Good idea on the test. We will try that for sure. Funny thing is, he had verbally told me the 30 watts so I did the math after talking to him on the phone and sent an email to confirm (because it seemed outrageous to me). He sent one email to me which had different numbers on it. He then sent another saying to disregard the first email and then confirmed the use of 8,640 watts. So I don't think it's a typo. What does an applications engineer do? That's who the email was from. He told me he'd been in the solar industry for 25 years.
There's one other concern that I have. When we added the 6 additional batteries, we had to have Fortress login to our system and not only update the software but rebalance the batteries which leads me to believe that I can't really rebalance on my own which makes me pretty darn uncomfortable. It's the one issue I'm going to worry about if I take a battery out of the system to run the test you suggest.
An "application engineer" is a fancy term to make an uneducated person feel important in their job. It's a "positive reinforcement" thing.. It makes them feel good about themselves in the hopes they will care about doing a good job.
Well that's damn scary. No way would I let someone into my home network like that..
I don't think you're a sucker.. Fortress seems to have a good reputation and I can't imagine that being the case with them producing batteries that suck 30 watts of power per 5kW module for doing nothing. Like I said, dissipating 30 watts of energy would cause that battery case to get warm just sitting there. It doesn't "add up".
Do you think I'd get more answers contacting Northern Arizona Wind & Sun where I bought the equipment? I will say I had one Fortress tech guy refer to my email as being "Quasi emotional" because I said the back and forth emails weren't going to resolve the issue and that I needed a set time for them to work with me as I had a team I was trying to keep on the same page who weren't always here. That particular communication set me off. smh
I was just looking at the EG4LL 2.0 and see they have two "Power Consumption" figures on their spec sheets that Fortress never discloses (at least that I can find). And they're nearly the same capacity for half the dang price! I'm feeling rather sick to my stomach at the choices I personally made in putting this system together. I had been watching a lot of Engineer 775 videos and thought these were his normal go-to. If they were before, they don't seem to be now so I'm sure there was a reason.
SOC is a horrible way to calculate anything beyond "can I make it through the night".. and even then it's a stretch. You want to use actual battery voltage and you need to be able to read it to at least 2 digits like 54.33 volts. (Preferably 3 digits at lower values) General use multimeters on Amazon or your local hardware store are fine for household use or working on a car, but when playing with lithium batteries, you want (need) a quality meter like a Fluke or one of the higher end Klein units. Basically, don't spend less than $100 and preferably about $150.
Lets go back to square one and diagnose your problem. In the shortest most basic way, describe what your problem actually is. "My batteries are not powering me through the night" or "My batteries are not charging" or "My inverter is shutting down because the batteries are dead".
Specs lie I have found out most lie I have an EG4 spec for 100 watts average idle, measured it is 137 watts.
You need to charge your batteries (if the solar is short) on the grid as running a generator is at least twice as expensive as the grid.
Yeah, its like they take clues from the automotive industry fuel economy listings.
My problem is that without powering anything (ie, no loads), the system has often consumed more power than I uptake in a day and this can continue for several days. I started asking questions on this forum and to Fortress and have received answers from Fortress that, as you've pointed out, make no sense. If my system, as it stands, consumes more power than I uptake then I have nothing left to power critical loads. So my mission has been to first understand what is consuming the power when I have no loads attached and if it truly is the equipment I've purchased that doesn't suit my needs then I am trying to determine if I need to sell and replace the equipment so that I can make it through a winter with at least my water running.
When you say "without powering anything, no loads", that leaves a lot open. How do you know there are no loads? Did you physically disconnect the breakers or just assume you didn't have anything running? Even a television that is off will draw power. A battery charger that is plugged in but not charging anything will draw power. Even a desktop computer that is plugged in but turned off will draw power. And that stuff adds up fast.
Yup.. and we'll help you figure it out.. My money is on unexpected parasitic loads in the house rather than those batteries.. but we'll get there and figure it out.
Your batteries are lithium phosphate.. a safe type of lithium. One of the minor drawbacks is that the discharge voltage curve is very flat. It is easy to use a multimeter to determine a full battery from an empty one, but everything in between from about 10% to 90% charge all seems to be within a very small voltage range. For this reason, multimeters don't do a very good job at determining state of charge on phosphate batteries so you kind of have to diagnose their capacity by looking at fully charged and then fully discharged voltages and determining how much juice you sucked from them, or used to charge them, between those two extremes.
That is normal. The bigger concern are the individual cell level voltage differences. If your battery has 16 cells in series and the voltage of the highest cell minus the lowest cell is more than a certain amount, then you have issues. Most lithium is kept to within 0.020 volts (20mV) and some folks like to see even less than that. I use lithium ion cells (not as safe but have more power), and I keep mine within 20mV, although during charging they sometimes do get as far out as 50mV.
Balancing is about cell level voltages not so much module level.
