Greetings,

Installed a 8x 380 panels, 8x agm 200ah batteries along with a spf5000tl hmv.... the inverter failed about 6 months later back in 2020. Came on for around 10sec after  loadshedding ended. My installer wasn't in town so send me to CNBM in Midrand which I think is there importer. The technician arm was in a sling and I had to connect the unit up and open it up for him to confirm the error and that no components were missing inside - apparently stealing components and swapping under warranty is a thing here in SA which they only discovered in China when they opened the units there just to find missing parts so now they test first.

Anyways mine was swapped out on the spot and has been rock solid since.

2 Weeks ago my gels gave up the fight so I bought a new polytech UP5000 and with a bit of googling found the correct pin outs for the comms cable and connected the battery up and it been working really well however... with setting-05 set to Li settings 02 & 11 are now managed by the system and its limiting them to between 10Amps and 32Amps and this is limiting my PV input to around 1650watts instead of my normal 3100watts so my PV is no longer able to carry my daily loads and charge the batteries. At 32Amps I can't even recharge the battery back to full between load shedding windows.

However if I set setting-05 back to USE and configure the battery voltages manually as per the polytech manual everything is back to normal aka I'm getting to around 2800watts in between today rain spells so it must be something with the inverters Li settings... or the inverters firmware. 

My installer has not responded to my whatsapp or emails. I've emailed growatt UK and China with no response from either in over a week.

Any advice?

It sounds like the inverter and the battery is not communicating via the comms cable.  Not so great to set up a Lithium Ion battery with user define settings.  When connecting up a Lithium Ion battery (including the comms cable) the inverter and the battery should be able to communicate and the inverter should pickup all the default settings of the battery.  This is to say if the pin config. on the comms cable is correct. I have personally stopped using the Growatt brand and exclusively install Deye as a primary and LuxPower as slightly cheaper option. I some large systems.  Best advice is to get rid of the Growatt and go to Deye/SunSynk (Deye manufactures inverters for SunSynk and it's only the interphase that is different) or if it you want to go a bit cheaper due to finances then LuxPower is next best bet. There are other good quality inverters out there, but these are the ones I use for supply and install. The Growatt (in my opinion - and this might cause a bit of noise - I hope not) is just a fancy Axpert copy in a suit, like thousands of others.

10 minutes ago, MLFourie said:

It sounds like the inverter and the battery is not communicating via the comms cable.  Not so great to set up a Lithium Ion battery with user define settings.  When connecting up a Lithium Ion battery (including the comms cable) the inverter and the battery should be able to communicate and the inverter should pickup all the default settings of the battery.  This is to say if the pin config. on the comms cable is correct. I have personally stopped using the Growatt brand and exclusively install Deye as a primary and LuxPower as slightly cheaper option. I some large systems.  Best advice is to get rid of the Growatt and go to Deye/SunSynk (Deye manufactures inverters for SunSynk and it's only the interphase that is different) or if it you want to go a bit cheaper due to finances then LuxPower is next best bet. There are other good quality inverters out there, but these are the ones I use for supply and install. The Growatt (in my opinion - and this might cause a bit of noise - I hope not) is just a fancy Axpert copy in a suit, like thousands of others.

I just tested with USE settings but I'm back to Li. I spend the money on a Lithium for the value over time and without BMS that won't happen. I don't believe it to be a communication issue between the inverter and the batteries BMS... if I disconnect the comms cable the inverter errors about 10 sec later with error 20 & 04 and the app shows all the % values at 0.
Reconnected the cable and it clears within seconds and all the % values are back. The UP5000 manual has the suggested charge\discharge rate at 50Amps so I leaning towards a inverter firmware issue.

I've popped a email to Amos so hopefully it is something easily corrected. Fingers crossed he responds.

I'm definitely aiming for a Sunsynk in the long term. 

On 2023/02/10 at 9:55 AM, Neph said:

I just tested with USE settings but I'm back to Li. I spend the money on a Lithium for the value over time and without BMS that won't happen. I don't believe it to be a communication issue between the inverter and the batteries BMS... if I disconnect the comms cable the inverter errors about 10 sec later with error 20 & 04 and the app shows all the % values at 0.
Reconnected the cable and it clears within seconds and all the % values are back. The UP5000 manual has the suggested charge\discharge rate at 50Amps so I leaning towards a inverter firmware issue.

I've popped a email to Amos so hopefully it is something easily corrected. Fingers crossed he responds.

I'm definitely aiming for a Sunsynk in the long term. 

Updated inverter to firmware 500.12 followed by a factory reset to fully enable the new firmware corrected by problem along with changing setting 05 Li from 02 to 04 which is Pylontech specific.

On 2023/03/03 at 5:15 PM, Neph said:

Updated inverter to firmware 500.12 followed by a factory reset to fully enable the new firmware corrected by problem along with changing setting 05 Li from 02 to 04 which is Pylontech specific.

Sorry for the late response, I gave up on BMS coms ages ago. I use USE and my settings are as Pylontech manuals, all has been good and no issues so far. Almost two years now and my battery bank SoH is on 95%. It was on 98% before adding a second hand US2000 which I bought late last year but I'm not too worried about that. When I checked each battery, individually, the first two which I bought when I first went solar, are at 98%, the other two and the UP5000 are still at 100% and the second hand one is at 95% which lead me to believe that Riot Cloud looks at the worst battery to say, that is my overall SoH for the bank. I stand to be corrected. Did the latest Firmware upgrade fix your charge issue? 

Sorry to respond to an old message, but I came across this post whilst searching for the Power board for my 3 kw inverter that actually has the same board as the Growatt. I had two 3 kw inverters in parallel and whilst I was on vacation they both blew up, total short at the battery side. They had only been installed 3 years and at the time they had no load on them, they just where charging my batteries. When I disassembled them, several MOSFET's and TVS had physically blown. I replaced them and they now do fire up but are showing error code 8 which is other component damage somewhere. So I am opting to replace the complete board if growatt will sell me one. 

I can only assume that it was a lighting strike, although my DEYE inverter was not affected, if anybody has any additional info it would be much appreciated.