Eg4 Lifepower4 battery and Solar Assistant

[sjordan0228]

I believe I have all my settings good for now and understand them. I was running Solar Assistant just connected to my inverter (EG4 3000) and set the battery type to EG4 Battery Protocol. Everything looked good and was reporting but it was not reporting the temp of my battery. So I figured maybe this is something that has to be done from solar assistant connected directly to the battery. So I set the dup switch to UDDD, shut the battery down and connected the SA to to Battery. I also change the battery protocol to User-Defined. Started everything back up and connected the battery. It found it!

I now have temperature showing, but now its not reporting any battery usage on the Dashboard. It shows the battery percentage and voltage and the actual load but does not show me that the load is coming from the battery or utility. I feel like an idiot yet again. What am I missing?

 

[Texican]

That 50w load maybe too small to register
What does it show with a higher load ?

 

[sjordan0228]

hah that was it! I added more and it shows.

Thanks for the idea.

 

[MaikaiLifeDIY]

Typically when you pull battery information from the inverter, it's a subset of the data available directly from the batteries. If you find this to be true in your scenario, you can connect to both the battery bank and the inverter to try and capture everything from the inverter, and the batteries.

To do this I'm talking about two USB ports each one connected to a different part of the system, IE (inverter/batteries).

 

[Quankl]

Typically when you pull battery information from the inverter, it's a subset of the data available directly from the batteries. If you find this to be true in your scenario, you can connect to both the battery bank and the inverter to try and capture everything from the inverter, and the batteries.

To do this I'm talking about two USB ports each one connected to a different part of the system, IE (inverter/batteries).

Good info. I just did this and it's working. But. Is it possible to still get EG4 communication with inverter still or is solar assistant now the middle man managing everything on USER because The inverter-batt #1 com port is now used to go into the PI.

I have
PI going to Inverter using USB-Serial-Rj45

Same Pi going to battery #1 using Rj45-USB and com cable from Batt 1 to Batt 2. I get all my information on solar assistant.

Only thing I'm missing is the 20% auto switch to grid and back at 30%.

 

[MaikaiLifeDIY]

Good info. I just did this and it's working. But. Is it possible to still get EG4 communication with inverter still or is solar assistant now the middle man managing everything on USER because The inverter-batt #1 com port is now used to go into the PI.

I have
PI going to Inverter using USB-Serial-Rj45

Same Pi going to battery #1 using Rj45-USB and com cable from Batt 1 to Batt 2. I get all my information on solar assistant.

Only thing I'm missing is the 20% auto switch to grid and back at 30%.

You have to use a splitter on the Sol-Ark to split the canbus port so it can both communicate with the batteries and SA on the same port.

See this article from Solar Assistant.

This is the splitter I used.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0069LVUPS?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

Keep in mind using the splitter isn't needed at all if your batteries can't be read by the Sol-Ark. I believe you're using EG4 LifePower4 batteries which cannot speak directly to the Sol-Ark, they must have a CommHub that acts like a translator getting data from the batteries and speaking the language necessary for the Sol-Ark to understand if you're also trying to enable closed loop communications.

 

[nihim]

I have an EG4 3000EHV and 6 Lifepower4 batteries with Solar Assistant monitoring everything as well. Basically the same as your issue, I ran into the SoC reporting from the battery BMS(s) can be wildly incorrect with low current loads. It appears the draw/charge on each battery has to be over 1~2 amps before the BMS starts registering it. I ended up adding a Victron 500A BMV SmartShunt to my system between the batteries and inverter to get accurate readings. I also run the inverter in USE mode with manual voltage settings now. This also means the 4 state of charge indicator lights on each battery are unreliable too, some of my batteries will show 1 light (25%) while others might be as much as 3 lights (75%). I was concerned the batteries might be wildly off-balanced but the voltages all read within a 1/100th of a volt and amperages on each battery connector are just about the same.

 

[MaikaiLifeDIY]

I have an EG4 3000EHV and 6 Lifepower4 batteries with Solar Assistant monitoring everything as well. Basically the same as your issue, I ran into the SoC reporting from the battery BMS(s) can be wildly incorrect with low current loads. It appears the draw/charge on each battery has to be over 1~2 amps before the BMS starts registering it. I ended up adding a Victron 500A BMV SmartShunt to my system between the batteries and inverter to get accurate readings. I also run the inverter in USE mode with manual voltage settings now. This also means the 4 state of charge indicator lights on each battery are unreliable too, some of my batteries will show 1 light (25%) while others might be as much as 3 lights (75%). I was concerned the batteries might be wildly off-balanced but the voltages all read within a 1/100th of a volt and amperages on each battery connector are just about the same.

I have recently updated the firmware on the LifePower4 batteries, I've forgotten which version is it, I think 3.31 or 3.32, which helped, they're much better at reporting the low current, but it's still not as accurate as the shunt. The BMS controls those lights on the front so if the BMS doesn't register the low current draw the lights will be inaccurate also.

In my testing, this scenario is typically only possible when well... when testing and you don't have production loads on the system that will typically keep a higher current draw. The only challenge I see is the larger the battery bank, the more the total current gets divided by the number of batteries potentially creating a scenario when only large loads will actually register as discharging current.

 

[Zapper77]

. It appears the draw/charge on each battery has to be over 1~2 amps before the BMS starts registering it.

2.2 amps with any Lifepower4 firmware before 3.30.

The newest firmware reads anything over 0.2 amps

Specifically it rounds 0.2-0.4 up to .5 and under 0.2 down to 0.