LVX6048 Battery Terminal

[iamrich]

This happened last year, but I finally got around to disassembling my burned out LVX6048. It looks like it was a bad soldering job that caused this issue, but I think the battery terminal design is just poorly designed. There is a little daughter board that the battery cables connect to, and then two bus bars jump that to the mainboard. There was black/burn marks on all four connections, but the negative pad on the mainboard won the race to release the magic smoke. Unit is out of warranty, so MPP Solar said all they can do is sell me a replacement mainboard. Not sure if the other Voltronic clones have this same issue, but it might be worth checking if you have one.

 

[OffGridForGood]

How much was the replacement board cost?

 

[ericfx1984]

How much was the replacement board cost?

Curious

 

[iamrich]

How much was the replacement board cost?

$175 for the mainboard, plus shipping from Taiwan. I decided to move on from this inverter (yeah, sucks since I paid $1600 for it when it was all the rage). I replaced it with a spare EG4 6000EX that I had bought last year for $1000 shipped, but I have an SRNE 10K mounted to the wall that I need to get off my lazy butt and wire up. I think just about everyone (retailers) are moving away from this Voltronic model. I was convinced I needed the transformer-based inverter to cover any serious amp draw items, but a year later none of those have materialized.

 

[crossy]

I reckon that's fixable with a cleanup and bit of ingenuity.

Depends upon how enthusiastic one is of course.

 

[OffGridForGood]

Post it on the Do It Yourself Market Place - with the part number ref and price for the MB, maybe someone is interested, and you get some of your Money back.
Maybe.

 

[iamrich]

I reckon that's fixable with a cleanup and bit of ingenuity.

Depends upon how enthusiastic one is of course.

Yeah, I thought about it, but honestly, I could never trust it to run autonomously. I mean, it would probably work fine for a single use inverter (like to weld or something) or a mobile power center that isn't going to be left unattended.

 

[iamrich]

Post it on the Do It Yourself Market Place - with the part number ref and price for the MB, maybe someone is interested, and you get some of your Money back.
Maybe.

I am not too broken up about it. The way I look at it, I have a complete set of spares (less the MB).

 

[robbob2112]

So the connector was hot enough to burn its way from the board. That would be a fairly simple cleanup and fix, assuming it was just a bad connection at the nut that caused the heat.

Clean everything up and replace the lifted pad with new thicker copper and solder everything back together. Probably use silver solder and flux for better conductivity.

Then you would have a spare unit. If you are just gonna junk it I would pay shipping to here so I could fiddle with it.

Note to fix it right you would need a hot air rework staion so you could flow through solder through the board and connect front to back.

Robert