is it the shunt or the system?

[davecason]

HI Gang,

Here's an odd one ...... all day my system was not charging .......

That was reported by the panel if my KIASE Charger /Inverter BIC1220080 saying it was at 74% and dropping and this was at 3:00 in the afternoon.

I only have one 330 Watt Can Solar panel but it was producing, and again that was according to the 485 serial data coming out of the solar controller and it's a EPEVER Tracer 4215BN ..... however the shunt said batteries weren't going up !

It's four 3.24v LiFePo4 cells with a capacity of 272Ah.

So for fun, I hit the breaker that feeds the solar buss bar that's connected to the batteries .......



Here's the shunt saying it was at about .6 of an amp for the whole day.
Then you can see where I disconnected the panel from the batteries.

Here's what happened after I reconnected it - it was off for about 2 mins.



So poof now the Victron Smart Shunt says it's NOW charging at 11.8 amps ....... so why?

Here's a zoomed out view:



So what do you think - was is the system charging before or only after I disconnected the solar controller from the batteries?

I'm a total newbie BTW so its something dumb and obvious - I'm yer man! (grin)

BTW - It's now 6:00 PM and I'm losing light but we're up to 81% instead of the 74% when i bounced it.

Cheers'
Dave

 

[HRTKD]

Maybe your solar charge controller got confused? A shunt just reports what's going in and out.

I've had similar experiences with an AC-DC converter. It gets 120vac and output is rather wimpy at maybe 4 amps. I disconnect the converter from the battery and reconnect and bam! I have 45 amps.

It could be your settings on the solar charge controller. It may have a very low float setting. Post the parameters for your solar charge controller and we'll take a look.

 

[davecason]

Hi HRTKD,

Yep, that's true, but the control panel for the inverter was also saying the same thing - the batteries were down and not showing
anything going in but once I did that solar controller and the 330 W panel - disconnect and reconnect after about two mins.

Then That panel also showed the battery voltage come up and it showed an extra bar on the batteries again as well.

It's an odd one - I did just get my Victron VE.Direct to USB cable yesterday as well so now the shunt and the software are always up
on the PC instead of having to use my cell phone and bluetooth connection - but that shouldn't matter.

I'll leave it all alone again tonight and it just hit cut-out now (9:15 PM) on the EPEver solar monitoring software so I"ll leave it till the sun gets going tomorrow and see if it starts to charge. If it does dandy ! If not, I;ll grab my my DVM and test and record all the voltages and then try that disconnect and reconnect step again and we'll see what we get.

Here are the current charge controller settings:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They are standard LiFePO4 cells from Basen in China.



Here's current monitor view now, just after that cut-out:



Thanks for the help !

Cheers'
Dave

 

[HRTKD]

I doubt this will be your problem but I once had two separate systems with two Victron MPPT and a shunt on one side and a single Victron MPPT on the other side. Somehow, I got the single MPPT into the same network as the other two. That completely screwed up the charging of the battery on the side that had the single MPPT as it was getting totally wrong information about the lead acid battery it was trying to charge. The single MPPT was getting voltage information from the shunt on the LiFePO4 battery bank.

Once I realized what was going on I took the single MPPT out of the network and all was right with the world.

 

[davecason]

Oh there is just the one EPEver controller, the path is from the 330 w can solar panel in to the EPEver and then out of that battery side of the controller to the buss bars.

The Positive line from the EPEver controller goes thru a breaker that's connected to the buss bar, the buss bar also has a run to the inverter, and the last connection of the buss bar goes thru a 200A breaker to the positive post of the battery directly.

The Negative line from the EPEver controller goes directly on to the buss bar and that has a connection to the system minus of the Vicrton shunt and the battery minus of the shunt is going to the negative side of the Daly BMS ( 4S 12v 200A) and out of that blue neg line to the negative post of the battery.

There's not a lot going on since it's brand new.

Granted I should have the shunt connected before the BMS but I'm waiting on two cables to arrive then it'll be: NEG Battery post to the battery minus on the Shunt, then system minus of the Shunt to the blue Negative of the BMS and the the negative out of the BMS to the buss bar.

We'll see how it behaves in the morning one the panel starts producing .......