Insight Home with XW+

[alvenegas]

Hello all,

I have had a PV system since 2018 consisting of 18 350W solar panels with 2 MPPT60 charge controllers with a Conext XW+. I have recently installed an Insight Home and two EG4 14kwH Lithium batteries. Before I had lead-acid batteries. The thing is that I have been reading about the limitations of the XW+ with Li-ion batteries. I have been searching in the forums about the combination of the XW+ with Li-ion batteries and I cannot find much, as everything is related to the XW Pro. The XW+ is open loop, so I can technically see the EG4 batteries info through the Insight Home. I received from EG4 an instructions setup guide to use the RS485 port on the batteries to connect to the #9 and #11 ports on the 12-pin connector of the Insight Home. I followed their instructions and is working, but I still have some issues. The instructions states that I need to choose Li-ion as the battery type on the inverter's Battery Setup menu, and I need to specify it is an External BMS. If I do that the inverter complaints about a lack of communication. I checked the firmware version on the screenshots of the setup guide and it says 1.17. I have the 1.16. I tried upgrading the firmware to the current version (1.18) but that did not work, and I don't know why. But somewhere in these forums somebody said that firmware version 1.18 of the insight home didn't do well withe the XW+. After reading that I stopped trying to do the firmware upgrade. Has anybody gone through this process already that can help me out configure this properly? I asked EG4 for my particular situation but have had no answer yet. There must be someone out there that has done this already. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[GXMnow]

I have an XW-Pro and the older Gateway device. My Gateway is upgraded to 1.18 and it is working fine. I skipped several updates as I went from 1.08 right to 1.18 and there were a lot of changes. Not sure how much was in the final step from 1.17 to 1.18

With that said, the external BMS is basically trying to emulate a Schneider "Batt Mon" unit. From your "Dashboard", can you click on the battery and see the data from the BMS? It there any data missing? I currently don't have a compatible BMS so I am operating in voltage control mode. But with your BMS communicating, you should still get the improvement of having the voltage reading from the BMS vs the voltage read inside the XW box. Voltage control for the charging limits works just fine. The SoC control only becomes important when you are trying to activate when to start and stop things like grid charging and energy export where the true amount of energy in your battery bank matters a lot more. With LFP batteries, the voltage changes so little from 30% to 80% SoC that it can be difficult to know for sure where you are in the discharge curve. What settings are you trying to control with SoC?

The other thing that BMS communication can give you is control of maximum charge and discharge rates. But with 2 x 14 KWH batteries, that should also not be an issue. The XW+ is only 6,800 watts with surge to 12 KW. If you are down to a single 14 KWH battery, it should still be able to handle 100% charge and discharge rates, so having the BMS command a lower charge or discharge current limit is not all that important.

I looked into making my batteries communicate with the Insight system, but did not see enough merit to go through the hassle. With the newer "Inverter type" BMS units, it does make it easier, but it is still not totally straight forward.