EG4 LifePower4 BMS Reports Designed Capacity Wrong!!!

[kenglaze]

Buyers beware!

I have 3 EG4 LifePower4 12v 400 Ah batteries. The two oldest are about 14 months old and their BMS reports in the EG4 BMSTools app (and everywhere else) that the designed capacity of the battery is 100 Ah and not the correct 400 Ah. This is despite the fact that they correctly report "Capacity Remaining" as a value between 0 and 400 Ah correctly. In essence this means that I might have 300 Ah remaining capacity on a battery that reports 100 Ah total designed capacity!!! The newer battery is about 4 months old now and reports everything correctly.

This is a problem since I am using a newer EG4LL ss the "master" on the battery comms bus that interconnects all the batteries together. The EG4LL as the master polls the other batteries and then reports the status of the bank to my Victron CerboGX via its CAN bus port. With the miss reported capacity from those two batteries the total SOC calculation is messed up which makes it impossible to do things like switch to shore power when the bank reaches 20% SOC.

Screen shots attached showing the BMS tools screens for each of these three LifePower4 batteries.

EG4 has not responded to my emails and Signature Solar doesn't know what to do about this since there are no firmware updates for the LifePower4 batteries.

If you are reading this and considering the purchase of LifePower4 batteries I would caution you against them if you plan to rely on BMS comms with your system being accurate.

If anyone has any solutions or thoughts to offer I am all ears!

Thank You,
Ken

 

[marionw]

Download the EG4 LiFePower4 | 48V 100AH Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery software (yes it is for the 48 volt one) from
https://eg4electronics.com/categori...wer4-48v-100ah-lithium-iron-phosphate-battery
Under downloads.
Download the appropriate BMS Test software to see if it will recognize and communicate with your batteries.

if it does that I have some "tricks" you can try.

 

[ksmithaz1]

Z4SR02 on the bad ones 03 on the good one. Firmware.

 

[EG4_Jared]

Buyers beware!

I have 3 EG4 LifePower4 12v 400 Ah batteries. The two oldest are about 14 months old and their BMS reports in the EG4 BMSTools app (and everywhere else) that the designed capacity of the battery is 100 Ah and not the correct 400 Ah. This is despite the fact that they correctly report "Capacity Remaining" as a value between 0 and 400 Ah correctly. In essence this means that I might have 300 Ah remaining capacity on a battery that reports 100 Ah total designed capacity!!! The newer battery is about 4 months old now and reports everything correctly.

This is a problem since I am using a newer EG4LL ss the "master" on the battery comms bus that interconnects all the batteries together. The EG4LL as the master polls the other batteries and then reports the status of the bank to my Victron CerboGX via its CAN bus port. With the miss reported capacity from those two batteries the total SOC calculation is messed up which makes it impossible to do things like switch to shore power when the bank reaches 20% SOC.

Screen shots attached showing the BMS tools screens for each of these three LifePower4 batteries.

EG4 has not responded to my emails and Signature Solar doesn't know what to do about this since there are no firmware updates for the LifePower4 batteries.

If you are reading this and considering the purchase of LifePower4 batteries I would caution you against them if you plan to rely on BMS comms with your system being accurate.

If anyone has any solutions or thoughts to offer I am all ears!

Thank You,
Ken

Would you be able to provide me the email used through DM and I will look into this.

 

[EG4_Jared]

The BMS version Z4SR02 does not accurately display the Ah for the 12v batteries in BMS Tools. To resolve this issue, BMS Tools v2.2.1 must be utilized, and I advise following the instructions in this document to ensure accurate reporting to BMS Tools.

Link to BMS Tools v2.2.1: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NSpwRnJElckG52Bk99CLhCfpBjgE4Y1G?usp=sharing

 

[kenglaze]

The BMS version Z4SR02 does not accurately display the Ah for the 12v batteries in BMS Tools. To resolve this issue, BMS Tools v2.2.1 must be utilized, and I advise following the instructions in this document to ensure accurate reporting to BMS Tools.

Link to BMS Tools v2.2.1: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NSpwRnJElckG52Bk99CLhCfpBjgE4Y1G?usp=sharing

View attachment 200231

Hi Jared,

Thank you for the assistance. Note google drive would not allow the download of the shared file reporting that it is detecting a virus. Is there some other way that it could be shared? or maybe zip it and change the file extension to trick it into that mode where it cant scan it...

Please also note that I have connected to the batteries using BMS_TOOLS_15-16s V 2.06 which has a similar GUI to the one you showed. When I hit GET it responds with 100 AH, I then change the Designed Capacity to be 400.0 and hit POST. After that when I hit GET again to verify the change was made it still reports 100 AH. It is worth noting that the status at the bottom of the window reports "Read Data OK" for GET requests however POST requests produce the message "3 Write Data OverTime" suggesting that maybe the POST was not successful.

Screen shots attached...

Do you expect that this newer version of the BMS tools, V2.2.1, will affect the desired change correctly?

 

[kenglaze]

Download the EG4 LiFePower4 | 48V 100AH Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery software (yes it is for the 48 volt one) from
https://eg4electronics.com/categori...wer4-48v-100ah-lithium-iron-phosphate-battery
Under downloads.
Download the appropriate BMS Test software to see if it will recognize and communicate with your batteries.

if it does that I have some "tricks" you can try.

Thank you for the suggestion, I am going to try the steps the EG4_jared is suggesting before trying this and see where that gets me first. I will keep people updated.

 

[kenglaze]

The BMS version Z4SR02 does not accurately display the Ah for the 12v batteries in BMS Tools. To resolve this issue, BMS Tools v2.2.1 must be utilized, and I advise following the instructions in this document to ensure accurate reporting to BMS Tools.

Link to BMS Tools v2.2.1: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NSpwRnJElckG52Bk99CLhCfpBjgE4Y1G?usp=sharing

View attachment 200231

OK, this is a follow up reply. I was able to download the BMS Tools V2.2.1 after installing google drive for windows desktop to I guess circumvent the virus check. Using this version of BMS tools results in the same failure to change the value. GET results in a reported 100 Ah designed capacity and using post to change that value to 400 Ah results in "16 Write Data Overtime".
Noting that I tried on this particular battery with its ID originally set to 4, and then tried it again with the ID set to 16 in case that would make a difference since I noted that ID needs to be 16 when updating firmware in other videos online.

new screen shots attached.

 

[kenglaze]

Download the EG4 LiFePower4 | 48V 100AH Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery software (yes it is for the 48 volt one) from
https://eg4electronics.com/categori...wer4-48v-100ah-lithium-iron-phosphate-battery
Under downloads.
Download the appropriate BMS Test software to see if it will recognize and communicate with your batteries.

if it does that I have some "tricks" you can try.

Hey @marionw, I have not been able to make progress thus far with EG4, they seem to think i should be able to POST or write to the Capacity variable in the BMS but so far the BMS does not respond to these POST attempts. I have multiple versions of the BMS software that all seem to communicate generally just fine with all of my batteries. I am starting to wonder what "tricks" you might have up you sleeve. Would you mind elaborating for me?

 

[marionw]

I use the BMS_Test_2.7.8 software with my six EG4 LifePower4 48 volts batteries. I have no experience with the EG4 LL series batteries.

Any changes you make to the BMS without express permission from EG4 or one of its representatives may/will invalidate your warranties.

The password for the "Config" screen is 888888

Don't know if this will work with your EG4 LifePower4 12v 400 Ah batteries