El Escribano
New Member
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2022
- Messages
- 12
Dear everyone, Help! Please feel free to laugh at my ingenuity. I'm getting old (I’m running out of time) so I decided I would trust an installer to bang in a grid-tied 10KW photovoltaic system at my place, and I assumed that everything would go like clockwork, without a contract and purely based on a quotation. I also told the contractor that I wanted to be able to fit batteries to the system subsequently, so instead of two standard Growatt MIN 5000TL-XH inverters he installed the hybrid versions ones, which were more expensive, wired in parallel. I was a happy man assured that I would be able to retrofit the batteries and that it would almost be a plug and play affair I could do myself if I bought Growatt batteries.
The installation is working just fine, despite not being able to connect to the system to monitor it using the Growatt ShinePhone app until just the other day, because it’s taken me that long to string an ethernet cable up the hill to the solar hut.
Anyway, because of the price of electricity here and the paltry buy-back tariff (only 11 cents max), it didn’t take me long to get on the phone to a Growatt dealer in Spain to order a battery stack. I was about to order the cheaper 2.5 KWh Growatt modular batteries (which would not have worked because they were low voltage), when I very wisely rang them and they pointed out that, no, I would have to buy the high voltage ones with the Growatt Battery Monitoring System (BMS), so I bought three 2.5 KWh units and the BMS. These are Lithium Ion and cost about 670€ a KWh if you include the BMS.
I installed this kit double and triple checking everything (and finding a few problems that the original installer had failed to do correctly) and assume everything would work, but it was not to be.
Yesterday, I received an email from the Growatt after after-sales service here in Spain which said, “This installation is not going to work properly, as there is no way to use parallel inverters with storage. I updated your inverter to the last firmware version, and this will improve the system, but I´m afraid there is no way to do any more in this case...”. Now I’m pretty sure that I can get the Growatt retailer to take the batteries back and that I may have to use some legal duress with the installer, but my question for anyone who has bothered to read this far is can anyone tell me if a) what the after-sales service has told me is true and b) what might be the best/cheapest way to salvage what I can and retrofit some batteries into this installation?
The installation is working just fine, despite not being able to connect to the system to monitor it using the Growatt ShinePhone app until just the other day, because it’s taken me that long to string an ethernet cable up the hill to the solar hut.
Anyway, because of the price of electricity here and the paltry buy-back tariff (only 11 cents max), it didn’t take me long to get on the phone to a Growatt dealer in Spain to order a battery stack. I was about to order the cheaper 2.5 KWh Growatt modular batteries (which would not have worked because they were low voltage), when I very wisely rang them and they pointed out that, no, I would have to buy the high voltage ones with the Growatt Battery Monitoring System (BMS), so I bought three 2.5 KWh units and the BMS. These are Lithium Ion and cost about 670€ a KWh if you include the BMS.
I installed this kit double and triple checking everything (and finding a few problems that the original installer had failed to do correctly) and assume everything would work, but it was not to be.
Yesterday, I received an email from the Growatt after after-sales service here in Spain which said, “This installation is not going to work properly, as there is no way to use parallel inverters with storage. I updated your inverter to the last firmware version, and this will improve the system, but I´m afraid there is no way to do any more in this case...”. Now I’m pretty sure that I can get the Growatt retailer to take the batteries back and that I may have to use some legal duress with the installer, but my question for anyone who has bothered to read this far is can anyone tell me if a) what the after-sales service has told me is true and b) what might be the best/cheapest way to salvage what I can and retrofit some batteries into this installation?
