Budget MPPT recommendation - Epever BN 40A 150V - was Eco-Worthy 60A 150V MPPT

[AlpineJoe]

Finally have things wired up - except it too me a long time to get it done and the panels were in the shade by the time I flipped the panel breaker on.

This 4215BN has several lithium choices built in, so it may be a dead product but they're still updating it. I do have questions as to the appropriateness of the settings, but I'll start a new thread on that.

 

[Crowz]

You should be happy with the 4215bn. Mine are 7 or 8 years old now and have never even had a hicup of a problem. Great charge controllers. The pair of them I have run my 12 volt system now at the new house covering my security cameras, networking gear and pi computers.

I used them on a 24 volt battery bank on my older house.

 

[AlpineJoe]

You should be happy with the 4215bn. Mine are 7 or 8 years old now and have never even had a hicup of a problem. Great charge controllers. The pair of them I have run my 12 volt system now at the new house covering my security cameras, networking gear and pi computers.

I used them on a 24 volt battery bank on my older house.

I'm excited to finally have this all wired up! I have a Samlex 600W PSW inverter on the batteries and peeled off a lot of my networking equipment, plus some weather cams, and a PC running blue iris. Total is about 100W, though the Samlex itself is using up 20W on top of it.

I do have more solar power than the 40A the 4215BN can handle, so I likely will pick up another if this one works over the next month. Also interested to see how it affects my ham radio reception.

 

[Crowz]

I'm pulling about 7 amps continuous with it peaking higher at times off the 12v bank so the 4215bn's have to replace 80ah to 100ah a day and usually have the bank charged back full by lunchtime. The 400 watts of panels in the front of my house are doing all of the main charging on controller #1 and the single 200 watt panel on controller #2 adds in a bit but is shaded a good bit of the day right now.

Since this stuff is a side part of the main solar setup I haven't connected all of the left over panels to them yet so its not at "full power" so to speak yet.

Trying to talk myself into buying another $200 of pv cable to get controller #2's pv inputs reaching where they need to be to use the other panels.

Right now I'm in the gap between summer and winter so no heat or ac is required to run off the 12v system right now. When winter gets here the inverter will ramp up from 40 watts or so its pulling right now to 500 watts running the heater in the workshop some so I will need more pv input then to make up for the drain it will cause on the batteries.

 

[AlpineJoe]

I'm pulling about 7 amps continuous with it peaking higher at times off the 12v bank so the 4215bn's have to replace 80ah to 100ah a day and usually have the bank charged back full by lunchtime. The 400 watts of panels in the front of my house are doing all of the main charging on controller #1 and the single 200 watt panel on controller #2 adds in a bit but is shaded a good bit of the day right now.

Since this stuff is a side part of the main solar setup I haven't connected all of the left over panels to them yet so its not at "full power" so to speak yet.

Trying to talk myself into buying another $200 of pv cable to get controller #2's pv inputs reaching where they need to be to use the other panels.

Right now I'm in the gap between summer and winter so no heat or ac is required to run off the 12v system right now. When winter gets here the inverter will ramp up from 40 watts or so its pulling right now to 500 watts running the heater in the workshop some so I will need more pv input then to make up for the drain it will cause on the batteries.

Right now my Victron SmartShunt is showing 4.5A at 24V being pulled. I have 1.5KW of panels hooked up, so I should be maxing out the 40A. there's another ~ 675W of panels up there that I still have to wire up but will need another controller for it.

The drag is that the panels are flat mounted, and there's shade from a lot of things throughout the day. I really need to get them on the composite roof, but I'm trying to not draw attention to them, then there's all the roof penetrations. Hopefully I can make enough power where they're at.

 

[SamDeleted]

The drag is that the panels are flat mounted, and there's shade from a lot of things throughout the day. I really need to get them on the composite roof, but I'm trying to not draw attention to them, then there's all the roof penetrations. Hopefully I can make enough power where they're at.

Rule of thumb is 70% for flat mounted


If you had 1,000w of PV , you now only have 700w ...

Still better than nothing , ?

 

[AlpineJoe]

Rule of thumb is 70% for flat mounted


If you had 1,000w of PV , you now only have 700w ...

Still better than nothing , ?

Appreciate it. Didn’t know that was the figure.

 

[Tomthumb62]

Appreciate it. Didn’t know that was the figure.

70% is an average. It can be better or worse than that depending upon the time of year. Better in summer, worse in winter.

 

[AlpineJoe]

I pulled 61AH from the batteries overnight. This morning it took a while before the panels starting putting out decent power due to shadowing. It took a long time but eventually got up to 33.3A of charging at 27.4V, or 912W coming out of 1.5KW of panels, but mounted flat and here in So Cal, the sun is really off to the side most all the day this time of year.

Battery was full by 12:20 pm, and by 2pm the shadows were back. But it was a success. My smartshunt said I generated 1.9KWh of power today, before the 4215BM throttled back as I was hitting my boost voltage. Now I feel inspired to put more load on it, but also just bought a second 4215BN for the remaining 3 panels on the roof.

Images from today's production. Dropout was programming a custom 'user' setting per a table I found in the 'settings information required' thread.

 

[CapnGimp]

I read up on the EPevers dropping out of MPPT and from what I could gather, it wasn't the BN series. I hope that's true.

I do know that I have more panels than my single 4215BN can handle, so I will be looking for another SCC. Right now I will be feeding the BN with 3S2P REC Solar 250W panels, but have another 3 panels of ~ 225W size that will also be put into use. With the flat mount, and annoying shadows, I hope to at least get some decent production to offload 100 - 200W of 24/7 power use onto solar.

What I really need now is solar logging software to see how I'm doing with the current setup.

I have the Tracer 4210AN(two) and it does send high voltage spikes to my inverter when reaching cut off voltage that I have it set at. Most days it trips the inverter multiple times and cuts out until a few minutes later, other days it tapers down the output to run whatever load I have on it at the time.
I run a laptop with the epever software on it full time unless a cloudy day comes along, which is rare out here in the West TX desert. I have taken a zillion photos over the last year+, changed the settings innumerable times, etc. I WANT to get around 80% charge and carry the usage I demand overnight. I have a 24v system, 2000w inverter and normally right at the 1040 watt limit input with 4 panels. I recently introduced 2 more panels to the mix for over volting the system in winter to maintain max input to the charge controller. I will probably have to put them back on my old flooded batt system come late spring. Check the epever website and download the software there. My charge controllers are over three years old and I updated the firmware on one to use with the LiFePO4 batts I bought last September. It has two types of Li batt settings, use the LiFePO4 and set up/monitor them with it. I have a few posts here with my old settings, as I said I have changed them a bunch. I have them where I think I will keep them now, just changed last week. Need help, ask. I MAY make a post with all the changes I have tried, may not, JUST TODAY saw that the cause is delayed MPPT changes. If I HAD the money, I would go victron or another great name CC. These are doing the trick with minimal anxiety though haha. I am OFFGRID for over 5 years, BTW, so I rely 100% on my systems. I occasionally troubleshoot and repair my neighbors systems, quite a few live within a few miles of me.

 

[AlpineJoe]

It happened - stuck at low output. I saw it yesterday early when I was getting ready to hook up a second 4215BN. After disconnecting and reconnecting the panels, the delivered current shot up. Thought it would have corrected on its own as it was still very early.

Today I didn’t intervene until well after noon. Both 4215BNs were just delivering at most 250W. After turning the panels off then on, power went up to 800W.

I should have listened to you guys. It’s not even a cloudy day today - just very high altitude haziness.

Any workaround for this other than buying something else?

 

[Crowz]

Scratch what I was going to say since the lower part wasn't coming out of night time like I thought.

 

[Kiwi2000]

View attachment 176121It happened - stuck at low output. I saw it yesterday early when I was getting ready to hook up a second 4215BN. After disconnecting and reconnecting the panels, the delivered current shot up. Thought it would have corrected on its own as it was still very early.

Today I didn’t intervene until well after noon. Both 4215BNs were just delivering at most 250W. After turning the panels off then on, power went up to 800W.

I should have listened to you guys. It’s not even a cloudy day today - just very high altitude haziness.

Any workaround for this other than buying something else?

I find putting a decent load on the inverter and battery bank gets my Epevers SCC's to get going in the morning. Usually my 750W hotplate that I cook my breakfast with brings the Epevers out of their slumber.

My Victron system at the other end of the house doesn't have any such problems. It always starts working as hard as it can from first thing in the morning.

 

[Crowz]

That also might be why mine get it in gear so well since I have an 6 amp minimum draw on them all the time.

 

[AlpineJoe]

I find putting a decent load on the inverter and battery bank gets my Epevers SCC's to get going in the morning. Usually my 750W hotplate that I cook my breakfast with brings the Epevers out of their slumber.

My Victron system at the other end of the house doesn't have any such problems. It always starts working as hard as it can from first thing in the morning.

I don’t get it. Is there a lower battery voltage threshold that has to happen? If so, why would just turning off the panels and turning them back on fix it? I have about a 4 amp continuous load on the charger

 

[Kiwi2000]

I don’t get it. Is there a lower battery voltage threshold that has to happen? If so, why would just turning off the panels and turning them back on fix it? I have about a 4 amp continuous load on the charger

I'm not sure why they do it. It can even happen when the battery bank is at a 50% SOC and the voltage is well below the boost reconnect setting.

I have them set on 13.9v boost, 13.8v float, and 13.7v boost reconnect. But even at 13.1v and 50% SOC the Epevers sometimes can't be bothered to get going in the morning.

But soon after running a decent load for a few minutes, away they go.

I now have that system also running my hot water cylinder with a 2000 watt element. It's cycling often enough to keep the Epevers working I find.

 

[Murphyslaww]

It's always strange to hear about these issues with the Epever. I've never had any of these with my AN 80amp and 30amp. That said, their monitoring functions via wifi and cloud have gone downhill, and it's forced me to give up on them and move to Victron, probably not for a solid reason other than I'm a data geek. Other than that they have been solid performers that I have pretty much been able to forget about. I start to wonder if my Epevers don't have a more recent firmware that may be causing issues. Mine don't have LiFePo4 settings, I just use User and set them myself.

I did head to head testing between the 80 amp and a Victron 100/50 and the Epever produced slighty more output on 80% sunny days, when compared to our enphase house system as a control. (Test system - 1200 watts of 300watt panels paralleled via combiner box to about 25-35v, 30ish amps max, 24v system, 5kw powerqueen batts, 4kw roarbatt inverter, running, mainly, a mini-split 9k btu.)

I was going to do a follow up test on cloudier days, but the wifi dongles, simply just stopped working one day. I have a smartshunt, so I guess I could still do it, but unfortunately, victron's own software isn't very well designed for this sort of testing.

 

[Kiwi2000]

I don’t get it. Is there a lower battery voltage threshold that has to happen? If so, why would just turning off the panels and turning them back on fix it? I have about a 4 amp continuous load on the charger

Here's a typical example that I snapped a photo of today.

It was late in the afternoon with some cloud around and the system was trying to maintain float with some load on it. Battery voltage had already dropped to 13.36V which is below the float setpoint of 13.5V.

A 520w string going to a Victron SCC was producing more wattage than two 780w and 1500w strings going to Epever SCC combined!

 

[AlpineJoe]

Here's a typical example that I snapped a photo of today.

It was late in the afternoon with some cloud around and the system was trying to maintain float with some load on it. Battery voltage had already dropped to 13.36V which is below the float setpoint of 13.5V.

A 520w string going to a Victron SCC was producing more wattage than two 780w and 1500w strings going to Epever SCC combined!

View attachment 177900

Are all the panels the same make and model, and are they all on the same surface with no shadowing at this time of day?

Wait a minute - I think I just figured out what you are telling us. The Victron is clearly doing MPPT as the PV voltage is 78.88V, and the two EPevers are stuck in non-MPPT mode as the PV voltage has been loaded down to the same as the battery voltage.

If your panels are all the same and series strung to the Epevers, then they too should be up in the 78V PV range and the wattage should be 5x.

Is this what you are showing? To me, yours are 'stuck'. Next time you see this, disconnect and reconnect the panels to your Epevers.


FWIW, my two Epever 4215BN continue to correctly do MPPT charging every day. Even today with clouds and rain, whenever I would check on them, the PV voltage was higher than the battery, and not just by 2 V.

 

[Kiwi2000]

This morning it's quite dark and grey with heavy rain. The 780w string going to the Epever was on 19v and only producing 19 watts while the other two strings were working more as expected. So I popped the PV fuse breaker to cycle it and yes indeed it came back on at 110v and started producing better power.