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oh, I didn't know that! Thanks for the links!

Hi CTS, It can get below zero Farenheit here in the winter, and it has. My shed with all the equipment in it has south facing windows, so it does warm up nicely during the day if it is sunny out (and we get a lot of sun in the winter). The shed is a log shed, with an insulated roof. But no...

Hi everyone, The insides are 4" of rigid foam, and then the plywood on both sides. I also insulated the bottom of the box the same way, so it is insulated on six sides. The foam I used claims to be a R value of 6.5 per inch, here it is...

Right, it makes sense to bond the DC system to ground. So I want to know why (and which) battery manufacturer says to not do so, and under which circumstances.

I would want to understand why exactly.

I need to double check that. I believe there's a ground wire connecting the two also. Not entirely sure on top of my head actually.

Correct.

Do you have a generator? If you go this route, your generator needs to produce 230V as well. A 110V generator cannot be hooked up to the 230V Victron inverters.

When you say "AIO" what unit do you have in mind? Make sure the manual says it can be set to 60 Hz. I know the Multiplus II charger/inverter can.

Yes!, Plus you can also use the 230V output to directly feed any 230V loads. The Victron "european" 230V inverter can be set to produce 60Hz, instead of 50Hz, and off you go! Download the Victron autotransformer manual and read that one. It has good info in it. Also read this article on how/why...

You need a DC ground wire, and use the appropriate AWG (mine is 2/0), in case any component on the DC side shorts out. Because such a short from DC positive to ground will create huge amounts of current. If there's no nice thick ground wire to take that current back to the battery, it will find...

That is correct, but if you need 4KW on one leg, you still get to draw 2KW on the other leg with the autotransformer. With the two inverter setup, you do not have that flexibility. So IMHO the autotransformer setup is superior.

I have 240V and 120V loads. So I need both voltages. There's two ways to do that. 1) With two 120V inverters working together (which you can do with Victron inverters), or with a single 240V inverter and an autotransformer. Think of the 240V (well really 230V but that is not important) inverter...

Cool! Which batteries did you buy?

Yes the first four are the address, so you can have 2^4 = 16 addresses. It seemed to make some sense to me that the master battery is address 0, and not address 1. So I tried address 0. As soon as I did that, the CerboGX showed that packets were being received over the BMS-CAN bus, but it still...

All yours Chris! Sorry everyone else, only have one.

Hi, I have one brand new, never used, never opened, still in original box, Victron Smartsolar MPPT RS 450/100 for sale. Reason I am selling it is because I really needed the bigger 450/200, so now this one is not going to be used. All yours for $850 and I'll pay ground shipping (UPS).

That is instantaneous power that the panels deliver to the Victron MPPT controller (add up the 4556W + 3386W in the screenshot. I have two strings of panels). Since the MPPT controller has about a 5% loss, the output power is 7503W, which is also shown in the screenshot.

So nominal rating for my 11 Silab panels is 490W x 11 = 5390W. But today with some nice sunshine and 30F outside, I actually got 7942W, or 47% more than their rating. It is actually hard to believe! Or VRM has a bug somewhere....

Hi Tellingson, thanks for that! Do you have any more info, or a link to more, about this issue? Would love to know more.

What are your needs? What is your (constant) load, how much solar do you have, how much space, etc? That'll determine how much battery you need. All I can say, get more battery than you think you need today, you'll likely need more in the future :-) Personally, I was considering five of the...

I figured it out! The Trophy Batteries now happily talk to the CerboGX. See below screenshot. The battery has a set of six dipswitches on it, which need to be set correctly in order for it to talk to the CerboGX. The dip switch settings I received from Trophy were incorrect. Here is the correct...

That should work as well, just one more panel. However a 28A inbalance is quite a lot (3.3KW). That would be basically two 15A circuits fully loaded on one leg, and nothing on the other leg. Do you really anticipate that being a problem?

Not yet, I believe it is an issue with the Trophy BMS. Have not heard back from Dan @ Trophy yet. I think he's a bit busy after Will's latest video :-)

Hi Chris, I would run it all through the Autotransformer, and feed the output of that into a standard electrical panel for both 230V/120V loads. That also makes the Autotransformer 32A (or 100A) breaker a nice single disconnect for all loads. The Victron Autotransformer manual shows how to wire...

Not sure of the brand, this was done by my local solar installer a while ago. I'll ask them. Here's a picture. Hope that helps a bit.

Hah, I did something very similar :-) Nice! I attached a heating pad to each battery, and tied that to a thermostat, so that I can control the temperature inside my insulated battery box, and keep it at 55F. The control logic for that is in the far-right of my first picture. I know the batteries...

Hi Philip53, I picked the Trophy for several reasons. First of all, I liked the high quality of the build and quality cells they use. I've seen Will's video on the earlier Trophy battery teardown. Second, I was looking for a high capacity (>200 Ah) battery, as I didn't want to string, for...

Good question. So far I have not seen them diverge more than 2-3%, which I consider just fine. I'll keep monitoring though, will report back!

South West Colorado.

Hah, the batteries are the most expensive part still, unfortunately. With shipping and tax it is basically $5K per battery. But we live there, and we need to have power, so the investment is worth it to me.

Hi Nobodybusiness! Thanks for the kind words. Below is the image I got from Dan @ Tropphy on how to wire five batteries. I thought it was pretty inventive. So far the SOC of the outer most batteries and the middle battery is no more than 2% or so apart.

Hi All, Here’s my setup for our off grid cabin that we recently completed. Goal was to have enough battery and solar to basically (almost) never have to run the generator. The cabin consumes more electricity in the winter than the summer, due to having to run the furnace, and of course there’s...