower, is completely unrealistic for LFP batteries. If you had a recent model that has the ability to talk to a particular brand of battery's BMS (so far only Pylontech, as far as I know), then it's different and will be accurate. Your model doesn't have this direct battery communication capability (regardless of how recent).

That's one of the reasons for using a BMV and ICC; that way, the monitoring software has a good idea of the battery's state of charge, and hence can make intelligent decisions about when to switch to and from line mode, for example.

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when my inverter is in battery mode it will show battery capacity at like 28- 41%  but then when utility kicks in it all of a sudden shows 100%. why does it do this  ?

That's just part of the code that attempts to guess the state of charge of the battery. It was written back when nearly all batteries were lead acid. The displayed value is usually something like (battery voltage - (cutoff voltage + 0.2V) x 10%. For your example of 50.0 V with your cutoff voltage setting at 44.5 V, it would display something like (50.0 - 44.7) x 10% = 53%. When in line mode, with the possibility of AC charging, it uses the same formula except capped at 95% unless it looks like the battery is full. Fullness is guessed as the battery voltage being >= (float voltage + 0.2V) when the charge current is less than 5 A. In that case (when it guesses the battery is full), it displays 100%. In this mode, it will never display a value between 96% and 99% inclusive.

All this is vaguely reasonable for lead acid batteries, but totally irrelevant to LFP batteries. So just ignore the SOC from the inverter and Watchpower, and use whatever LEDs or monitoring software comes with your battery. If that's not good enough, use a BMV with ICC.

Edited May 18, 20197 yr by Coulomb
Added sentence about direct BMS communications capability.

Good day to all.

We have the following Solar system running for a month now without any problems:

Mecer 5Kva MKSII, 12x355w PV panels, 2x3.5Kw pylontech, ICC, Extra DB board just for the Solar system, and a feed-in from the grid to switch over when the batteries reach 25% DOD.

As the System is set up in our spare bedroom and the Mecer can be noicy when under load I want to know in the event of having guest to sleep over, can I just switch the Mecer off to shut down the system and switch it later on again?

I also would like to know if I for example want to add another Pylontech to the system, what is the right sequence to disconnect every isolator to shut the system down and work on the it savely, and the sequence to start it up again?

On 2019/06/20 at 6:06 PM, Bert sa said:

can I just switch the Mecer off to shut down the system and switch it later on again?

Sure. Of course, any loads on the inverter won't get power when it's switched off. Hopefully you can switch over to the grid.

On 2019/06/20 at 6:06 PM, Bert sa said:

what is the right sequence to disconnect every isolator to shut the system down

I would just turn off loads, AC in, PV in, then the inverter itself. Finally switch off the batteries. Reverse to start everything back up again.

On 2019/06/22 at 3:32 PM, Coulomb said:

Sure. Of course, any loads on the inverter won't get power when it's switched off. Hopefully you can switch over to the grid

 

Thanks Coulomb, so if I just want to switch it of for the night we have guests, I just switch of the inverter, leave everything connected and switch it on the next morning?

Edited June 25, 20197 yr by Bert sa
wrong place to quote

5 hours ago, Bert sa said:

I just switch off the inverter,

Yes.

hi there guys . so I have been running my inverter on solar only and its been doing well  for some time until today . BOOM I got an error 09 ! 
I have seen threads started about this error 09 , seems like error 09 is our nightmare .

so how I got hit with error 09 is that I got a guy today to install a voltage regulator at my place because our power some times spike to 250v and back down to 230v Eskom or city power just says it will be fine give it time hence I installed this voltage reg. so after installing and connecting everything again boom error 09 

has anyone found a solution for this error 09? 

what can I do to fix this ? 

 

10 hours ago, Nabzo said:

so how I got hit with error 09 is that I got a guy today to install a voltage regulator at my place because our power some times spike to 250v and back down to 230v

That sounds like a pretty normal voltage range to me. I suspect you would have been better off without the regulator at all. Perhaps the sudden voltage step changes confuse the code that tries to synchronise frequency and phase with the incoming AC.

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has anyone found a solution for this error 09? 

what can I do to fix this ? 

I would disconnect the voltage regulator; sorry, I know you won't want to hear that. Then it's a matter of repairing the inverter; more bad news. It might be something simple, but most likely it's quite an involved repair. See for example this topic: PIP inverter repairs, and the hardware section of this huge topic: PIP-4048MS and PIP-5048MS inverters .

Edited September 24, 20196 yr by Coulomb
Blank lines

3 hours ago, Coulomb said:

That sounds like a pretty normal voltage range to me. I suspect you would have been better off without the regulator at all. Perhaps the sudden voltage step changes confuse the code that tries to synchronise frequency and phase with the incoming AC.

I would disconnect the voltage regulator; sorry, I know you won't want to hear that. Then it's a matter of repairing the inverter; more bad news. It might be something simple, but most likely it's quite an involved repair. See for example this topic: PIP inverter repairs, and the hardware section of this huge topic: PIP-4048MS and PIP-5048MS inverters .

I have disconnected the voltage reg and left it on solar only when the inverter is ofit shows the solar panels charging the battery. When I switch it on after a few seconds error 09 kicks in . So there is an input of power 

9 minutes ago, Nabzo said:

When I switch it on after a few seconds error 09 kicks in

What i remember of all the error posts before. Once the Error 9 pops up, its time to have the unit repaired. Normally nothing you do at home now will help the situation. Something inside is already damaged and needs replacement  before the error will go away. 

5 hours ago, Nabzo said:

So there is an input of power

Yes. That involves only the top blue box in this block diagram:

The problem is that one or both of the bottom two blocks has blown up. The "bus" in the diagram above is the pair of lines with arrows between the two bottom blocks. If you like, it's impossible to get 400 V between the arrowed lines.

Edited September 24, 20196 yr by Coulomb
"pair of arrows" → "pair of lines with arrows"