Solar Assistant uses influxdb and grafana. The files are easily accessible. There are two small changes you can make to the OS's filesystem in order to enable ssh. I find it extremely valuable to see the logging information whenever there's an issue and you simply cannot access it without ssh...
I'm not sure too many people are using this feature but after some back and forth with MPP Solar about odd behavior with the timer, I finally understand a little more about how it works and wanted to share it in case it helps anyone else. I am making some assumptions based on my observations -...
This is the first phase of a solar/battery backup system for our house. This phase does not include any of the solar work (stay tuned for that), but today, after months of planning, ordering parts, lots of waiting, we finally turned the system on and so far (knock on wood) it has been running...
The PAM issue is something broken in the installation of Solar Assistant. It doesn't break any user-facing functionality, but it prevents scheduled cleanup tasks from running, like log rotation and the like. In my view, although you need a working cron system to implement scheduled backups...
@mrall Solar Assistant is able to read from the 48V LiFePower4 batteries over the RS485 port using the "Narada" protocol. Maybe you'll have some luck finding it?
I would also point out that there is some inconsistency in the DIP switch address settings and it's particularly important that you...
@RichardfromEG4 got back to me with the manufacturer's specs:
6 Nm on the M6 bolts (battery or cabinet bus bar)
8 Nm on the M8 bolts (cabinet bus bar)
Hope this helps and thanks Richard!
I made a copy of their table that is correct since I had the same issue as @Texican for 48V/100AH EG4 LiFePower4 (no LCD) packs. I verified all the address settings using their BMS software. Another important thing to note about Solar Assistant is that it starts at address 2 and scans...
The good news is that the input is limited to numbers 00-23 only. I can confirm that setting start to 00 and end to 00 is a special case and is ignored. Start time > end time works as expected by wrapping back to 00 after 23. For example, start 15 and end 06 is interpreted as the ranges...
Here are the steps - please let me know if it works for you. This is all from memory and it's been a while so I may have missed a step. There are two prerequisites - (1) that you know how ssh keys work and how to generate and retrieve the public key you want to use to access the SA pi; (2) you...
I don’t know about EG4 (maybe @RichardfromEG4 can comment on this), but Ian at watts247 told me removing the bonding screw would not void the warranty on the unit.
I'd shoot an email over to info@solar-assistant.io. Pierre is very quick at responding. It's not an open source project, so I can't help look into the issue on the software side of things. Only he can do that and chances are, you won't be the first person that has reached out to him with this issue.
Hey y'all, so no smoke or anything destroyed to report, but if you are thinking of using a Siemens double-throw safety switch as a manual transfer switch (for example to switch between utility and off-grid inverter power), please be aware that although there are side knockouts on the lever-side...
Yes, you should be able to do that by setting the output source priority (setting 01) to SbU (solar/battery/utility). You will also need to configure settings about your battery bank - if you're using EG4 batteries, they've made it really easy and the battery type setting 05 will have an EG4...
Yeah, I also suspect the BMS, especially given the other issue I've experienced with the temps and other values getting stuck and no longer reporting actual values, but the last value read. It's not a big deal--it just messes up the Solar Assistant graphs and I'm a little OCD about it. As you...
Sure, I will give it a try. I'm conducting another experiment at the moment to try and better understand why Solar Assistant is reporting that battery charged is more than 2.5x battery discharged at bulk 56.4v, float 55v. I'm using LV6548 inverters and I don't believe there is an absorb...
Annnnd, they're telling me 8 Nm across the board, even for the larger screws (M8) on the cabinet bus bars. It's a bit concerning that we got two different answers, though.
The distributor confirmed that when two LV6548 are run in parallel inverter mode, both will have N/G bonding. They followed up by saying:
They also mentioned that the “warranty will not be affected” when removing the binding screw, so it seems the correct action here is to remove it from all...
I have two LV6548 inverters connected to an EG4 battery bank. After connecting up one of the inverters to the battery bank, I shutdown that inverter, as well as all the batteries (each has a mini-breaker). As I always do for safety, I measured the voltage across the positive and negative bus...
Ah, good point. I just assumed it was a separately controlled relay that was turned on (separately) when in inverter mode. I didn't consider that they were energized together.
I plan to remove the screw and label the device that will not have the bond. I'm sure many others with this setup have...
Super strange... I'd be curious to know if the BMS's are identical between the one unit that doesn't conform and one of the others, as well as how the DIP switches connect to the BMS. Are they directly soldered, connected with a ribbon cable, or something else? Sounds like the QC wasn't too...
I have 6 of the EG4 48V/100AH LiFePower4 packs and also had issues getting Solar Assistant to read all the packs and found the manual's dip switch settings were incorrect (flipped and reversed). Cross-linking to another thread discussing this issue...
Sorry, I do not. The best thing to do would be to use a combination of an RS485 listener (so you can see the packets being emitted by the battery BMSs) in combination with the PC software provided by EG4. This should allow you to reverse engineer things. Also, if you're trying to sort out...
Solar Assistant does support MQTT integration and will continuously publish inverter/battery stats that can be read by other devices. In a recent revision, it also supports publishing to a particular topic to set inverter values, though the documentation is not specific about what values can be...
Decent price - I don't have space on my roof for 25 panels though (lots of pitch changes) so I'm trying to find slightly larger 380W-410W range to try to get it down to 16-20 panels in total.
Yep, I (thankfully) read that in another thread and I installed the negative bus bar upside down. I might rotate them in your topology though since that would shorten the 4/0 run. Thanks again for the suggestions!
Yeah, I’m surprised by that. I figured they’d have a resistor to discharge the caps but that seems not to be the case. Anyway, thanks for confirming this is a reasonable thing to do (given this inverter)!
Speaking of updates, what version of Solar Assistant are you running? I believe the latest is 2022-05-11. It's listed under System on the Configuration tab.