Connecting Solar Assistant to EG4 Lifepower batteries

[solarhombre]

Or , as an alternative, you forget the master battery, and just use the rest in SA and keep inverter comms going..

Batteries will balance themselves out in voltage anyway, and if something unforseen happens, you would want the inverters primarily talking to the BMS as they control the charging ( sd card corruption or maybe a broken pi power supply would be first that comes to mind)

Yet another alternative would be the communication hub which then acts as master in the rs485/modbus topology although I am not entirely sure those work with the V1 version of those batteries

At least for the EG4LLv2, even battery #1 has the cell voltage info available (see Post in thread 'EG4-6500 Modbus' https://diysolarforum.com/threads/eg4-6500-modbus.54210/post-838843).

I have 3x RS485 dongles (isolated!): 1 to inverter, 1 to master battery, and 1 to batteries 2 to 6. The inverter sends the same request over and over to #1 in 500ms intervals. I have some software (written in Go) that forwards the request to #1 and the response back to the inverter, and the same software also monitors the rest of the batteries. It should be easy to use the pauses from the inverter to query the cell voltages and publish them too, along with some derived data (#1 knows the total current and voltage, so knowing the info from 2-6, one could guess what #1 values are for current and voltage).

I'll put this up in GitHub and release tarballs/zip files for mac, windows, and Linux along with docker images for Linux amd64, arm and arm64 (pi3+, Pi4). It will take a couple of weeks to be up (needs a couple more tests, docs, and I need a vacation . Hopefully once this is up, I can add support for lifepower batteries, and I'm counting on the help of people from this forum, since I don't own any of those.

 

[tgilles1]

I'm using SA with EG4 3000-48V inverter and three Lifepower4 batteries and EG4 Comm Hub.. If you can use EG4 Comm hub, you get best of both worlds. I plugged my SA into the last port in the battery chain, and set batteries to sequence 1,2, and 3 (Hub is 0 in this case)

Since the HUB is master, SA ignores it, but can communicate with all 3 batteries. While hub handles communicating between batteries and inverter stats/etc.

I would prefer to see SA use EG4 Hub directly, mainly because it's controlling this dance, and for cable management (OCD guy here).. but it works as is.

 

[jlemke]

I just got my Growatt 24v 3000 set up this weekend with SA and 2 x 24v EG4 Lifepo4 batteries. I am not sure what setting I need to put the SA in to read battery values. Currently it is set to use inverter values because that is all that seems to work. I see voltage and state of charge, but I am feeling like I should be seeing more. Kind of new to this so I just need some assistant on the right settings.

 

[wildbillpdx]

I just got my Growatt 24v 3000 set up this weekend with SA and 2 x 24v EG4 Lifepo4 batteries. I am not sure what setting I need to put the SA in to read battery values. Currently it is set to use inverter values because that is all that seems to work. I see voltage and state of charge, but I am feeling like I should be seeing more. Kind of new to this so I just need some assistant on the right settings.

Most likely you need to cable the Pi to the batteries to get the correct readings. Otherwise, the information is minimal.