bb12489
New Member
I've done a lot of research over the past few days after realizing that my setup is probably not configured correctly to fully utilize our solar capability while being plugged into shore power on our bus. A brief overview of our system is below. Basically we want to be able to have the solar support our daily loads and charge our batteries. Then use the battery, and grid as fall backs when the solar can't keep up with higher AC loads. Right now our loads are always supported by the grid, and our charge controllers are sitting there doing nothing. The only way I've found around this is to toggle the inverter to "Inverter Only" while the sun is shinning, then back to "On" when the sun goes down.
I've read that ESS is what I'm looking for, but Victron states not to use this in a mobile application due to the fear of feeding power back into the grid, even though there is an option to not feed in to grid (does it actually not feed back power?). The other method I've seen involved setting up a virtual switch to ignore ac input under certain conditions (battery voltage and power draw). I messed around with setting some voltages for absorption/float higher on the charge controllers than on the inverter, but I think I'm missing some info here. I still can't get the solar to pick up the loads during the day. I also tried the new setting for solar priority, but that's not really doing what I want either.
I would appreciate any help on this, and I'm happy to share screenshots of my settings from ve.configure, and Venus OS if that helps.
I've read that ESS is what I'm looking for, but Victron states not to use this in a mobile application due to the fear of feeding power back into the grid, even though there is an option to not feed in to grid (does it actually not feed back power?). The other method I've seen involved setting up a virtual switch to ignore ac input under certain conditions (battery voltage and power draw). I messed around with setting some voltages for absorption/float higher on the charge controllers than on the inverter, but I think I'm missing some info here. I still can't get the solar to pick up the loads during the day. I also tried the new setting for solar priority, but that's not really doing what I want either.
I would appreciate any help on this, and I'm happy to share screenshots of my settings from ve.configure, and Venus OS if that helps.
- Quattro 24/5000 Inverter
- 3x 24v EG4 LiFePower4 batteries
- 2x 150/60 Solar Charge Controllers
- Victron Smart Shunt 500
- Lynx Power in
- Lynx Distributor
- 8x 360w LG NeON panels
- Rpi4 with latest Venus OS