For a grid tied EG4/Luxpower 18KPV, what happens if it has no battery attached?
There was some comment that the unit would not work properly in these circumstances, that is required a battery to be stable or operational. If so, this seems like a weakness since loss of the battery (for service, fault, or otherwise) would disable the unit and that seems operationally fragile.
If there is no battery and tied to the grid with no PV input, I'd hope the grid powers everything. If there is PV input and grid, the system would convert the PV input to AC which feeds local loads and the remainder back feeds the grid, or the shortfall is drawn from the grid.
What if there is no grid and PV input? Will the system try and make AC? What happens if that overloads (which could easily happen due to cloud)?
Also, if there is no grid, no PV, and no battery, the system is off. Then the sun rises. How do you dark start under these conditions? There is no way to generate the signal to the RSD devices on the panels to "open them up", so it feels like the system will stay dead until either there is grid or battery provided. Do you need some sort of kick start power to get things going?
I am exploring all the corner cases of operation before committing to the system and the manuals are totally useless for documenting these behaviors. The only way to know is to ask other owners to see how it actually operates. That's the engineering mindset, amateurs make things work, professionals make things not fail, and to do that, you have to look at all of the conditions.
I'm also open to knowing how other inverters in this class operate.
Mike C.
There was some comment that the unit would not work properly in these circumstances, that is required a battery to be stable or operational. If so, this seems like a weakness since loss of the battery (for service, fault, or otherwise) would disable the unit and that seems operationally fragile.
If there is no battery and tied to the grid with no PV input, I'd hope the grid powers everything. If there is PV input and grid, the system would convert the PV input to AC which feeds local loads and the remainder back feeds the grid, or the shortfall is drawn from the grid.
What if there is no grid and PV input? Will the system try and make AC? What happens if that overloads (which could easily happen due to cloud)?
Also, if there is no grid, no PV, and no battery, the system is off. Then the sun rises. How do you dark start under these conditions? There is no way to generate the signal to the RSD devices on the panels to "open them up", so it feels like the system will stay dead until either there is grid or battery provided. Do you need some sort of kick start power to get things going?
I am exploring all the corner cases of operation before committing to the system and the manuals are totally useless for documenting these behaviors. The only way to know is to ask other owners to see how it actually operates. That's the engineering mindset, amateurs make things work, professionals make things not fail, and to do that, you have to look at all of the conditions.
I'm also open to knowing how other inverters in this class operate.
Mike C.