Charge controller blinking and inverter shutting off

[Gabrielle]

Installed my first system and it was working well for the first day. Day 2 things started acting up. The inverter was beeping loudly and shut itself down. Then I started it back up and it happened again in about 20 min. This is happening when the charge controller is saying the battery has a full charge. I unplugged my fridge and it stopped happening. My fridge is a stand-up freezer converted to a fridge with a temp bypass and should not exceed the capacity of the inverter. I ordered a watt meter to check it out.

But, as the inverter was doing its thing the charge controller began to blink both the pv light and the battery light slowly, in tandem. I see nothing in the manual about this particular blink situation. I flipped the breaker to reset it and it goes back to solid battery light and blinking pv, as is appropriate for the conditions- but then returns to the slow blink for both after a minute or two.

I set controller to 'user' and did basically the settings that Will Prowse does in a video for setting the Epever to BattleBorn lithium batteries.

This is my setup, (built with future expansion in mind):

SOK 100 amp battery
Epever 40 amp charge controller
Gowise 1000 watt inverter
100 watt panels x2

Anyone have any ideas or want to point me in a direction for investigation?

 

[rmaddy]

Do you have a voltmeter or multimeter? What voltage do you measure at the battery with no load or solar?

What size wires are going from the batteries to the bus bars? You need at least 4AWG (2AWG is better)
What size wires are going from the bus bars to the inverter? You need at least 4AWG (2AWG is better)
What size wires are going from the bus bars to the charge controller? You need at least 8AWG

Make sure the SCC is setup for LiFePO₄. Fully charge the battery before trying to turn on the inverter.

Note that a new battery is probably at about 30% SOC. So that means it needs about 900Wh put into it to be fully charged. Your 2 100W panels might get you 150W depending on how they are setup. 900Wh / 150W = 6 hours of good solar.

 

[Gabrielle]

I'll check the battery, just need to find my multimeter.

I have:
2AWG from batteries to busbars
4AWG from bus bars to inverter
8AWG from bus bars to controller
Solar panels in parallel

I have been using the inverter without ever fully charging the battery. I should have done that initially I realize now. I just turned the inverter off and the charge controller is now at solid pv light and blinking battery light. So seems the issue is with the inverter?

I can't check with a multimeter at the moment but the charge controller remote reads 14.4V for the battery

 

[Gabrielle]

I emailed Epever and they said that having the inverter connected to the controller is a problem? It is only when the inverter is on that the beeping and blinking happens with both lights at the same time on the controller.

I also emailed both the battery and controller companies to get parameters for the controller and Epever says they don't recommend LiFePO4 with this controller. SOK hasn't answered. I set them with some I found on a YouTube vid but if anyone has another opinion for controller settings I can double check these with that would be welcome. Just trying to figure out what I've done here that's not working..


I'm truly exasperated at this point.

 

[John Frum]

Did you get this figured out?

 

[Gabrielle]

Hey thanks for checking in-Not really. The charge controller isn't doing that anymore. I got parameters from sok battery and that helped..

But the inverter is shutting down still. I plug I'm only my fridge which tests at 70 watts at the highest in startup and then runs at 40-50 watss with compressor kicked on.

The inverter handles this as it gets cold but after half hour to an hour shuts down. I can't figure it out.

 

[Gabrielle]

Did you get this figured out?

Oh I just noticed that hat it's you who replied to my new post. So, here's the core of my system.

I don't mean amps it's 70 watts. I know that's nothing. My fridge is very high efficiency. I haven't gotten a kwh reading but I haven't seen it go above 70 watts. I think this is in line with what I've heard other days about freezer to fridge conversions.

 

[John Frum]

will respond in the other thread.

 

[DixieMtCR]

I had a similar problem in the beginning. 12v system, with Lead Acid Batteries and a 40amp Charge Controller. 600w of panels.

The system worked fine for a few days and then the inverter began to beep and shut down. Batteries were charged.

Problem was that one of the 300amp breakers from the batteries to the inverter was bad. I had 1 on the positive and one on the negative to insure that if the current was too high for the 3000watt inverter (250 amps @12v) , and a faulty breaker failed to pop, the other would surely pop. 250amps is a lot of current. The inverter could handle a huge spike but for a very short time. So, I went with 300amp breakers to stop a runaway system.

The breaker on the negative of the inverter was defective, but it took a while for me to figure that out. When disconnected, both read open when tripped, and both read closed when reset. An Ohmmeter does not draw enough current to show that problem. Replaced the breaker and the inverter came alive again. The inverter thought that it was getting a LOW VOLTAGE because the breaker did not fail to OPEN. It just could not pass high current any more

When the inverter was turned on, the input voltage would drop, and the inverter would fault. That made it beep and flash lights.

No more problems for about a year now.