Growatt 5000ES

[omarfar]

Hi. I bought two growatt 5000ES inverters. They both come with the wires required for parallel operation. I followed the instructions and connected them and programmed them to parallel single phase (one is a master and one is a slave). All is working fine (since yesterday). However, ever since I set them up, i have had an 'uneasy' feeling. Because the outputs are joined and the inverters sync their waveform, frequency...etc... so as long as all is working, all is good.... however, what happens if they lose connection between them??? Eg. A connection cable comes loose.... what happens? Do their outputs become out of sync??? If so this could be catastrophic... having two phases connected together.... it is in essence a short circuit.... does anyone know how safe it is to run inverters in parallel (with communication connections between the inverters)? Has anyone had any problems? Also, a question specific to the growatt spf5000es: if they are set up to run in parallel in single phase mode, and if for some reason one turns off or is turned off (or both of them), when turned back on will they still automatically be paired and work synced in parallel or do I have to reconfigure them to run in parallel? Any info would be much appreciated. Thank you.

 

[Vigo]

I assume by now you’ve probably figured most of this out for yourself, but for future searchers, here goes.

Master and slave is basically determined by which inverter is turned on first. If they are turned on simultaneously it will seem random which gets which status, but in reality it is probably still based on which was turned on first and only seems random because the inverters think in milliseconds and our hands cant flip switches simultaneuously down to the millisecond.

if communication is lost between the units, they will beep and complain and flash a red light at you, but as far as ‘phasing’ they will just go on doing what they were already doing, which means they remain in sync on the ac output.. for a while..

When you turn off one of the paralleled inverters, the other one picks up the ac ‘load’ being shed by the unit turning off, basically instantly. As long as that load doesnt cause the remaining inverter to be overloaded, all is well.

If you happened to turn off the master, the remaining unit promotes itself to master. If you turn the other unit back on, it is now the slave.

They do not lose their settings and do not have be ‘re-told’ that they are in parallel. In fact, when you turn them off you are not really turning them off, you are simply disallowing the inverter to output ac, and allowing it to go to ‘sleep/standby’ IF there is no solar or grid connection by which it can charge batteries. If it still has solar or grid power available, it will still actively charge batteries even though it is ‘off’. So ‘off’ is not totally off and does not cause you to lose any settings. In fact, even if you disconnect pv and battery from the ‘off’ inverter, i believe it STILL will not totally shut down, unless you also unplug the small current sharing wires from it!

Ive been off grid on 2x 5000es since May. I’ve had to figure out a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t spelled out in the manuals, and still learn new 5000es idiosyncracies almost daily.