Good day. Installed a 10kV system consisting of the following. 18 330W modules, two Mecer 5000W Inverters (white  and blue) and two 100A 48V Lithiums. All is well however i would like to set up the dynamics according to my needs. 

In short, during the day exclusively from modules. Night batteries and if batteries run below specified voltage, utility until panels basically takes over. Please be so kind to assist in this. Cant wait to get cracking. 

Hi, 

What make of batteries? Do you have the battery data sheets?

What settings do you have for 01, 02, 11, 12, 13, 16, 26, 27 and 29?

I use mainly 01-SBU, 16-SLb, UCb and it works perfectly, loads when sun is shining and charging battery during daytime, only charges batteries from grid when they go too low. From Sunday 24th November to Sunday 1st December only used 6kWh from grid (oven is directly on grid).

Thank you for your reply. 100a 48v BAK LP. I am currently not at home but will post the settings as soon as possible. Only changed setting 1 to sbu. Rest are still default. Spoke to a family member at home and last night the units did switch over when loadshedding occurred but lasted only 10 min then all went dark.... Battery jumpers not set yet though. Not sure if that could be an issue. 

Does this picture imply utility is first? 

2 hours ago, Karoo said:

Does this picture imply utility is first? 

No. The "SL" I believe indicates that it's a slave; the other unit will show something like "HS" in that position, to indicate that it's the master. In practice, it doesn't make much difference to the user which one is the master.

The arrows around the hexagons indicate that the unit is in battery mode; power supplied from PV and the battery if needed will power the load.

Whether the utility is used before solar or battery power for loads is a setting, setting 01 (output source priority). Whether utility or PV is used first for charging is a different setting, setting 16 (usually called charge source priority, but called "solar energy priority" in the manual I looked at.

I have two of those inverters in parallel. Seems like you have 9.6kWh battery backup, no way it can only last 10 mins. I can see, at the time of your picture, your load on each inverter is less than 25% most probably 8% if no serious loads are running. Battery is charging if the bottom bar is running up and down and as @Coulomb pointed out your load is coming from PV as well as from battery and batteries are suppose to charge simultaneously if PV is enough. The left top one is utility and currently it is not getting any power from utility, it will be linked when utility is supplying you with power.

01 has three settings, USB (Utility -> solar -> battery), SUB (Solar -> utility -> battery) and SBU (Solar -> battery -> utility). When the sun is shining I use SBU. Now with all the rain (for which I am happy about) and zero to nothing PV coming in as well as stage 2 to stage 4 load-shedding, I have set it to USB at around 8am and switch it back to SBU around 5pm (I could/should probably just leave it on USB, but don’t want the utility to supply power 24/7). Those inverters really don’t like SUB and want to push back to grid when the batteries are fully charged, or it seems like they want to push back.

16 has 4 different settings, SLb UCb, SLb UdC, SbL UCb, and SbL UdC, S-Solar, L-Load, b-battery, UCb-utility allowed to charge, UdC-disallow utility to charge. S->L->b (solar will supply load and charge batteries), S->b->L (solar will charge batteries and then supply load). I could not find that cycles turn quicker or slower with any of these two settings, they seems to turn around about the same time.

It might be possible that your system has tripped, even though you have 10KW, your batteries can only supply a load of 4.8KW at any given time. It can also be that your cut-off is set too high and that the batteries/inverter reached that level and switched off. 

Unfortunately with solar, you have to manage power use, meaning your load need to be spread out. You can have an average of 1000w with fridges, etc, but if you use the oven, kettle or a geyser, you can easily exceed 4.8KW, then the batteries shut down, if that happens the inverters shut down and then your system is down. 
Try and find out what was running at the time the system went down.

I had a system trip when my geyser still had a 3KW element, the geyser was running, swimming pool running and normal fridges, tv, etc was running, used around 4.5-5KW and one of the kids switched a hairdryer on, boom system down. It exceeded what the batteries could supply at that moment and the inverters could not get the shortfall quick enough from the panels. I was not home, told the wife over the phone to switch the system off in a certain order and then back on again, they quickly learned to switch off the geyser briefly if they want to use the hairdryer. 
The batteries was just not enough to handle the inrush, hence the system shut-down. (This was with the 9.6KW Huawei’s I had, no problems since the Pylontech’s, also my battery bank is bigger since the Pylontech’s).

If you did not have a load of more than 4.8KW at the time, then the batteries might be the problem.
They should last at least close to two hours if you have a constant load of 4KW.
 

Edited December 6, 20195 yr by Wilfred

Question. Had a lovely day of sunshine but the 2 cells didn't charge.... Please be so kind to assist. All alarms and red LED's flashing on the batteries. 

Very odd, double checked all settings? Usually when these inverters go nuts, the only thing if any that happens is that the batteries charge either from grid or PV or both. Had an incident at a client of mine where the inverters went into bypass mode, no idea why, me and the owner got two of the inverters out of it but not the 3rd inverter, single phase, the inverters used grid and PV and could not get it off-grid. I told him to switch the system off totally and restart it, I don’t know if he did it.