Recent content by danb35

No, I have 1"-wide strips along either side. So it's resting on the tops of the cells themselves, but not on the terminals. The net metering rules here aren't the greatest, but again, battery backup was actually a big part of my design goals. It's nice to have a battery pack that will power...

Yes, that is feasible in .us, and (since it doesn't require the purchase of batteries) it can be considerably less expensive. But there are a couple of reasons I chose to do it this way: I wanted the battery backup. I don't have frequent power outages here, but they do happen, and I've had a...

Details? Well, this is what I used for battery: https://batteryhookup.com/products/new-12v-100ah-lifepo4-kit-w-bms-low-temp Overkill to be sure, but it included the BMS, and I didn't need to mess with bus bars as the cell packs have flexible wires. The four cell packs fit very nicely into the...

Here's what I came up with:

Yeah, I should have updated the thread. I adapted one of Will's milk crate builds, leaving out the solar charge controller, and using 4x 100Ah packs from batteryhookup.com. Way overkill for the power capacity, but it's working well so far.

So just to make sure I'm not missing anything--"double-conversion UPS" is really just line -> charger -> battery -> inverter -> load, right? Ignoring trying to get fancy with monitoring, of course.

I'd like a minimum of 2 hours, and wouldn't mind more than that. If I call it 300Wh (as I mentioned in my OP), that gives about 3 hours' runtime, ignoring conversion efficiency and such--a 12V, 25Ah pack would handle it. At that rate, battery would be the cheapest part of the system, so I'd...

I'm open to building or buying. I'm willing to pay a bit of a premium to buy--it'll look much more "finished", which will help the WAF (and this will be in her domain), but that depends on there being a commercially-available product that does the job and isn't multiples more expensive than...

It's a little OT for this forum, as I'm not really looking to use solar power for this, but I'm really looking for something that could serve as a UPS, running a constant load of about 100W, for a few hours--call it 300Wh or so--and using LiFePO4 batteries. Pb-acid don't seem to last long in...

No, as I said in the text you quoted, I'm monitoring it on a Linux server, though you could do the same thing using a Raspberry Pi. See: https://github.com/jblance/mpp-solar As a bonus, it will also let you monitor the Daly Smart BMSs that are the subject of this thread.

Hadn't thought about it, but it's an idea. It would take some re-wiring, but it could be feasible. Lighting for the main shop is a kW of LEDs, but the "clean room" in the back (where the server rack, 3D printers, reloading bench, etc. are) is about 200W worth. What I don't yet have worked out...

The mounting hardware is Rib Brackets from S-5, which I found at altestore.com. Surprisingly expensive, really--even without rails and racks, I still spent half as much on that hardware as I did on the panels. The server rack ordinarily draws 1-1.2kW, so the batteries power it for 5-6...

Since it's pretty well all up and running now, here's what I have set up in my workshop. I'm using eight 250W panels from SanTan Solar, a MPP Solar LV2424, and 8x 272Ah LiFePO4 cells for storage, to run my server rack, and hopefully bring the electric bill for my workshop lower than the one for...

I ended up buying both a USB-RS485 and a USB-UART adapter off eBay. The 485 still didn't work, so that's three separate RS485 adapters that didn't work--I'm not sure if my BMS is just defective or what. Fortunately, I am able to communicate using the UART adapter. I'm using this software to...

I've now tried with a different RS485 adapter, suspecting the original one might be defective. Connected its A and B terminals to the wires that should be A and B according to the manual--no comms (or any other response) with their software. Swapped those two wires--still no comms. Running...