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EG4 Lifepower4 48V Top Balancing Firmware.

Zapper77 said:
Do a full discharge and discharge..the SOC will reset to full at 56.5v
Click to expand...
I just tried this today and my cell alarm triggered. I think I either have a super out of balance battery or a bad cell, and I'm leaning towards a bad cell. The cell undervoltage alarm triggered at total voltage of like 49.7. A few seconds later I got the SOC undervoltage alarm, but not sure if the delay has to do with a comms protocol delay. The screenshot I took like 10 secs after, and I think total voltage went back up quickly because the cell started balancing and brought the voltage up a bit.

I also thought these had passive balancers but this does look like it's moving current between cells and not just discharging them. Am I reading this wrong?

This firmware did fix a bunch of stuff on my other batts, but I tihnk it may have also uncovered a bad battery. I can say I'm definitely liking this firmware update.
 

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adobopr said:
I just tried this today and my cell alarm triggered. I think I either have a super out of balance battery or a bad cell, and I'm leaning towards a bad cell. The cell undervoltage alarm triggered at total voltage of like 49.7. A few seconds later I got the SOC undervoltage alarm, but not sure if the delay has to do with a comms protocol delay. The screenshot I took like 10 secs after, and I think total voltage went back up quickly because the cell started balancing and brought the voltage up a bit.

I also thought these had passive balancers but this does look like it's moving current between cells and not just discharging them. Am I reading this wrong?

This firmware did fix a bunch of stuff on my other batts, but I tihnk it may have also uncovered a bad battery. I can say I'm definitely liking this firmware update.
Click to expand...
I think...that qualifies as a full discharge.

You can only top balance or bottom balance...not both

Now you just need to fully charge and I suspect you may need several hours if now days of top balancing...seeing how that one cell seems oddly low.
 
Zapper77 said:
I think...that qualifies as a full discharge.

You can only top balance or bottom balance...not both

Now you just need to fully charge and I suspect you may need several hours if now days of top balancing...seeing how that one cell seems oddly low.
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Ok, I'm gonna charge it with my bench power supply and just leave it isolated from the pack for a few days. while the bench PSU handles top balancing.

Will report back progress and thanks for all the help.
 
adobopr said:
Ok, I'm gonna charge it with my bench power supply and just leave it isolated from the pack for a few days. while the bench PSU handles top balancing.

Will report back progress and thanks for all the help.
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Check on it every 4-6 hours. After reaching Cell OV.

56.5 or 57v is a good target goal to start with. But don't get discouraged if a Cell goes to OV when under 55v.
 
Zapper77 said:
Check on it every 4-6 hours. After reaching Cell OV.

56.5 or 57v is a good target goal to start with. But don't get discouraged if a Cell goes to OV when under 55v.
Click to expand...
That's a good idea. I isolated the battery but left it on comms while charging so I can monitor through SolarAssistant. Everything looking good up until now. Hope this battery gets itself back together after all this.
 
Some updates in case anyone also runs into a huge balance difference like me.

I ran my lab bench at 56.2V for like 18 hours, but at some point I actually took the battery and paralleled it with the rest of the pack so it would charge a bit faster, then continued with 56.2V. I think it hit real 100% around 6 hours ago and it's been doing some type of cell balancing but it's been oscillating per my grafana graphs. This graph tracks the max cell voltage difference in a pack.
1692994228012.png

I did just raise the voltage of the lab bench to 57V which is that little which is when it went up to a 234mV difference, it was ~150 @ 56.2. I'm hoping the higher voltage triggers some better top balancing which is why I increased it.

Here's what SA is currently reporting.

1692994454933.png
This battery only reports about 11 cycles for some reasons while all the other ones are at around 230. I always thought the BMSs in general were wonky, but after the update they're all behaving pretty well, so I wonder if this 11 cycles is legit and has to do with either a bad cell or an imbalance that never got fixed. If this is a passive balancer only and cannot bring that last cell up, this will take a really long time to get that average down to the lost, so it could take a while until I know if the cell is bad or just very out of balance.

Will update tomorrow with more progress details.
 
adobopr said:
Some updates in case anyone also runs into a huge balance difference like me.

I ran my lab bench at 56.2V for like 18 hours, but at some point I actually took the battery and paralleled it with the rest of the pack so it would charge a bit faster, then continued with 56.2V. I think it hit real 100% around 6 hours ago and it's been doing some type of cell balancing but it's been oscillating per my grafana graphs. This graph tracks the max cell voltage difference in a pack.
View attachment 164504

I did just raise the voltage of the lab bench to 57V which is that little which is when it went up to a 234mV difference, it was ~150 @ 56.2. I'm hoping the higher voltage triggers some better top balancing which is why I increased it.

Here's what SA is currently reporting.

View attachment 164506
This battery only reports about 11 cycles for some reasons while all the other ones are at around 230. I always thought the BMSs in general were wonky, but after the update they're all behaving pretty well, so I wonder if this 11 cycles is legit and has to do with either a bad cell or an imbalance that never got fixed. If this is a passive balancer only and cannot bring that last cell up, this will take a really long time to get that average down to the lost, so it could take a while until I know if the cell is bad or just very out of balance.

Will update tomorrow with more progress details.
Click to expand...
Took around 72 hours before I was comfortable with the voltage difference. 4 of my batteries were good after 24 hours. 5th after 48 and (the 6th) I stopped after 72 hours...6th was close enough for me.
 
Zapper77 said:
Took around 72 hours before I was comfortable with the voltage difference. 4 of my batteries were good after 24 hours. 5th after 48 and (the 6th) I stopped after 72 hours...6th was close enough for me.
Click to expand...
Did you cycle them as normal and just let them top balance during sunlight topup or did you leave them topped/charging like I am?
 
adobopr said:
Did you cycle them as normal and just let them top balance during sunlight topup or did you leave them topped/charging like I am?
Click to expand...
Left them charging. I cycled the breaker a few times and a few small discharges of around 5%. Mostly I just left them on charge.
 
Update: The really imbalanced battery is is still very imbalanced, the process will take a really long time to get as good as the rest of the batteries I think. I'm considering pulling it out, popping the cover and using my bench PSU to get the low cell/s up closer and reduce the imbalance, but I'm concerned on warranty implications if it ends up being a bad battery.

EDIT: Decided to just integrate it into the pack to see how it was doing and it looks like its not my most of out balance pack anymore. I'd say the new firmware is working. Will run them as normal for now and hope the sun filling them up to 100% daily does enough work to get them all stable.
 
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MaikaiLifeDIY said:
@Markus_SignatureSolar has stated in this thread #223 that the expected current reporting threshold is anything above 500ma. Perhaps you're correct and the engineers gave him the 12v amount rather than the 48v. If you step up the voltage behavior does seem to align with a possibility of 2 amps being the result of that 500ma increase from a 12v to 48v battery.

Currently, I have batteries reporting a 92% SOC, which fuzzy math means that a 100a battery has about 92a remaining, so theoretically I should only be able to put about 8-10 amps into the battery. I only have an active current meter so I'll have to find a way to count/verify the input amps, if the battery took say 20 amps, then I would know the SOC is significantly out of alignment with the battery's actual SOC.

The reason this is so important to me is because everything I want to do with my Sol-Ark, and many other automations through Solar/Home Assistant rely on this SOC being accurate to take action at certain levels. If it's off by 5% not a big problem, but if it's off by as much as 20%, that's the difference between having a battery that is either giving me a low SOC warning or simply shutting down because it's empty.

In an off-grid situation, I simply cannot rely on a SOC value that is significantly inaccurate.
Click to expand...

Over the weekend I conducted a test to confirm how this is behaving on my 12 EG4 LifePo4 Batteries (60 kWh or 61.44 kWh) with a 15K Sol-Ark and the EG4 Comm Hub in a closed loop with the Sol-Akr.

On Sunday the 27th at 09:25 state of charge was reported by the EG4 Comm Hub at 93%, the same value present in the Sol-Ark and Solar Assistant.

I enabled the generator to charge the batteries, at 12:05 the SOC reached 100%. At 21:01 the batteries stopped taking charge and the Sol-Ark reported it pushed 23 kWh into the batteries.

Doing the math, if the batteries had used 23 kWh from the available 61.44 kWh the SOC should have been approximately 62.5% SOC, but the SOC reading was at 93%, a 39% difference between the reported SOC and the estimated SOC.

My continual draw is small, right now it's just running a refrigerator, which takes about 1.8 kWh per day to run, but because it's constant load is so small the BMS doesn't appear to be calculating the actual load since each of the 12 batteries is typically less than the 2.3 amps required for the BMS to register a change in the SOC and or actually current flowing out of the battery.

My next step is to install a Victron shunt between the batteries and the inverter to see the full discharge calculation.
 
MaikaiLifeDIY said:
Over the weekend I conducted a test to confirm how this is behaving on my 12 EG4 LifePo4 Batteries (60 kWh or 61.44 kWh) with a 15K Sol-Ark and the EG4 Comm Hub in a closed loop with the Sol-Akr.

On Sunday the 27th at 09:25 state of charge was reported by the EG4 Comm Hub at 93%, the same value present in the Sol-Ark and Solar Assistant.

I enabled the generator to charge the batteries, at 12:05 the SOC reached 100%. At 21:01 the batteries stopped taking charge and the Sol-Ark reported it pushed 23 kWh into the batteries.

Doing the math, if the batteries had used 23 kWh from the available 61.44 kWh the SOC should have been approximately 62.5% SOC, but the SOC reading was at 93%, a 39% difference between the reported SOC and the estimated SOC.

My continual draw is small, right now it's just running a refrigerator, which takes about 1.8 kWh per day to run, but because it's constant load is so small the BMS doesn't appear to be calculating the actual load since each of the 12 batteries is typically less than the 2.3 amps required for the BMS to register a change in the SOC and or actually current flowing out of the battery.

My next step is to install a Victron shunt between the batteries and the inverter to see the full discharge calculation.
Click to expand...
When was the last time that you fully charged your batteries to 100%SOC / 56.5v or higher?
 
Zapper77 said:
Ok
Click to expand...
I guess once I have the inverter running the whole house, I'll typically have more than 2.3 amps per battery so maybe it won't be a problem, but when I'm away and there is only minimal usage, I'm gonna have to find another way to check the batteries and their true state of charge (going down the Victron shunt path now). The other interesting thing about this is the lights on the front of the battery even showed all 4 lights on instead of what should have been 2. I'm not certain, but it seems like the SOC lights on the front might also be receiving their data from the BMS just like the EG4 Comm Hub.

1693340708721.png
 
MaikaiLifeDIY said:
Just for comparison, mine is set at 56.3 which is what I was told by Signature Solar, actually 56.2 :)

View attachment 165079View attachment 165078
Click to expand...
That number provided to you assumes tgat you don't use battery communication.

With communication the battery bms or in this case the hub reduces the amperage as the voltage and SOC climbs.

Edit to add...bump it up to 56.6 and the BMS will reset SOC with every full charge.
 
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This is what the BMS in the LP4 is set to.
Firmware 3.26 is on the left. 3.1 is on the right.

BMS charge setting change 3.17 to 3.26 (1).jpg
 
Zapper77 said:
That number provided to you assumes tgat you don't use battery communication.

With communication the battery bms or in this case the hub reduces the amperage as the voltage and SOC climbs.

Edit to add...bump it up to 56.6 and the BMS will reset SOC with every full charge.
Click to expand...
Done, I adjusted it up to 56.6
 
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