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Megarevo RxLNA Discussion

Mom made bread growing up grinding her own wheat, and wife made bread for us but used a bread maker machine. I don't care much for most breads in the stores. Now I eat as little bread as I can due to carbs, and as little sugar due to pre-diabetes. BTW I am 4th gen sugar beet/ wheat farmer.
 
jsmetalcraft said:
Mom made bread growing up grinding her own wheat, and wife made bread for us but used a bread maker machine. I don't care much for most breads in the stores. Now I eat as little bread as I can due to carbs,
Click to expand...
Smart, we should try and do that as well.
jsmetalcraft said:
and as little sugar due to pre-diabetes.
Click to expand...
Necessity, but also smart.

I was surprised that the MR had no problems supplying 74% of max capacity at one phase and only 3% on other phase.
On the other hand you realize that eg a microwave for just a minute on the same phase wouldn't have worked, so I am seriously thinking about paralleling a second MR.
I just found out 2 days ago my batteries are 120Ah but only 15S = 5.76 kWh, 5kWh usable.
I had the intention to parallel those with a bunch of 19" batteries but that is not going to work since they are almost all 16S.
So 2nd MR will get it's own set of batteries
Different capacity so could run into problems when charge gets low
 
An interesting note about the battery wake up is that I found out on my lead acid setting, the EPS does not turn off when the "END VOLTAGE" (48 V) was reached. My BMS turned off discharge at 45v. The problem here is that the MR no longer senses the battery because no output from BMS and no communication hooked up. Luckily, the batteries somehow settled back above 45v, which turned on discharge and therefore supplied the 45v (no load with the eps off) to the MR. Fortunately, the sun was out when this happened and therefore the battery began to charge.

I originally thought this was because I have Batt Wake Up enabled. Apparently I just got lucky?
 
I played around with Home Assistant today and added daily battery charging & daily battery discharging to my setup

In my /config/custom_components/solarman/inverter_definitions/custom_parameters.yaml I added

disclaimer: I have no idea what I am doing ;-)
Seems to work pretty well

- name: "Daily Bat Charging"
class: "energy"
state_class: "total_increasing"
uom: "kWh"
scale: .001
rule: 1
registers: [0x316D]
icon: 'mdi:battery-arrow-up'

- name: "Daily Bat DisCharging"
class: "energy"
state_class: "total_increasing"
uom: "kWh"
scale: .001
rule: 1
registers: [0x316F]
icon: 'mdi:battery-arrow-down'
Click to expand...


Screenshot from 2022-09-09 17-54-57.png
I hope this matches what I see from the solarman data
Screenshot from 2022-09-09 17-57-54.png
 
Last edited:
fromport said:
I played around with Home Assistant today and added daily battery charging & daily battery discharging to my setup
Click to expand...

I checked today and I have these graphs:

Discharge of the battery in the last 2 days:

discharge.png
Count was reset at midnight and around 8am solar arrived and started charging my batteries.
Around 2PM batteries were at 94% and the discharge cycle continued

That sounds about right except when I look at my charge graph:
Screenshot from 2022-09-10 18-02-49.png

There seem to have been a very slow charging of my batteries from the grid as well

Looking at the solarman graphs it seems to have taken terms charging/discharging
Screenshot from 2022-09-10 18-07-09.png
Green (discharging) and yellow (charging) were both active.

So the graphs are probably pretty accurate.

I updated the icon in the code with an up (charge) & down (discharge) arrow ;-)

Screenshot from 2022-09-10 18-02-22.png
 
Last edited:
Looks good! This is what I have logging in my HA so far....

1662906037047.png

It does seem to be working pretty well. Much better than the old days when data would just stop reporting from the MR :)

This is my charge/discharge graph

1662906464453.png
 
Last edited:
I'm not at home right now, but I *think* I have successfully rebooted the inverter via the modbus protocol.

As posted above, I'm using home assistant to watch values in near real time. I am off-grid with batteries. I have two inverters hooked up in parallel with PV only going to my "Left" inverter. I sent a write command to my "Right" inverter to reboot, and it reset my values in HA. I then sent an OFF command to the inverter, and the values set to zero. I was able to send the ON command, and the values reappeared. Keep in my, my LEFT inverter will continue to power my loads during the reboot.

Since I'm not home, I'm unable to see what the inverter is actually doing, but via software, this is looking good.

I used the PYSolarmanV5 to send this script:

Code: 
def main():
    modbus = PySolarmanV5(
        "192.168.X.XXX", 233XXXXXXX, port=8899, mb_slave_id=1, verbose=False
    )

    print(modbus.write_holding_register(register_addr=5120, value=0x####)
    )

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

In the example above, replace the "####" with AAAA to turn OFF the inverter, then 5555 to turn on the inverter. For a simple reboot, you need to use address 5121, and send the value 0xAAAA.

Note, I don't know what I'm doing. I just trial and error until I get a response, but it seems to work.
 
How are you sending these commands to the SOLARMAN wifi adapter? Or did I miss something on how you have this connected?
 
Unfortunately, I don't know enough about VMs or how HA works so I can't upload the yaml (I don't know how to access the file system, lol), but I copy/pasted into a text file. I do all my editing of the yaml thru the HA file editor directly.
 

Attachments

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I currently have 3x 5kWh usable batteries hooked up to my MR.
I moved about 95% of my home to my critical load panel.
Heavy electric loads are still on the grid and during the day (when possible) I run the AC, charge my EV etc.
This has now resulted in 2 interesting days:

Screenshot from 2022-09-16 22-25-17.png
3 strings connected to my MR produced almost 44kWh yesterday
As soon as the sun set, the batteries took over:
Screenshot from 2022-09-16 22-26-57.png
Lowest SoC of the batteries was 37% and before noon the batteries were back up to 95% charged.
Apart from the MR i still have a few other PV systems active.
I read the meter at midnight and log the readings.
According to those logs the "from the grid" meter had advanced 0.81kWh and the "to the grid" had advanced 67 kWh.

Tomorrow I hope to add the 4th battery, that would make it 20kWh usable storage capacity to the inverter.

The most funny thing is that I talked to a neighbor briefly that said "yesterday evening there was a power outage, just over an hour, and your house was the only one with the lights on" :cool:
We were totally unaware there was no grid power.
 
flygeek said:
@jsmetalcraft - you'll need to find a circular 4-pin adapter to plug into the slot where the Solarman (IGEN) stick-logger goes. Circular Connector: Pin 1 = Positive 5 Volts, Pin 2 = Ground, Pin 3 = RS485+, Pin 4 = RS485-. For the life of me, I can't find out what the spec of the adapter is to order one. You can then just use a Raspberry Pi or similar with the Waveshare RS485<->Ethernet adapter and pymodbus to hoover up all metrics from the Megarevo. Some folks have done some pretty neat graphing of the metrics.
Click to expand...
Did you end up getting work on solar asistant ?
 
I'm not familiar with Solar Assistant, but I have two inverters working just fine in Home Assistant using the included wifi dongle.
 
@daffyjoel - I was able to extract info from the ModBus registers and the RS485/Ethernet gateway, but the Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/) way would be much less work! In the threads there is a yaml file that defines the modbus registers and their English equivalents (p18/19) - fromport and NCSolarGarage talk about it.

Once the firmware upgrade enabled proper data collection using the WiFi dongle, I stayed with the pro.solarmanpv.com site. I'd like to do Home Assistant, it's just low on the list of priorities.

My unit's been running in Peak Shift mode (or Weak Shift according to the display) for a few months now and has been doing the right thing.
 
flygeek said:
Once the firmware upgrade enabled proper data collection using the WiFi dongle, I stayed with the pro.solarmanpv.com site.
Click to expand...
I am still missing so much information , and my oem reseller is pushing MR to update their info but no response yet.
eg:
Screenshot from 2022-10-12 09-11-45.png
No information (kWh) regarding battery in/out .
flygeek said:
My unit's been running in Peak Shift mode (or Weak Shift according to the display) for a few months now and has been doing the right thing.
Click to expand...
Can you tell us your settings please ?
I am currently in self supply mode meaning that batteries only get charged by solar, but during the winter that won't be enough.
Screenshot from 2022-10-12 09-14-48.png
Each night my batteries goes down to just below 50% which is great for now, but once I start heating electric I will not have enough storage.
I am interested in your settings/setup.
thanks in advance
 
@fromport - I've got two charts attached - my home system is 4kW of panels (my roof is only 14ft wide in the city).

First chart is from earlier in the summer when I was in self-consume mode without grid feedback (anti-reverse enabled). My issue with self-consume is what you noticed, the battery doesn't start the day fully-charged and needs the PV to get it at capacity. With not having grid feedback I was missing out on the bulk of the daily generated energy (i.e. battery was charged by noon most days and then the system was just powering the loads the rest of daylight). My battery at home right now is only 6kWh (going to switch to home-made 14kWh or just buy a 25kWh system). The battery depletes by 9-10pm most days, so if there is a power outage in the evening, I'm out of luck for the night.

SOLARMAN_Business.png

Here in Toronto, the TOU peak hours are 7am - 7pm (2x nightly rate) so I wanted to use peak-shift during that time. It took some messing around with the hours (i.e. they need to overlap - if you put a minute gap, i.e. end at 7:00 and start at 7:01 then it doesn't work).

The chart below shows peak shift working. The battery gets recharged at midnight during low power time and grid power is used to drive the loads until the start of peak time at 7am, then the battery is used until the PV system recharges it and also powers the loads. The battery is not touched until there isn't enough PV in the evening. I've actually turned off grid usage until 9pm (mostly just to not use grid when the dishwasher is on after dinner).

SOLARMAN_Business.png

I did encounter some weird behaviour when I turned off anti-reverse and let the unit power the grid. The main AC and dryer are not powered by the Megarevo and when I did my test, the dryer was going. The unit kicked into high gear and the fans sounded like jet engines and the battery started dumping at 200A and triggered an overload warning. I'm not entirely sure why the battery was being used to power the grid. I know somebody mentioned it in an earlier thread (jsmetal maybe?) and perhaps that's why you need to dial back the percentage fed to the grid.
 
flygeek said:
My battery at home right now is only 6kWh (going to switch to home-made 14kWh or just buy a 25kWh system).
Click to expand...
Thank you for all your information/feedback!
My motto always used to be "one can never have enough solar" but I have to add "or storage" these days ;-)
I am adding storage as well ;-) Turns out my current system is 15S and the one I am building is 16S :-(
So I will have to add an extra inverter to my setup.

flygeek said:
The chart below shows peak shift working. The battery gets recharged at midnight during low power time and grid power is used to drive the loads until the start of peak time at 7am, then the battery is used until the PV system recharges it and also powers the loads. The battery is not touched until there isn't enough PV in the evening. I've actually turned off grid usage until 9pm (mostly just to not use grid when the dishwasher is on after dinner).
Click to expand...
I am very confused by the wording/settings in the menu of the MR.
Could you tell or post a photo of the settings of the menu of the MR?

thanks in advance!
 
@fromport - Ha, you've made me validate what I actually programmed in and I take back my previous statement about overlapping times! If they do overlap, then things break (opposite what I said before).

I have the Work Mode set to Peak Shift with Time 1 and Time 2 set.

Time 1:
Charge Start: 00:00
Charge End: 07:00
Disc Start: 07:01
Disc End: 22:00

Time 2:
Charge Start: 11:01
Charge End: 17:00
Disc Start: 17:01
Disc End: 19:00

What I'd done is try to balance the charging with the TOU periods. Time 1 is saying charge from the grid between midnight and 7am and discharge time is 7am to 10pm (not 9pm as I said before). The Time 2 setting is saying that you can actually charge from the grid during mid-peak pricing (11am-5pm, peak being 7am-11am and 5pm-7pm) if you have to - but I've actually not seen that as yet (my loads aren't big enough).

The :01 times are necessary otherwise if you say, for example, Charge End: 07:00, Disc Start: 07:00 - then the unit just gets confused.
 
flygeek said:
I have the Work Mode set to Peak Shift with Time 1 and Time 2 set.

Time 1:
Charge Start: 00:00
Charge End: 07:00
Disc Start: 07:01
Disc End: 22:00

Time 2:
Charge Start: 11:01
Charge End: 17:00
Disc Start: 17:01
Disc End: 19:00

What I'd done is try to balance the charging with the TOU periods. Time 1 is saying charge from the grid between midnight and 7am and discharge time is 7am to 10pm (not 9pm as I said before). The Time 2 setting is saying that you can actually charge from the grid during mid-peak pricing (11am-5pm, peak being 7am-11am and 5pm-7pm) if you have to - but I've actually not seen that as yet (my loads aren't big enough).

The :01 times are necessary otherwise if you say, for example, Charge End: 07:00, Disc Start: 07:00 - then the unit just gets confused.
Click to expand...


Thank you so much for your example. I tried using it and got so confused. EG: didn't know that discharge time #1 & #2 could overlap.

With overlapping times, it would never go back to main menu etc etc.

So your example helped a lot and I just switched to peak shift.
TY TY TY!
 
flygeek said:
I did encounter some weird behaviour when I turned off anti-reverse and let the unit power the grid. The main AC and dryer are not powered by the Megarevo and when I did my test, the dryer was going. The unit kicked into high gear and the fans sounded like jet engines and the battery started dumping at 200A and triggered an overload warning. I'm not entirely sure why the battery was being used to power the grid. I know somebody mentioned it in an earlier thread (jsmetal maybe?) and perhaps that's why you need to dial back the percentage fed to the grid.
Click to expand...

*WHAT A MESS*

This morning I switched from self supply to Peak shift.
My ToU times:
peak power: 2pm-8pm
off peak power: 8PM -10PM & 8AM-2PM
super off peak: 10PM-8AM

I have 20kWh usable battery capacity. I limit battery charging to 100 amps x 51 volt (15S batteries) = 5100 Wh per hour charging.
I have set Dod to 20% so I will drain only 16kWh from the batteries max.
So I setup timer 1 like this:
Charge Start: 10:00
Charge End: 13:59
So my batteries will have 4 hours to charge them with 5.1Kw/h so with the rest of my PV setup should be able to charge completely from SOLAR.
On cloudy days I will charge from the grid at off peak power.
at 2pm my batteries were charged to 95% , nice
Disc Start: 14:00
Disc End: 20:00
That is my most expensive rate so I want to use that from my batteries.
I had to work so I left (i know, pretty dumb) and left early after changing the settings.
Well, this is what happened :
At 2PM it switched to discharging mode.
Screenshot from 2022-10-13 18-33-30.png

Since PV was going down, it supplemented what PV could not made from the batteries!
But why ?! The load was less than 1000 watt and the rest of available solar should have been exporting to the grid!

Screenshot from 2022-10-13 18-36-44.png
at 4:30 it was pulling almost 5kW AC from the batteries and feeding it into the grid
:-(

When I arrived home at 5:15 noticed it and quickly changed back to self supply mode.
Batteries are now discharged to 49% and will not be able to pull me through the night on the current charge.

So like the previous report, the inverter was powering 5KW to the grid. I assume that is related to the 100 amp CHARGING current limit I set.
My batteries & inverter could have done 8kW if needed.

This is all so weird, I have to think about this.
So far I am not overly impressed with the whole MR concept.
I am thinking about instead of getting a second one, getting one of the luxpower(or relabled GSL) 12k inverters.

What a bummer...
 
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