Morning guys. 

I installed 6 x 330W solar panels in 2 strings of 3 about 2 weeks ago with a 150/35 Smartsolar MPPT. I set up ESS and everything is working great except for one thing that is bothering me and I would like to know if any of you have experienced something similar in the past.

At sunrise the MPPT will start to charge the batteries and when PV is enough it will start taking over the loads, like it should but.......Every now and then the MPPT drops out completely to 0w-5w's for anything between 10-30 minutes. I tried checking data downloads via spreadsheet but just cannot find a pattern, fault code or anything to explain why it's dropping out. If i remove the VE-direct cable it seems to be charging full on untill the batteries are full. Also when I set ESS to "keep batteries charged" it shows no drop outs. This only happens in "optimized(with batterylife)" and "optimized(without battery life)" modes.

I've suspected that maybe the mppt overheats or something but cannot say that it's very hot when the fault occurs. There's obvious heat in the unit but I would say about 35-40deg, which I would say is normal. This happens randomly, not a specific time of day, not at a specific PV voltage, no pattern I can find so far, it just drops out (mostly for close to 10 min but longest was about 10min) and restarts itself. If I manage to see when it drops out, I can disable the MPPT charger via bluetooth and immediately enable again and it will charge as if nothing ever happens. I've checked and rechecked all connections, breakers, fuses, etc but think this might be a setting issue. I just have no idea where so continue looking.

Also when it drops out all the current draw comes from the batteries, like it's set up. No cloud cover, we live in the Karoo.....

I really hope someone can shed some light on this seeing that it's tickling my panties. 

Help please?!?

I had something similar a while back.

Just to check, did you at some stage connect to the MPPT via bluetooth and changed a few values?

There was a setting I set (will have to check), but this caused intermittent disconnects.

I did connect but did not change any settings. MPPT settings is supposed to be defaulted to the ESS setting, controlled by the VenusGX. Have not fiddled with settings on the Smartsolar itself yet.

 

I've checked the PV voltage. The voltage increases as soon as the amperage decreases, which I guess is normal. Once again, I do not have this problem when ESS is set to "keep batteries charged" making me think that it's not voltage/current/temp/hardware issues but a setting issue

I think this may be a Firmware issue - see https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/45673/victron-smart-solar-15035-charging-shutoff-malfunc.html

Have you tried updating the firmware?

All Hardware has got the latest available firmware installed but this is the first video with a similar incident. It's doing exactly the same as mine...

When trying to update, my Smartsolar says "Your product is already running the latest firmware version" which it v1.54. It seems to be happening more frequently...