jballou
New Member
Hey all, long time lurker and just started building out my home system in earnest this last month or so. I made the mistake of going through a local solar company that has been... less than ideal, so I got them to just cut me a check for the battery segment of my install to do myself rather than start another fiasco with them. I'm pretty new to everything, but I've managed to get a pretty decent setup with 8x 48v packs wired in parallel with BMS run through an old APC UPS to handle my critical loads when we lose power, which is pretty frequent.
I've done about 240 solder connections in the past couple days as I attached custom ribbon cables for the BMS and the connectors to be able to link everything up, and went to get the main bus set up this morning so I could gang them together and test the BMS functions. I'd gotten all the BMS and power leads checked out with the multimeter, and thought I was in the home stretch, when I plugged in the first 48v pack to the aggregating bus and was surprised to have a loud "FZZZT" ring out as my beautiful XT90 connector was converted to photons.
Turns out the bus bar I bought was a junction block where each pair of terminals is a straight-across connection, when I had assumed that each side was an isolated bus of ganged terminals for grouping in parallel. So my plugging in the connector created a short, and I learned a (luckily inexpensive) lesson about double-checking the easy stuff.
I've done about 240 solder connections in the past couple days as I attached custom ribbon cables for the BMS and the connectors to be able to link everything up, and went to get the main bus set up this morning so I could gang them together and test the BMS functions. I'd gotten all the BMS and power leads checked out with the multimeter, and thought I was in the home stretch, when I plugged in the first 48v pack to the aggregating bus and was surprised to have a loud "FZZZT" ring out as my beautiful XT90 connector was converted to photons.
Turns out the bus bar I bought was a junction block where each pair of terminals is a straight-across connection, when I had assumed that each side was an isolated bus of ganged terminals for grouping in parallel. So my plugging in the connector created a short, and I learned a (luckily inexpensive) lesson about double-checking the easy stuff.
