Honestly, I have not worked on the PLC code for about 2 weeks now. My work has actually had me do a few things. So the code is still in limbo. I am manually changing the settings twice a day to keep it time shifting my power.
Having the main house loads on the backup panel has altered the operation a bit. Even outside of the "Grid Support" window, it keeps going in to invert mode to help power the loads, right after it completes the charge cycle. And it still inverts to power loads after my time window as well. I am setting the "Recharge volts" so it has to cut off close to 9 pm, and that is sort of working. I will add that function in the PLC once I actually get it working. Of course, I did not realize it was running on invert even past midnight, and I have now run the battery bank lower than I ever intended. It pulled it down to 20% SoC without a problem, other than it took me 2 days of charging from the sun to get it back up. I could certainly have hit the charge harder, but did not want to use any grid power. Through all of that, the battery temp has still never gone more than 1 or 2 degrees above the surrounding air temp. Touching it, it feels the same temp as the concrete floor. During the power failure, I did see current spikes up to 80 amps when we ran the microwave oven, and that was with the fridge and furnace running and some lights on and a PC etc. So far the battery bank has been rock solid. The Schneider XW-Pro inverter is rock solid and working great. I just wish they could get the software to make it time shift power with AC coupling and grid tie operation. It works great off grid, or with DC charging, but on grid with only AC coupled solar, it has an issue. The inverter won't pull the battery bank down to where it will start another charge cycle.
Knowing what I know now, I am on the fence. The Sol-Ark does look great on paper, but after looking at the manual, it also does not seem to work well with only AC coupled solar. It really is meant to work with DC solar connected through it. The Outback Skybox looks to be the best package at this time, but it is just 5,000 watts and a bit expensive for what you get, but it works and has good support. The Schneider is a well built solid product, but the support is not great and the software has a few holes they need to fix. I truly believe a simple patch in the Gateway could cure the problems, but they are reluctant to even try. They want to sell an MPPT charge controller. I am opening a new service ticket about the issue with it inverting even when I have grid support disabled. Let's see where this one goes. I hope to dig back into the PLC soon. I know that will make it work, but my coding skill is so rusty. I know I can make it work, but I am really trying to make the code modular and efficient. If I just hard code it, it will be tied up doing nothing but my functions to my ip address etc. It will make it a pain for another user to put on their system.