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diy solar

Connected two 48V chargers in parallel, internal spark

If they have input protection, I think the main risk is that some of the chargers don’t deliver power.

Matching chargers within a brand/family helps with avoiding having a hodgepodge of heterogeneous crap to have to understand
The last sentence, at the end of the day, for most of us non-engineer type electricians, need.

Between you and GXMnow, this has been a great thread for me! thank you both.

These typically have an isolation diode at the output
I also now see how having some means of blocking reverse flow would be a necessity for anything designed to just send power out, whether a power supply or a charger. I assume if it is listed to be paralleled I can assume it has inherent protection.
 
"however, they may not work so fine with..."?
The one place I see a possible problem is some "Smart" chargers can be a little too smart. If the battery voltage goes higher than they are set for, will it throw an error? If it is just an error showing the voltage too high, is it a problem? Some older DC power supplies have an output protection circuit called a "Crow Bar" that will actually short the output if the voltage goes above a safe set limit. This was common on some old logic system power supplies. They would have 2 or more redundant supplies, isolated by diodes. Say for example 5 volts for a ton of TLL logic chips. If the voltage ever hit even 5.2 volts out of a supply, that supply would get shorted out, and blow it's output fuse, the other supply that is still at it's correct voltage would stay running. Early pass transistor power supplies could fail to a short and cause their output to jump up and this protection was better than frying a ton of logic boards. I have not seen any modern switching supplies with a crow bar recently, but if you are using some old surplus stuff, you may run into one. Again, this is a power supply thing, not a typical charger thing.

I was a bit concerned about throwing errors with my setup. I have the voltage going more than a full volt higher than the highest setting in the XW-Pro. But this turned out to not be a problem as it has another separate setting for over voltage shut off. I have that set higher than the Victron charge controller will ever go. Other chargers might not allow this, so you do need to check the available settings, or even just test the result yourself to make sure it does not do anything stupid. In most cases, the chargers should be set for very similar settings, and the internal reference errors of maybe 0.1 volt should certainly not cause any problem. All chargers have to allow for the voltage to creep up a little due to changing temperature etc. But in my case, going more than a full volt higher is quite a lot. But I am doing it because the chargers are doing different things with the energy coming from different sources. If solar production dips, the XW-Pro would start using grid power. I don't want that to happen. And after 4 pm, I have it stop charging and let the extra AC coupled solar export to get credit at the higher rate. The Victron charge controller is always getting it's energy from the DC coupled PV panels, I want that all to go to the batteries unless they are truly full, so that stays charging to the higher voltage if energy is available from the DC panels.

If (when) I update my control software, I do want to add a new function where if the Victron DC system is still supplying energy after 4 pm, I can command the XW-Pro to export from battery to keep the battery voltage below the Victron Absorb setting and export more energy at the highest peak rate after 4 pm. The voltage would climb less and not cause any issue on the XW-Pro, and the Victron would basically think te battery just has more capacity and keep trying to charge it up to it's set voltage. I have actually tested this by manually entering in those values to the XW-Pro, and it works perfectly with the Victron "charging" the batteries, while the XW-Pro is inverter and pulling from the batteries at the same time.

If you are going to combine chargers and inverters from different brands that don't talk to each other, you may be a bit on your own to understand what function and settings will work well together. In most cases, there won't be any problem, but you need to understand what problems might occur and check what happens in those situations. The first time I had the Victron charge controller pull the voltage well above the XW-Pro voltage settings, I had them connected through just 10 amp fuses. Probably overkill, but I knew that current would not hurt anything even if it did go stupid. Obviously, if you are combining a pair of fixed rate 30 amps chargers, this would not work as they would just pop those small fuses. I was able to set the current limits down to prevent that, but some chargers may not allow the current limit to be adjusted at all, or set that low.

As I said... In most charging situations, you will have any parallel chargers set to absorb at the same full charge voltage. The only difference would be any error in the internal reference. That will typically be within 1%. That should never cause a problem, just one charger might switch to Absorb mode before the other.
 
If you are going to combine chargers and inverters from different brands that don't talk to each other, you may be a bit on your own to understand what function and settings will work well together. In most cases, there won't be any problem, but you need to understand what problems might occur and check what happens in those situations.
This is probably the greatest impact statement. I am not setting these up on a day-to-day basis, I am helping friends with their DIY stuff that has typically gone awry. They typically have the thought "you're an electrician, you know this stuff." I do not. I mean, I know more than when I started asking a gazillion questions, but when I look at all that has just been posted within this thread...wow. You that know these inside and out and "play" with settings to achieve optimum performance, it is awesome!

I think, from all of this, the safe thing for me to do is NOT mess with all the items thrown together and encourage them to purchase things that do talk to each other, even to the point where just ONE thing needs to be set, so that all other "things" function as safe as is possible.
 
Just wanted to check in and say that I now have two Vertiv R48-3000e rectifiers connected in parallel and they work absolutely fine like this. The AC side is connected to different phases.
 
The Vertiv units are excellent and cheap! And, they are designed for parallel operation and hot-swapping in their native environment.

If you've not already seen it there's loads of info on how to program the beasties in this thread.

 

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