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New 10kw NHX AIO From Watts247

Kornbread said:
When considering a luxpower 12k, it was stated that the eg4 18kpv updates would work on the luxpower12k. YMMV

IIRC, Watts has been working on refining the software on these units for a ~year. It would leave me a bit miffed if someone with no skin in the game came along, used what I had built for their own profit, and stole sales.
Click to expand...

I would buy it from him if I could buy it off Amazon. I don't believe he lists it on Amazon.

I've brought it up with many of the vendors here before, and they don't like Amazon's abusive treatment and extra expense incurred for putting stuff on there.

I don't like the return, shipping and warranty procedures in place at many of the vendors favored here.. so I don't buy from them unless it is absolutely necessary.

I actually like dealing with Amazon's faceless, dead in the eyes, no soul having sales system as a buyer. You know where you stand. Everybody is treated equally, like garbage possibly, but equally. I'll never have to, or get to, talk to anybody on the phone with Amazon. That's a huge plus to me, I deal with enough people on the phone everyday as it is.:ROFLMAO:
 
The problem with re-badged hardware is that the original device is certified but the badged one is not seen as certified.
So if I show a re-badged version of something to my power company for approval, they immediately say no because it's not on their list.

This could mean lots of potential lost sales which makes me wonder why the industry is doing that, it seems very stupid.

I'm putting this post together to try and help myself and others trying to swim through this mess of what's what.
 
diWhy said:
The problem with re-badged hardware is that the original device is certified but the badged one is not seen as certified.
So if I show a re-badged version of something to my power company for approval, they immediately say no because it's not on their list.

This could mean lots of potential lost sales which makes me wonder why the industry is doing that, it seems very stupid.

I'm putting this post together to try and help myself and others trying to swim through this mess of what's what.
Click to expand...
Not true, you need to read thru this thread. https://diysolarforum.com/threads/e...-in-cali-as-of-aug-28-2023.72365/post-1015818 As I stated, looking at a list is outdated, you need to use the interactive system shown in the thread I linked.
 
diWhy said:
The problem with re-badged hardware is that the original device is certified but the badged one is not seen as certified.
So if I show a re-badged version of something to my power company for approval, they immediately say no because it's not on their list.

This could mean lots of potential lost sales which makes me wonder why the industry is doing that, it seems very stupid.

I'm putting this post together to try and help myself and others trying to swim through this mess of what's what.
Click to expand...
The manufacturer's model number is on the side of the inverter and in the box are the ul certs.
 
Kornbread said:
For LCD updates, Ian recommends a 4-8g, class4 sd card and usb adapter. Never found a 4-8g sd card. Settled on a 16g. LCD update was successful with the 16g. It is noted that larger sd cards and any card not class4, may not read correctly.

Firmware updates to the inverter take the 'hybrid' software downloaded from Watts247, usb male-a to male micro, and a computer. Not absolutely sure about the small end of the usb cable ... I 'think' it's a micro.

After the update, both the 'home loads' and 'inverter' page report the same, or nearly the same power output, which is nice because those reported numbers are now within my margin of error when using a clamp meter and measuring the actual inverter output at the sub-panel feed.

Oddly enough, battery+load╪pv in SolarAssistant's dashboard. There is a missing ~500w.

Also appears there is a new American Standard Classification settings under the grid tab.

Old firmware.
View attachment 222243
New firmware
View attachment 222244

New options under grid tab.
View attachment 222245
Click to expand...
Where did you find the file exactly?
 
I am in the club.

Random observations;

It's quiet but when it's working it gets pretty loud. I think it's all those tiny fans.

I live close enough to watt247 that I just drove down there and bought it in person. I asked him about warranty support. He said it goes through him. Very nice assuming he stays in business.

PV power is lower than my last inverter which was an ip6048. Perhaps it was lying to me.

The CTs... really that's all I need to do for zero export? Find the internal CT, cut it out and run a wire to the mainboard?

So far so good but here's my big problem so far; I don't have enough of the settings exposed to automate this properly with SA.

SA can change the basic modes, battery, self consumption etc. It cannot change the advanced modes.

In basic mode the max charge current setting covers both the solar charging and the AC charging. Advanced mode has different switches for both but SA can't do advanced mode.

I'm hoping that SA will expose more functionality soon. As it is I have to manually make a few changes over the course of the day.
 
Hey - just wanted to post back to the forum some hopefully helpful information... I have not seen anyone talk about or report experience with AC coupling a grid tie inverter to the output of the NHX. I had spoken with Ian a while back, and he said that it will indeed handle that. Since the NHX doesn't do frequency shifting like Solark or Victron, it doesn't handle making the grid tie inverters that are connected to it throttle back in an off-grid setup.

I hooked up a Growatt 3000 TL-X grid tie inverter with 6 - 350watt Rec Solar panels to the 2nd output of the NHX. I ran the following tests:
- Grid connected, more power coming in from GT than being consumed - charged the batteries and offset the loads
- Grid disconnected, no loads on the output of the NHX. It just charged the batteries.

There are two cautions using the system this way:
- If Grid is not connected and battery is full, or GT power exceeds your allowed charge current, bus voltage will go up and likely cause a vbus fault
- If Grid is connected, and you don't want to feed power back into the grid (self-consumption), you will need to have a means of shutting off the GT inverters or throttling them back. You could likely use the dry contact relay on the NHX to control this. Or you could simply dedicate the 2nd output port of the NHX, and program it to shut off when the battery SOC gets to 90% or something like that.

The Growatt GT I have works with an energy meter and will throttle back to near zero export, if set up to do so. I plan on utilizing this to feed power from my garage, where I have solar panels set up, by no convenient way to run PV wire to the house where my batteries are with the NHX.

One other thing I have done, in my setup which is kind of unrelated is - I used 3 wires to hook up two parallel strings of panels. Its 10 ga, and I am running only about 9 amps per string, so having a common negative wire is not a problem for the current rating of the wire. I did some research before doing this, and found it is not unheard of. I only did it to get around a temporary issue with my wiring setup. Have been running this way two days, without issue. Wire is still running 10 amps below its rated ampacity, so all's good.
 
CuriousJohn said:
Hey - just wanted to post back to the forum some hopefully helpful information... I have not seen anyone talk about or report experience with AC coupling a grid tie inverter to the output of the NHX. I had spoken with Ian a while back, and he said that it will indeed handle that. Since the NHX doesn't do frequency shifting like Solark or Victron, it doesn't handle making the grid tie inverters that are connected to it throttle back in an off-grid setup.

I hooked up a Growatt 3000 TL-X grid tie inverter with 6 - 350watt Rec Solar panels to the 2nd output of the NHX. I ran the following tests:
- Grid connected, more power coming in from GT than being consumed - charged the batteries and offset the loads
- Grid disconnected, no loads on the output of the NHX. It just charged the batteries.

There are two cautions using the system this way:
- If Grid is not connected and battery is full, or GT power exceeds your allowed charge current, bus voltage will go up and likely cause a vbus fault
- If Grid is connected, and you don't want to feed power back into the grid (self-consumption), you will need to have a means of shutting off the GT inverters or throttling them back. You could likely use the dry contact relay on the NHX to control this. Or you could simply dedicate the 2nd output port of the NHX, and program it to shut off when the battery SOC gets to 90% or something like that.

The Growatt GT I have works with an energy meter and will throttle back to near zero export, if set up to do so. I plan on utilizing this to feed power from my garage, where I have solar panels set up, by no convenient way to run PV wire to the house where my batteries are with the NHX.

One other thing I have done, in my setup which is kind of unrelated is - I used 3 wires to hook up two parallel strings of panels. Its 10 ga, and I am running only about 9 amps per string, so having a common negative wire is not a problem for the current rating of the wire. I did some research before doing this, and found it is not unheard of. I only did it to get around a temporary issue with my wiring setup. Have been running this way two days, without issue. Wire is still running 10 amps below its rated ampacity, so all's good.
Click to expand...
Oh yeah - the only other thing I didn't like about the GT setup, is that the power fed in via GT does not show up anywhere as power produced. It shows up as a reduced load on the inverter and battery charging. If you wanted to track that production, you'd need to have an independent meter to aggregate that power into the total.
 
Has anyone had issues with their nhx display freezing? If so, are you using SolarAssistant? What firmware version is the nhx running?
 
CuriousJohn said:
Oh yeah - the only other thing I didn't like about the GT setup, is that the power fed in via GT does not show up anywhere as power produced. It shows up as a reduced load on the inverter and battery charging. If you wanted to track that production, you'd need to have an independent meter to aggregate that power into the total.
Click to expand...
What is the idle consumption of the 10KW NHX?
 
Haven't had the display freeze. I do have an issue that came up today, probably unrelated.

After upgrading to 2024-07-02 it won't communicate with the inverter. It sees it once and then it says invalid response, retrying...

I guess I need to figure out how to downgrade.
 
koppted said:
What is the idle consumption of the 10KW NHX?
Click to expand...
My not so accurate measurements say ~80w.
Osmethne said:
Haven't had the display freeze. I do have an issue that came up today, probably unrelated.

After upgrading to 2024-07-02 it won't communicate with the inverter. It sees it once and then it says invalid response, retrying...

I guess I need to figure out how to downgrade.
Click to expand...
Which inverter firmware are you running?

Upgraded earlier this week to SA Software version: 2024-05-23. No issues so far, fingers crossed.

Was previously running SA Software version 2024-01-03 and over the course of 8 days, there were 2 instances of the inverter display freezing, which was exactly the same data SA was reporting. Battery data, reported separately to SA by the JK bmss', never missed a beat. The RSD button also stopped functioning.

^Oh, this always happened at midnight.

Never had an issue with the older nhx firmware, other than the loads being under reported by roughly 1/2.
 
Kornbread said:
My not so accurate measurements say ~80w.

Which inverter firmware are you running?

Upgraded earlier this week to SA Software version: 2024-05-23. No issues so far, fingers crossed.

Was previously running SA Software version 2024-01-03 and over the course of 8 days, there were 2 instances of the inverter display freezing, which was exactly the same data SA was reporting. Battery data, reported separately to SA by the JK bmss', never missed a beat. The RSD button also stopped functioning.

^Oh, this always happened at midnight.

Never had an issue with the older nhx firmware, other than the loads being under reported by roughly 1/2.
Click to expand...

arm 2.0322 02.10
dsp 1.0413 03.35
hmi 1.0004

I think the version of SA I have is beta. If you're in the beta program you might want to hold off on upgrading.
 
Looks like they are several firmware updates out there.

arm ver: 2.0306 220217
dsp ver: 1.0406 130336
hmi ver: 1.0008
 
SolarAssistant says the 340 usb serial adapter is the problem. @Osmethne do you have one of those between the inverter and Pi? This is that cheap serial adapter that Watts247 shows in their videos for connecting SA to the NHX. I'm not 100% convinced since Watts247 appears to be running several of these inverters using that adapter and SA.
xx
1720108217510.png
 
Kornbread said:
SolarAssistant says the 340 usb serial adapter is the problem. @Osmethne do you have one of those between the inverter and Pi? This is that cheap serial adapter that Watts247 shows in their videos for connecting SA to the NHX. I'm not 100% convinced since Watts247 appears to be running several of these inverters using that adapter and SA.
xx
View attachment 226492
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Is it showing an error for it in the log?
I show that same device with different AIOs
 

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42OhmsPA said:
Is it showing an error for it in the log?
I show that same device with different AIOs
Click to expand...
I'm not totally sold on this being the sole issue as the inverter ran for a couple months without freezing. Only after the nhx firmware update, that fixed the erroneous load calculations, did the nhx freeze issue appear.

From SolarAssistant:

It looks like you have a QinHeng Electronics HL-340serial converter. This converter has been shown to be quite problematic at times, while it can sometimes work it tends to give errors over time. Those chips tend to give system-level messages in the Kernel Logs (Configuration Tab > Scroll down to USB Devices > Click "view detail"). There are three possible factors that may be affecting it:
Click to expand...
 
Kornbread said:
I'm not totally sold on this being the sole issue as the inverter ran for a couple months without freezing. Only after the nhx firmware update, that fixed the erroneous load calculations, did the nhx freeze issue appear.

From SolarAssistant:
Click to expand...
Could you roll back to the previous firmware? I'd rather have poor load calculations than freezes.
Hopefully Watts gets another firmware out.
 
Kornbread said:
SolarAssistant says the 340 usb serial adapter is the problem. @Osmethne do you have one of those between the inverter and Pi? This is that cheap serial adapter that Watts247 shows in their videos for connecting SA to the NHX. I'm not 100% convinced since Watts247 appears to be running several of these inverters using that adapter and SA.
xx
View attachment 226492
Click to expand...

My usb devices are as such:

1720130721639.png

Also, maybe not relevant to your concerns I downgraded SA to 2024-06-18. Everything is fine now.

I have never changed the firmware version of the inverter.

The anomalies I've in about the 3 weeks I've been running this are:

Once the power went out to the house for 90 seconds. For some reason the backup functionality didn't kick in so the entire house was dark for a minute and a half. I wasn't awake for this so my information is imperfect.

Last week I left it in battery only mode for about 4 days. There was a battery overvoltage alert and it wouldn't interact with the batteries until I rebooted the inverter.

The PV input is roughly 15% lower than the IP6048 this inverter replaced. I don't know if the IP6048 was lying to me or if there some kind of issue with the MPPT algorithm in this inverter.

Once last week I noticed it after switching to self consumption it took about 8 minutes for it to honor that setting and stop drawing from the grid to charge the batteries. Perhaps another firmware bug.

Also, this is what I used to communicate with the inverter. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081MB6PN2?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details. $15 so might be worth trying if you suspect the adapter is the issue.
 
I had hoped this was going to replace the aging blue GTILs on my garage wall. The way this thread is going I’m having second thoughts.
 
Where there's software there's bugs. I don't think there's such a thing as an AOI without its quirks. This one is working out well for me so far but then again this is only the second AOI I've used.
 
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