April 7, 20215 yr 19 hours ago, Ros said: Hi all! I am planning to add 9 x 455 watt solar panels to my VMIII and run it in SUB. The installer came to take measurements for panel fixtures. Looking at VMIII he said my AGM batteries will die soon even if using the SUB mode. Why would he say that? Is it true? I thought VMIII could mix solar and utility and work even without batteries... Hi Ros your plan sounds good. I'm not sure why he said the batteries will die but your plan will get the most out of them since they will be kept fully charged which they like. My growatt 5000es has an equalization feature which comes on everytime the batteries are full and there is still excess solar. This feature seems to be helping my batteries recover after our local power substation blew up 2 months ago. I also thought I would have to buy new batteries in February but now I'm confident that I should be fine if 2 hour loadshedding comes back at night. During the day your 9 pv panels will cover you so batteries are only needed if loadshedding happens at night. It's a good plan.
April 7, 20215 yr On 2021/04/06 at 11:37 PM, Ros said: Looking at VMIII he said my AGM batteries will die soon even if using the SUB mode. Why would he say that? Perhaps he has seen too many lead acid installations die early because people use the default low battery cut-off value and run them down to 5% SOC with all the lengthy load shedding. Or maybe he has a great deal on a lithium battery, this week only, be quick or miss out... 🤔 Edited April 7, 20215 yr by Coulomb
April 7, 20215 yr 2 hours ago, Coulomb said: Perhaps he has seen too many lead acid installations die early because people use the default low battery cut-off value and run them down to 5% SOC with all the lengthy load shedding. Or maybe he has a great deal on a lithium battery, this week only, be quick or miss out... 🤔 I'm trying to think of a time where the phrase "Today only" was used and it was not a scam.😇
May 4, 20215 yr Author Hi all i did some further research and realised a few things. My inverter is not a PV inverter to solely depend on solar power so its normal for the inverter to draw some power from the batteries and replace it with the energy from the solar panels when it deems it suitable. 3rdly i also realised that getting a true SoC without a raspberry PI is like poking in the dark so i have decided to just purchase a Raspberry PI with ICC software to reduce the guess work. I am just not sure which voltages i will need to change to to allow for a proper back to grid after i connect the Raspberry PI.
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.