Install and Operation of the SUNGOLD 10KW 48V SPLIT PHASE SOLAR INVERTER

[Kenny_]

Nope that didn't work... I tried the modified cable both ways between battery and inverter.... nothing... just alarm ....

But the thing I didn't say before I started this change was that I plugged the comm cable supplied with the inverter back in and NO ALARM. There is something very screwy going on.

The cable supplied with the inverter appear to have inverted pins/colors i.e. pin 1 goes to pin 8,

The cable I modified appears to be a straight through cable I cut all but 7,8 and it seemed to work fine but no indication of multiple batteries/packs

also @Hedges I did try plugging in the modified cable (only 2 wires and ground) in both ways i.e. swapping ends between the battery and inverter...no difference, still an alarm 58.

and sorry about my inability to measure the voltages, etc. these pins are so tiny, etc..it's pretty much impossible for me to even try to do. I was having trouble just checking continuity trying to determine straight-through or reversed finally gave up... I can see the colors are reversed in the "inverter supplied comm cable"

The thing that gets me is that the inverter supplied cable was working for a week before error 58 showed up and I built the modified cable to fix it (i.e. just pins 7 and 8 straight-through to both ends). At that point I plugged the original inverter supplied cable in and got the error 58...plug the modified cable, no error. I tested this several times and then left the modified cable in until this afternoon when I tried the original supplied cable and NO ERROR. WTF?

 

[Kenny_]

I think I'm gonna stop and standby until I get the Solar Assistant Cable and see what happens with that. ...
Will leave the modified cable plugged in for now I guess....

In better news, it looks like my additional batteries have shipped.

 

[#40Fan]

What have you got to lose? Try this....

Cut all 8 cables.

Attach 8 to 8 and 1 to 1 as well as connect them together 8's to 1's.

Same with the 7's and 2's.

 

[Kenny_]

What have you got to lose? Try this....

Cut all 8 cables.

Attach 8 to 8 and 1 to 1 as well as connect them together 8's to 1's.

Same with the 7's and 2's.

Don't think I'm gonna try that, but thanks!

 

[Hedges]

The pins are small, but with a cord cut in half, you can fan out to individual wires, strip and probe them.
I've got some IDC sockets so I use them for breakout from a patch cord.

I suppose you could strip middle of a patch cord, punch into one of these, and have a short patch cord as stub to another one, to probe. Hopefully very short like 6", not 6', for signal integrity reasons.

One of these days I'm going to buy a punchdown tool, good for phone or LAN closet.

 

[Kenny_]

After finagling for over a week with Sungold about my order of additional batteries....they finally shipped them but....they did not ship the rack. I've asked them to cancel it and I may look at getting a different one. It looked kinda flimsy to me anyway and they said the one they were about to ship was damaged....

Any Suggestions for a battery rack?

 

[Hedges]

Check eBay for server racks, sort by distance. And Craigslist.

I bought an open frame aluminum rack from Weird Stuff Warehouse back when they existed, for $100. Prices can be $50 to $1000, something for everyone.

The trick is how to best support loads. I got flimsy sheet metal angles that attach front and rear, don't like them. Stronger angles attached to sides would be better. But do the batteries come with slides that mount on a 19" rack? That should work better.

 

[Kenny_]

Well!!!! Solved that mystery.... The comm cable supplied with the inverter IS a Reverse Type cable... i.e. it is 'ended' pin 1 of one end goes to pin 8 of the other end (or something like that).

Using that original cable that came with the 10K48 inverter it works, but only if the correct end is plugged in to the Inverter and Battery Respectively.

If you reverse it you get and error - 58

and for some reason the modified ... straight through cable will give the error unless the mods are made removing 1-5 wires. or 1-6 (ground wires don't seem to matter from what I can tell (but the shielding may be supplying the ground, or it may be coming round-about from the negative of the battery or some such).

In any case I'm relieved to figure out wtf was going on with those comm cables and error 58!

 

[Lighthouse Beacon]

Well!!!! Solved that mystery.... The comm cable supplied with the inverter IS a Reverse Type cable... i.e. it is 'ended' pin 1 of one end goes to pin 8 of the other end (or something like that).

Using that original cable that came with the 10K48 inverter it works, but only if the correct end is plugged in to the Inverter and Battery Respectively.

If you reverse it you get and error - 58

and for some reason the modified ... straight through cable will give the error unless the mods are made removing 1-5 wires. or 1-6 (ground wires don't seem to matter from what I can tell (but the shielding may be supplying the ground, or it may be coming round-about from the negative of the battery or some such).

In any case I'm relieved to figure out wtf was going on with those comm cables and error 58!

Insane! But does make sense

 

[Kenny_]

Insane! But does make sense

I'm going to follow up the email and tell them that they need to mark the cable ends as well as make it clear in the manual and documentation!

 

[Kenny_]

Next topic: Monitoring Software
I got an email with the monitoring software .rar file
once I got that extracted via 7-zip it's called iPower-nt.exe (on my windows machine not sure about Mac but instructions include Mac info)

...and... I'm not seeing anything different for the battery....it does have some significant features such as upgrading firmware, ability to change parameters, ability to store and retrieve sets of parameters... and a display similar to what is on the inverter screen.... those are the things I notices in a quick once-over.

Maybe more later....

P.S. the fact that the parameters are available and can be set means that something like Solar Assistant could easily be able display and change the parameters as well (which would give me the fuller control I'd like to have )

 

[42OhmsPA]

Next topic: Monitoring Software
I got an email with the monitoring software .rar file
once I got that extracted via 7-zip it's called iPower-nt.exe (on my windows machine not sure about Mac but instructions include Mac info)

...and... I'm not seeing anything different for the battery....it does have some significant features such as upgrading firmware, ability to change parameters, ability to store and retrieve sets of parameters... and a display similar to what is on the inverter screen.... those are the things I notices in a quick once-over.

Maybe more later....

P.S. the fact that the parameters are available and can be set means that something like Solar Assistant could easily be able display and change the parameters as well (which would give me the fuller control I'd like to have )

Would you mind zipping that file back up and sharing it here? You could even add it to the resource section.
It should communicate with any SRNE oem inverter... I'm sure many would find it useful.
(it might not upload pending file size)

 

[Kenny_]

Would you mind zipping that file back up and sharing it here? You could even add it to the resource section.
It should communicate with any SRNE oem inverter... I'm sure many would find it useful.
(it might not upload pending file size)

It's pretty big and I certainly don't want to violate any rights...so prefer not to....

 

[42OhmsPA]

It's pretty big and I certainly don't want to violate any rights...so prefer not to....

No worries. I found it....

Monitoring my All-In-One

I bought one of the PowMr units. You should not. No. Really. You shouldn't. But, if you did, you might find, like I did, that you have no way to monitor it. Well, now you do. . . mostly. This project is based loosely on the SolarShed project. I just simplified it as much as I could. I...

diysolarforum.com

 

[Kenny_]

No worries. I found it....

Monitoring my All-In-One

I bought one of the PowMr units. You should not. No. Really. You shouldn't. But, if you did, you might find, like I did, that you have no way to monitor it. Well, now you do. . . mostly. This project is based loosely on the SolarShed project. I just simplified it as much as I could. I...

diysolarforum.com

Ah, Nice! Thanks!

yes, iPower was what they sent me in the .rar file...

Monitoring my All-In-One

I bought one of the PowMr units. You should not. No. Really. You shouldn't. But, if you did, you might find, like I did, that you have no way to monitor it. Well, now you do. . . mostly. This project is based loosely on the SolarShed project. I just simplified it as much as I could. I...

diysolarforum.com

 

[Lighthouse Beacon]

Ah, Nice! Thanks!

yes, iPower was what they sent me in the .rar file...

Monitoring my All-In-One

I bought one of the PowMr units. You should not. No. Really. You shouldn't. But, if you did, you might find, like I did, that you have no way to monitor it. Well, now you do. . . mostly. This project is based loosely on the SolarShed project. I just simplified it as much as I could. I...

diysolarforum.com

Kenny I’m alittle lost on where you are in regards to monitoring did you ever get solar assistant up and going? What do I need to do that?

 

[Kenny_]

Kenny I’m alittle lost on where you are in regards to monitoring did you ever get solar assistant up and going? What do I need to do that?

Oh yeah it's plugged into the Inverter USB port and working fine. I LOVE IT!

You just need a Raspberry Pi, the Solar Assistant software (burned onto a miniSD card) in the Raspberry Pi, and a USB cable (standard usb - printer type usb) Was pretty easy to get up and running following their directions.

You can order it ready to go from the Solar Assistant website or put it together yourself as I did with an old Raspberry Pi I had lying around.



The problem I'm having with it is that it just shows the 'aggerate' battery state and I was hoping to see the more detailed information for each 'pack'/rack battery.

Just got the following response from Solar Assistant:

------------
Hello Kenny,

Based on the battery manual that i investigated the pinout for the rs232 communication port and rs485 port match that of a specific Pylontech battery model.

If you connect that cable to the master rs485 port on your battery, then select the usb serial rs232/485 protocol does it read the battery/batteries?

We have not explored reading the Sungold batteries, if we did we would list them in our battery configuration page:https://solar-assistant.io/help/battery/configuration


Kind Regards,
Duane - SolarAssistant support
------------------

I/we may be just out of luck wrt seeing battery details....
I have an rs232/rj11 cable coming tomorrow, I'll try that before I give up this quest.

 

[Kenny_]

Here's the followup/response from SunGold wrt to Inverter Communication Cable....can you say 'Lost in Translation?' ... I thought you could.

----------------------

Hello,
First Thank You for that information
This is a follow-up on the above information and problem.

The thing I learned is that the Communication Cable Supplied with the Inverter 10K48sp must be plugged in correctly.

One end (call it 'A') must be plugged into the inverter and the other end (call it 'B') must be plugged in to battery #1 Rs485a port. If it is plugged in the opposite way it will not work and will cause an error 58.

This cable ends should be marked explicitly so that it will be connected properly between the inverter and the battery. It should also be explained in the manual and documentation.

This caused me no end of trouble!

Thank you.

Dear Customer,

Wish you the best day.

If you can't custom-make the BMS cable, we can sell one cable for you, the price is $35, do you need to buy one?

Looking forward to hearing from you to move further.
----------------


SMH!

 

[Kenny_]

We've got a couple of days of cloudy, rainy, snowy weather here in Denver - today and tomorrow.
Not much sun and will be a small test for my new system and my two 5.1K batteries....will likely have to go to grid at some point.

I have 3 additional rack mount Sungold batteries on the way but already two have gotten 'delayed' status. Might get one tomorrow (no delay listed) then the othe two maybe on Friday. Fedex seems to have a bit of trouble with these 100+ lb batteries.

 

[Lighthouse Beacon]

We've got a couple of days of cloudy, rainy, snowy weather here in Denver - today and tomorrow.
Not much sun and will be a small test for my new system and my two 5.1K batteries....will likely have to go to grid at some point.

I have 3 additional rack mount Sungold batteries on the way but already two have gotten 'delayed' status. Might get one tomorrow (no delay listed) then the othe two maybe on Friday. Fedex seems to have a bit of trouble with these 100+ lb batteries.

Thanks for documenting everything Kenny. I am following closely. I got cryptic messages from SG this morning about my OVP. They are basically saying discharge and start over… which I’ve done… I’ve switched my battery to Solar Only mode to keep the battery not charged so heavily by utility power, but I’m at least functional without error 59 and OVP now

 

[Kenny_]

Welp.....hit bottom with the (2) batteries.... 10% SOC and the grid bypass kicked and the batteries are charging right now from the grid.

All is working as expected.

Nice!

p.s. pulling more from the grid than I have in days! About 4k at the moment.

 

[Kenny_]

This also brings a question to my mind about charging/discharging.

The settings (param 61) in the 10k by default switch to grid when the battery drops to 10% SOC. That worked as expected. It's now charging at 3+ Kw.

The switch back to battery/inverter parameter #62 is 100% "Switches to Inverter output mode when SOC is greater than this setting."
First it seems it's never going to be greater than 100%
and secondly I didn't think it was a good idea to charge LiFePo batteries all the way to 100%.

Should(n't) that param 62 be something like 90 or 95%?

 

[42OhmsPA]

My 2 cents...
Set grid charge current to 0a, let the grid carry the loads until the panels take over again. Bring the soc cutoff up a bit so you have a bigger buffer if the grid would go down.
If bad weather is forecast, utilize the grid to charge.

 

[Kenny_]

Thanks @42OhmsPA ! I've got learning to do. Seems good advice. For this turn I'm going let it charge from grid and see if it switches off/back at 100% SOC.

Seems it might be good to have a manual button or switch to 'charge from grid' without having to fiddle with paramaters... or a single parameter "Charge from Grid" on/off.

I certainly wouldn't want the system to 'charge from grid' automatically at Peak Energy Rate Time!

 

[Kenny_]

(a summary at this point)

**My Solar Exploits**

Cloudy, rainy, snowy yesterday and today. Good opportunity to see how the new system operates under these conditions.

Very little solar power generation yesterday and that went towards home usage (as opposed to charging batteries).
the batteries hit the low threshold point (10% SOC - state of charge) early this morning and the system seamlessly switched to grid power and began charging the batteries which it has been doing for the last few hours. Batteries are now at about 95% SOC. I'm waiting/looking for the system to automatically switch back to battery operation once they are fully charged (I likely will change this parameter once I verify that it is operating as designed/set)

I've used/pulled more grid power in the last few hours than I did all week. I don't like it (because that's my goal, to eliminate the grid and grid usage as much as possible) but it is very useful and important data for future operation.

Also I just notice that my Xcel utility bill is totaled up ... no statement yet with the details, but initial guesstimate is that I saved something like 30-40% of my electricity bill $$ this past month. I should be able to download the statement in a few days and get a better estimate. It's a bit of guesswork in any case given that conditions vary from year to year and mostly I'm comparing to last year's bills and the past month bill etc.

Onward and Upward!
The Sun is our Savior, we shall not want.

#energy #solar #solarpower