#1: I'll try and keep this organized. We're limited to 10,000 characters so this will be a multi part post.
If you have an XP battery or a bunch of them this will be a good thread for information on how to treat them properly. We'll discuss what the Valence Brand U-BMS actually does and how to...
#13 Balancer On The Cheap.
Maybe you don't need a BMS at all? Like if your inverter shuts down before the battery gets too low and your charge controller is reliable and you have a cheap aftermarket battery to battery balancer. & Every once in awhile in order to activate the internal...
#15 CONNECTOR KIT
I bought this connector kit so I could make connecting to the valance plug easier but I can't find it so I ended up Jerry rigging the thing. https://amzn.to/2Hr3zM8
#16 User guide. XP battery manufacturers user guide...
#6 BATTERY BANK WIRING:
This is the most common mistake with do-it-yourself and even some professional solar installers. This applies to all parallel connections whether it be just parallel or series parallel. It's easiest to keep the wire lengths the same but it's really about the amount...
The black circles on the side of the u27-12xp reveal screws. You can remove the side cover and you'll have access to the individual wires going to the cell blocks so you could actually hook up a traditional cell balancer like a Batrium or many other far cheaper than Batrium choices. But if you...
!!! VALENCE. u-BMS SUCCESS !!!
Last week I finally got the OEM u-BMS fully functional and tested, I proved to myself it's working and doing its job. Now that I finally figured it out I realize it's so much easier than other DIY's like building your own with tons of wires. It's literally...
I did some testing with the high-voltage valence branded u-BMS. I'm happy to report it's working. I have it controlling for contactors although I'm really only utilizing two of them. I flashed the BMS for 2 batteries in series. The hv u-BMS needs 100 volts dc minimum because it's the...
No I've never tried the thunderstruck and don't have any experience with it other than seeing people happy with it on 12 V systems. Don't forget I convert HV units to LV and Flash them properly for your battery bank configuration.
Apparently my "reserved for future use" is useless because I cannot edit them. I guess there's a time limit on editing abilities. That really sucks because I'm not going to be able to update and correct the original posts as our learning progresses. people will be forced to read through...
remember your goal with the contactor is to be able to disconnect the battery. Removing either wire will accomplish this. So to answer your question. Yes you are correct in your 1st idea of where to put the contactor between the battery negative and the body ground.
I gave them a call today and found out some details. This BMS is good for some minor things but the problem for anyone looking to put modules in series is that this bms will not command the modules 12V resistors to activate in order to keep series modules in balance with each other. It will open...
I have used the Delta h6 PV input tethered to the high voltage battery of my car. It works great if you take it apart and disable the arc fault protection. I've also tied into its DC bus which is 516 volts with a 65KWH lithium iron phosphate battery. I've been running my house like this for...
The Ev200aaana is rated for 500 amps. make sure you get the one that has the economizer board on the side. It's basically a pwm board that reduces the power necessary to keep the contactor closed after it initially closes.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ev200aaana&_sacat=0&_sop=15...
yes you're correct if thunderstruck adds the module balancing and thermal protection it would replace the basic functions of the valence BMS. There are a lot of other options the valence BMS has that thunderstruck will probably never have.
Yes we verified that the battery will not balance its...
The batteries cannot be shut off internally. The thunderstruck will need to be wired to and will open and close a relay "contactor" in order to disconnect the battery Bank when it deems necessary...
I finally got around to doing the discharge test. I drained battery down to 10.8v & the cells down to 2.70 volts. The lowest was at 2.7 volts and the highest was at 2.75 volts. I got out 89% of their original rated capacity according to the watt hour counter in the valence software. With...
Just for a teaser I'll tell you about what's coming. My next version of the BMS all in one box will include a raspberry pi inside communicating with and controlling the valence BMS. This will give an unlimited amount of flexibility with whatever you're doing including home automation and dump...
Over discharged batteries progress update
#2
I slow charged them about 1/4 amp It took about 6 amp hours to get them to 12+ volts. Next I hooked up my 50 amp charger and they were quite willing to accept 50 amps but I turned the amperage down to 10 amps. I've got 3 different amp counter...
I've seen a battery at 18 volts and it didn't heat up. Yes you can hook both to the computer at the same time via rs485 and they'll both balance but you can only see one battery at a time without the BMS and canbus.
If an out-of-balance battery reaches full without having the balance...
You should really consider using a pre-charger. It's super simple to hook up. It's especially important with the high voltage.
I use about 16 KWH per 24hrs. That's half of what my PV can bring in. That's four time less than the battery bank size. But I always get some PV power even on rainy...
If you guys need a different configuration for your BMS I can send you the config file. As long as it's for your own use as I'm not trying to create a competitor for myself.
You know what would be the ultimate hack for the XP line? Actually reflashing a chip on the board that's inside the battery. Add some lines of code that as well as do its regular functions also Tell it to activate the 12 volt resistor anytime the battery reaches 14.4v and activate the cell...
I can no longer suggest active balancers that don't have a cut in voltage set point for lfp batteries. Valence is lfp. What recently happened to me is when one cell has a slow self-discharge the balancer in the picture caused all the others to dump their power into its bank of 4 which raises...
I doubt it will do anything other than confuse the rt. Maybe one benefit it could cause the XP To Flash every 5 seconds instead of 20 indicating that its on board balancing is activated. Of course this won't balance battery to battery on the XP side. And I would worry that the battery to...
The quirk I hate the most is it's so easy to pause the meter without realizing it.
There's a different model non-wireless that has inductive pickup for DC and it has a feature that's very nice. When it gets to the upper voltage cut off it can reset the state of charge to 100%. That's pretty...
So they've had 480kwh and 578kwh discharge from them. Divide that by their 1.7kwh rating gets you 282 & 339 cycles.
Their actual cycle counter doesn't get triggered unless you do a full cycle. Partial cycles don't add to it. I think it's more fair to look at the wh counter to get a better...
I just discovered my XP will not balance its internal cells with its internal balancer unless it's tethered to the valence software on my laptop or the external U-BMS.
you're right about it being voltage dependent. But the resistance determines the voltage under load so batteries with different resistance will pass different amounts of power and if the midpoints are tied 1 battery with a different resistance now affects the entire banks current flow instead of...
I think they're slightly different capacity so it will be harder to stay away from a severely undervoltage cell in a series setup if you mix the black and green. Parallel will be fine.
If you paid for green ones and you got black ones I'd be getting your money back if I were you...
Yes it should be below 1 amp per battery at that voltage. That's when it's pretty close to full except if you have anything out of balance you'll have to hold it there for a amount of time possibly many weeks for the low cell Bank to catch up. If the state of charge shows 100% then balancing...
My reply to mitchk1303,:
2. Every month or so I need to program my charge controller to do a float charge to a specific voltage (you used 14.07 for 6 hours). While the batteries are charging I plug in my computer with 5V to make sure all of the individual cells are balanced? Do you just open the...
I have a 6000 What high frequency inverter made for Tesla by Delta. It does 3000 W on each leg but I disconnected the neutral and installed an auto transformer To regain my neutral. Now all of my loads pull evenly from both legs of my inverter. The transformer also acts as an inductor and so I...
Your limb broke. Yes I have successfully connected the high-voltage battery from my Prius to a midnight classic with usable success. With my average consumption of 500 watts continuous house off grid I'm able to go twice as long on a gallon of fuel compared to my Honda eu2000 generator. I got...
yes you can use the valence battery as the 12-volt source.
And if you wanted to get super protective I would set it up so that if the BMS where to disconnect the battery Bank because of low voltage it would even kill power to itself so that way it's own power draw would never run the batteries...
they are second hand batteries so yes they've been balanced but they were also balanced when they were new before the first seller got a hold of them. The problem now is that most of these batteries have been sitting for years and so any cell block that has a slightly faster self-discharge rate...
Sorry for confusing you. One battery and the thunderstruck is fine.
The thunderstruck is designed for a single battery or batteries in parallel No additional balancers would be needed . In combination with a nice ev200a relay it would be a legitimate BMS that protected the battery.
And it...
No it's not safe to run without a balancer. You absolutely must have a balancer that engages only at the upper voltages. Of course you can do this by keeping the board awake. Now it's arguably safe enough to run without a BMS as long as you have the balancer. Set your low voltage cut off to...
Yes it connects to the battery it's protecting if you're running a 12-volt system. Personally I'm connecting mine after the relay so that when the relay is disconnected the BMS itself will have no power so that way it won't continue draining the battery in a low voltage cutoff situation. I'm...
There all used but the trick is to Purchase them directly from their original installation. Because in the original installation they have a uBMS so they were protected in every way.
Yes. But remember it controls the contactor based off of cell voltage. I've personally seen cells go over voltage at only 13.8 V But that was on an unbalanced battery. Once it's balanced it shouldn't be a danger. The thunderstruck will keep the Cells balanced On 12 V systems
Setting 37 "battery fully charged recovery point"
Does anybody know if one of the firmware for this inverter happened to omit setting 37?
I know a bit unconventional but my batteries are 17S. That way if you have a bad cell in the future you can remove a cell and still have enough cells to...
The bleed off resistors are very very tiny. It could take weeks or months in some cases of holding them at 99% For them to come to balance. Any battery that suddenly jumps to 100% has finally reached balanced according to its internal computer. You may see a battery at 20% suddenly move to...
I would hate to have to add one of these $10 balancers to a thunderstruck set up.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Li-ion-Lifepo4-LFP-Battery-Active-Equalizer-BMS-1-2A-Balancer-2S-3S-7S-17S-USA/184223726328?hash=item2ae496faf8:g:J5UAAOSw5IZeeLM3
I have to say thank you for doing such a nice job programming all this. The thing I like most about it is being able to easily check up on my system when I'm not home. Also love the Diagnostic abilities of seeing historical charts. If there's anybody wondering if you should get this I can...
you're welcome. Unfortunately I don't have any experience with running these batteries Under and over voltage to determine if and how much they get damaged. Your batteries don't have many cycles. I also noticed that the second counter for the time it's been Under and over voltage is low so they...
Heads up the propane refrigerator in my RV was computer controlled & the computer system took more power than a standard electric household refrigerator. I'd recommend putting a meter on everything so you know how much each thing takes so you can make the correct decisions for your system. I'd...
I was racking my brain around this for a while when using the valence BMS. It controls 4 contactors but it's designed for electric vehicles that won't allow the Drive unit to be engaged (discharge)while the charger is plugged in. realizing though that this doesn't matter because the inverter...
I had an interesting problem balancing module to module this week. My valence branded BMS is set up for nearly 40 batteries is series which is also how I have my battery's arranged. I have a small LED hooked to one of them. It Took a long time but its voltage Eventually dropped far enough for...
Yes but he is using grafana. I got his system and I love it. Im learning how to make graphs just how I like them presented. And I can check on my system with my phone when I am not at home.
https://diysolarforum.com/threads/valence-bms-and-mobile-app-with-grafana.17058/#post-211889
The quote you posted here is for the RT series. They are different and if you're going to understand that RT communication cables you need to read the manual for the RT battery because they have series-parallel limitationsand their communication cables may need to be hooked up in the correct...
With your setup I don't think you'll need a u-bms. He don't really have enough batteries to warrant the cost. Hook the communication cables between all the batteries to each others neighboring battery in any random order. You'll only make one connection to the laptop and that will communicate...
I tried it with 24 batteries in parallel. Connecting at different points from the positive on one end and the negative on the other is not good enough. The batteries in the centre were barely used and the ones on the end took the brunt of the amperage.
Then after the batteries on the end did most of the work the batteries in the middle would slowly charge the ones on the end. This will tax the batteries near the end more and theyll go bad 1st.
14.6 is 3.65v per cell. From now on you should only think in terms of voltage per cell. When Holding them at 3.65 one cell is likely to hit that voltage first causing you to freeze the voltage at that point. As the lower cells slowly rise in voltage you could increase the total voltage...
It's possible that you didn't charge to 100%
Yes sure 13.9 is theoretically full but that's only if you were holding that voltage with a very very slow charge rate.
If your battery is at 13.9 volts but it's still charging then it's not full. What I mean by charging is that if it's still...
I've seen that victron balancer on Amazon it did not have good reviews. I've never tried one.
To clarify about the balancing yes you are correct.
No mention of low temperature shut off in the XP manual. I just looked through and did a keyword search and couldn't find anything either. It...
Yeah that's what you should expect. The cell block voltage variations won't vary too much until you get up to top balancing voltages. If you can get each cell up to 3.45 without any cell going over 3.8 on the first try it means they were pretty much balanced already. If you find it takes days...
Yes. remove the black rubber circles from the side of the battery there's a couple under the warranty seal sticker on the side as well. Use a torx screwdriver to unscrew the screws and remove the side cover. Inside you'll find the balancing lead connector that you can easily wire up to an...
That's exactly what those who have been working on this have already done. You're definitely on the right track. But ultimately what I've decided to do is let the ubms do its job. I've added a logging device device on its CANbus.
Inside the ubms there's a lot of thinking and...
Dead battery. Critically discharged test.
Somebody brought me their U27-12XP which they had let get below 8 volts for two to four weeks. When they arrived with me they were at 4 volts. The red lights were completely off or perhaps glowing very very dimly. I immediately put them on a...
For your simple all parallel setup to accomplish balancing the four cell blocks inside each battery to each other you only need a laptop. As I've said before they have to communicate with something or they simply will not balance. I assume The victron systems communication is not adequate to...
The only way to cause the internal board on the XP battery to balance the cells is to get it 5 volts from an external source and communicate with the board with something like a laptop or a BMS... the communication doesn't need to be anything special just enough to wake up the board. Otherwise...
That's a pretty bad capacity compared to all the ones I've tested which were still holding somewhere between 96 and 100% but none of mine have had any possible damage with over or under voltage conditions in the past.
one thing you want to make sure of if you're using the built-in...
I know the prices have gone up so much. I think it's because of this super thread showing people how to handle the batteries. Especially now with the BMS situation finally figured out their confidence has gone up and people are bidding the price up higher. And there's not as many available...
I'm thinking I'll have to 3D print some spacers to go between them that will still let the air flow through. Or else make a strong aluminum sleeve to slide the cell into. Have you seen examples of these BMW cells having problems because there was no compression?
What are you doing with 180 volts? I'm off grid and my inverter uses 516 volts so I've got 38 of the 12 volt batteries in series. It's just rare to see people using higher voltage so you got me curious.
I pulled the high voltage straight off the prius battery through a midnite classic and into my off-grid house battery. The classic only works about half power and you have to use a custom wind curve mode. I've got a whole thread about it...
The battery was under temperature for 128 seconds. The lowest temperature it was ever at was 14゚F. I'm in Hawaii and there's no cold temperature here so I haven't played around with the under temperature stuff. And not sure if it means that it was actually used while it was under temperature...
POW-LVM5K-48V.
Vs.
hf4850h80-h.
On a side note setting 37 is set at 57.6 on my hf4850h80-h SRNE so That's interesting. I don't think these two units are close to the same enough to copy the flash file of the SRNE and write it over to the powmr unit? I think for now I'm just going to use...
People all around having good luck with those. if you don't need 240 though did you know you can combine both of the outputs into one single 120 volt output? It looks like on the LV 5048 it's line 28 change it between 2A0 and 2A2. And that theoretically changes its output between a matched 120...
It sounds like your charge controller is bad. Defective! Like the voltage sense inside is off therefore it drags the voltage to the wrong MPP and and with regular amount of voltage thinks it's too high.
I don't have any experience with the black ones. The manual for the green ones does mention it's upgrades over the black ones. It says. "
3. U-CHARGE REVISION 2 CHANGES AND UPDATES
3.1. U-Charge Rev 2
U-Charge Battery Modules:
• Communication cable connectors are now Amp Superseal automotive...
Travel trailers pull power out of the batteries 24/7 and you'll likely end up draining yours to a dangerously low level and ruining them. Because you don't have any batteries in series you can go with the thunderstruck. It will protect from low voltage if you get a contactor to go with it. I...
+13.18V seems lower than it should be. What was the other batteries reading at that time? Seems like you're on the right track. Like you're going to have to open these batteries up and measure the cells without the BMS interfering.
There are at least one or two threads about using the raspberry. Not in this super thread though. There might be a link to it somewhere in this super tread. If you know your way around a raspberry it's probably easy enough. I've never done it myself.
But the grid input has the inductive amperage meters that interact with it. Why they're not built in I'm not sure but I was reading the manual and it seemed as if it could respond quicker on the grid breaker then it could on the generator breaker because of those inductive pickups.
I was...
I just wanted to add a note here so I didn't get confused and think I hadn't talked to you. Thanks for the phone call. Here's the prototype I am working on.
yes it seems like the layout in your drawing is correct the top-left is for cells just like you circled and the bottom left is for the modules but the yellow and red should all be circled in the same circle because they all get warm together.
Are there individual resistors for cells or do they...
It'll be a few weeks before I get one up on eBay. Bidding will start at 800. Local demand has got me pretty busy right now. Here's a BMS setup that I put together recently. It's kind of long and more geared for the person who bought it so you probably want to skip around to save time.