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EG4 Lifepower4 48V Top Balancing Firmware.

I thought full charge was somewhere around 54v? Is that not accurate? Pretty sure I've only ever seen my 6500ex inverter measure 54.1v at 4 lights on my batteries...
 
Shinzul said:
I thought full charge was somewhere around 54v? Is that not accurate? Pretty sure I've only ever seen my 6500ex inverter measure 54.1v at 4 lights on my batteries...
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Anything over 54v is full enough for me.

But if you are relying on the BMS reported SOC...you will want to hit 56.5v a few times a month.

You should occasionally check for cell imbalance if you only charge to 54v
 
Zapper77 said:
Anything over 54v is full enough for me.

But if you are relying on the BMS reported SOC...you will want to hit 56.5v a few times a month.

You should occasionally check for cell imbalance if you only charge to 54v
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Ah ha!

That's good to know then.

If you're using the EG4 setting on the 6500ex do you have any control of what voltage it charges up to?
 
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.
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The 2A thing was confirmed by someone from SS in this thread. I also tried it with my bench PSU and was able to consistently go from not charging to 2A by increasing and decreasing the amperage in the lab bench a few milliamps. I'm optimistic it may just be a firmware bug and next update will bring it down to 500mA current readings, but there's absolutely no evidence that this will actually happen.
 
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adobopr said:
The 2A thing was confirmed by someone from SS in this thread. I also tried it with my bench PSU and was able to consistently go from not charging to 2A by increasing and decreasing the amperage in the lab bench a few milliamps. I'm optimistic it may just be a firmware bug and next update will bring it down to 500mA current readings, but there's absolutely no evidence that this will actually happen.
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Well I’m glad someone else confirmed this. In a long minimal load situation my testing showed the reported SOC could be up to 39% off.

I now have a Victron shunt in between the bus bar and the Sol-Ark. Rather than calculate SOC based on what I put back in the batteries I will be able to see the exact load. Funny that one of the settings right in the Victron Shunt is what level of amp draw do you want it to start measuring. The default value is .10 amps. You’d think this would be just as easily configurable on a $1400 battery with all sorts of gadgetry for monitoring and reporting over closed loop communication.
 
MaikaiLifeDIY said:
Well I’m glad someone else confirmed this. In a long minimal load situation my testing showed the reported SOC could be up to 39% off.

I now have a Victron shunt in between the bus bar and the Sol-Ark. Rather than calculate SOC based on what I put back in the batteries I will be able to see the exact load. Funny that one of the settings right in the Victron Shunt is what level of amp draw do you want it to start measuring. The default value is .10 amps. You’d think this would be just as easily configurable on a $1400 battery with all sorts of gadgetry for monitoring and reporting over closed loop communication.
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Well that shunt by itself is like 9% of the cost of the whole battery, which has cells, casing and a BMS. I'm sure that if Victron sold you a Server Rack Battery it would be much more expensive than 1 EG4 + 1 Shunt. :p
 
MaikaiLifeDIY said:
EG4 Comm hub says the batteries are at 97% and the Shunt says 90.1%. I can tell each day the delta is drifting wider.
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I suspected that exactly what was happening, but I hadn't done any testing to confirm.

Fortunately my batteries are recharged to 100% 3 or 4 times a week.
 
Well the guy from Signature Solar who was active on this thread never followed up, I have no idea if this issue is actually been communicated to the appropriate people for consideration. Any ideas on how to get an official bug/glitch/defect reported and logged with EG4?
 
MaikaiLifeDIY said:
Well the guy from Signature Solar who was active on this thread never followed up, I have no idea if this issue is actually been communicated to the appropriate people for consideration. Any ideas on how to get an official bug/glitch/defect reported and logged with EG4?
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He said he had relayed the info to engineering. I would assume that is "the appropriate people for consideration"
 
n2aws said:
He said he had relayed the info to engineering. I would assume that is "the appropriate people for consideration"
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I read that and I agree, but this is a $17K investment on batteries, not really chump change. I really need a little more than a forum nodd, especially considering I couldn't get a confirmation he has an actual issue logged in a system somewhere. Have ya'll ever logged an actual defect with EG4, do you have to go through Signature Solar, or is there someone you can work with at EG4?
 
FYI, I got in touch with Sol-Ark, Long story short, when the whole system is in production as long as PV is attached the SOC will reset to 100% when the batteries are charged bringing everything back into sync. Bottom line, in my isolated test instance, sure this is still an issue, but in a real-world environment this seems to be very unlikely to present itself as a problem.

I appreciate everyone's feedback and assistance and it appears we all learned and confirmed the amp draw of 2.3 minimum on the EG4 48 LifePo4 batteries.

Cheers and thank you to everyone who kept responding!
 
MaikaiLifeDIY said:
I read that and I agree, but this is a $17K investment on batteries, not really chump change. I really need a little more than a forum nodd, especially considering I couldn't get a confirmation he has an actual issue logged in a system somewhere. Have ya'll ever logged an actual defect with EG4, do you have to go through Signature Solar, or is there someone you can work with at EG4?
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I've never tried to open a ticket with EG4, it's always worth a try.

Ideally, I'm with you and would like to see maybe down to .5a granularity in reported charge/discharge, but without knowing how the BMS is setup (hardware-wise) I'm not convinced this is an issue that is just a "firmware update" to fix.

Hopefully, that'll be the case.. but I suspect if it wasn't a hardware limitation, they'd have very little reason to program in an ambiguous "don't report data below this current" limitation into the firmware. Barring an outright bug, this is likely a hardware limitation.
 
Markus_SignatureSolar said:
Im sorry that i havent responded for a bit. The problem is being worked we should have a fix for this in about 2 weeks or so. Its been a very busy couple of weeks. Thank you guys for the troubleshooting and input you have been providing for this.
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Hi @Markus_SignatureSolar , we've all speculated it might be a hardware problem, are you suggesting this could be fixed with some software adjustments?
 
Im done with asking question about my batteries. SS doesn't seem to care. Cant get answers about my problems. Time to try batteries from somewhere else. Spent over 24k whit SS already. I feel I've done enough.

Edit: Markus @ SS took care of my problems.
 
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