Our off grid cabin Victron/Trophy setup

[barthold]

Do you know if I could run the 120 volt loads off the inverter directly and use Autotransformer to step up 230v loads. Or Would I be better off running everything through the autotransformer?

Hi Chris,

I would run it all through the Autotransformer, and feed the output of that into a standard electrical panel for both 230V/120V loads. That also makes the Autotransformer 32A (or 100A) breaker a nice single disconnect for all loads. The Victron Autotransformer manual shows how to wire this up, and get a step up from 120V to 240V (and 120V).

Also, Victron publishes this, which I highly recommend. There's a lot of good information in that one page

https://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/AT-3-split-phase-120V-to-120-240V-with-Quattro-120V.pdf

Good writeup on how/why an autotransformer is here. Although this is on a boat, the fundamentals don't change.

Using the Victron Energy Autotransformer in a US 120/240 Volt system

Good luck!

 

[barthold]

Looks great!!!
I am looking at batteries for my Victron set up. Have you made any progress to get the trophy batteries to communicate with cerbo yet?

Not yet, I believe it is an issue with the Trophy BMS. Have not heard back from Dan @ Trophy yet. I think he's a bit busy after Will's latest video

 

[Chris72]

Hi Chris,

I would run it all through the Autotransformer, and feed the output of that into a standard electrical panel for both 230V/120V loads. That also makes the Autotransformer 32A (or 100A) breaker a nice single disconnect for all loads. The Victron Autotransformer manual shows how to wire this up, and get a step up from 120V to 240V (and 120V).

Also, Victron publishes this, which I highly recommend. There's a lot of good information in that one page

https://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/AT-3-split-phase-120V-to-120-240V-with-Quattro-120V.pdf

Good writeup on how/why an autotransformer is here. Although this is on a boat, the fundamentals don't change.

Using the Victron Energy Autotransformer in a US 120/240 Volt system

Good luck!

Thanks for the links I have the 100 amp ver. I was worried about the 28 amp neutral
Inbalance For all my 120v loads. My thought was to have a 120v loads panel running directly off the inverter then running a branch off that panel to Autotransformer to a 240v panel.

 

[barthold]

Thanks for the links I have the 100 amp ver. I was worried about the 28 amp neutral
Inbalance For all my 120v loads. My thought was to have a 120v loads panel running directly off the inverter then running a branch off that panel to Autotransformer to a 240v panel.

That should work as well, just one more panel. However a 28A inbalance is quite a lot (3.3KW). That would be basically two 15A circuits fully loaded on one leg, and nothing on the other leg. Do you really anticipate that being a problem?

 

[barthold]

I am looking at batteries for my Victron set up. Have you made any progress to get the trophy batteries to communicate with cerbo yet?

I figured it out! The Trophy Batteries now happily talk to the CerboGX. See below screenshot. The battery has a set of six dipswitches on it, which need to be set correctly in order for it to talk to the CerboGX. The dip switch settings I received from Trophy were incorrect. Here is the correct way of doing it:

There are two dipswitch setting rules you must follow, in order to get the 304 battery to talk to a Cerbo GX

1. The master battery MUST be address 0 (not address 1)
2. Dip switch 6 on the master battery must be on, all other dip switches off (5 and 6 on does NOT work)

Thus the master must have dip switch setting of 000001

From there on, I gave the rest of the batteries address 1, 2, 3 and 4 i.e. dipswitch setting as follows:

battery​	dip switch settings (leftmost digit is dip switch 1, rightmost is dip switch 6)​
Master​	000001​
2nd​	100000​
3rd​	010000​
4th​	110000​
5th​	001000​

Of course, extrapolate from here if you have more batteries. You can string up to 16 together.

 

[Chris72]

I figured it out! The Trophy Batteries now happily talk to the CerboGX. See below screenshot. The battery has a set of six dipswitches on it, which need to be set correctly in order for it to talk to the CerboGX. The dip switch settings I received from Trophy were incorrect. Here is the correct way of doing it:

There are two dipswitch setting rules you must follow, in order to get the 304 battery to talk to a Cerbo GX

1. The master battery MUST be address 0 (not address 1)
2. Dip switch 6 on the master battery must be on, all other dip switches off (5 and 6 on does NOT work)

Thus the master must have dip switch setting of 000001

From there on, I gave the rest of the batteries address 1, 2, 3 and 4 i.e. dipswitch setting as follows:

battery​	dip switch settings (leftmost digit is dip switch 1, rightmost is dip switch 6)​
Master​	000001​
2nd​	100000​
3rd​	010000​
4th​	110000​
5th​	001000​

Of course, extrapolate from here if you have more batteries. You can string up to 16 together.

View attachment 128534

Awesome!! I think I'm gonna go with those Trophy batteries. Now the question becomes what size to buy. If I am going to rack mount them 100ah might be better. It's between the 100 AH and the 220 AH. I'm leaning towards the 220AH. Also what's your thoughts on the cell options Eve vs Catl?

 

[barthold]

Awesome!! I think I'm gonna go with those Trophy batteries. Now the question becomes what size to buy. If I am going to rack mount them 100ah might be better. It's between the 100 AH and the 220 AH. I'm leaning towards the 220AH. Also what's your thoughts on the cell options Eve vs Catl?

What are your needs? What is your (constant) load, how much solar do you have, how much space, etc? That'll determine how much battery you need. All I can say, get more battery than you think you need today, you'll likely need more in the future Personally, I was considering five of the 220Ah batteries at first, but I'm glad I went with the bigger 304 Ah batteries. The extra capacity surely is nice.

As for EVE vs CATL cells, both are great cells as far as I understand it, and that is good enough for me. Trophy's warranty is what is the important thing to me, and I care less what cells they use.

 

[tellingson]

I figured it out! The Trophy Batteries now happily talk to the CerboGX. See below screenshot. The battery has a set of six dipswitches on it, which need to be set correctly in order for it to talk to the CerboGX. The dip switch settings I received from Trophy were incorrect. Here is the correct way of doing it:

There are two dipswitch setting rules you must follow, in order to get the 304 battery to talk to a Cerbo GX

1. The master battery MUST be address 0 (not address 1)
2. Dip switch 6 on the master battery must be on, all other dip switches off (5 and 6 on does NOT work)

Thus the master must have dip switch setting of 000001

From there on, I gave the rest of the batteries address 1, 2, 3 and 4 i.e. dipswitch setting as follows:

battery​	dip switch settings (leftmost digit is dip switch 1, rightmost is dip switch 6)​
Master​	000001​
2nd​	100000​
3rd​	010000​
4th​	110000​
5th​	001000​

Of course, extrapolate from here if you have more batteries. You can string up to 16 together.

View attachment 128534

I’m not sure if this is an issue with Trophy, but I know the battery monitoring on the Cerbo GX has issues with 16 cell batteries getting up to 100%. The SOK 48v100 batteries have to modify some of the underlying code to work. I don’t know if this has been fixed but it was has been an issue for a while.

@HighTechLab put in an issue on their GitHub repo. Hopefully we can get enough complaints to get it fixed if it isn’t already.

 

[barthold]

I’m not sure if this is an issue with Trophy, but I know the battery monitoring on the Cerbo GX has issues with 16 cell batteries getting up to 100%. The SOK 48v100 batteries have to modify some of the underlying code to work. I don’t know if this has been fixed but it was has been an issue for a while.

@HighTechLab put in an issue on their GitHub repo. Hopefully we can get enough complaints to get it fixed if it isn’t already.

Hi Tellingson, thanks for that! Do you have any more info, or a link to more, about this issue? Would love to know more.

 

[Chris72]

What are your needs? What is your (constant) load, how much solar do you have, how much space, etc? That'll determine how much battery you need. All I can say, get more battery than you think you need today, you'll likely need more in the future Personally, I was considering five of the 220Ah batteries at first, but I'm glad I went with the bigger 304 Ah batteries. The extra capacity surely is nice.

As for EVE vs CATL cells, both are great cells as far as I understand it, and that is good enough for me. Trophy's warranty is what is the important thing to me, and I care less what cells they use.

I am at the beginning stages. I only have 12 365w REC Solar pannals planning for more. I live in AZ so lots of A/C I also have an EV the house is all electric. I still need to buy the cervo gx, lynx power distributor and I am going with rs mppt 450/100. I am always open to suggestions. My plan to start was to get it enough battery capacity to get me through on peak hours 2pm-8pm. With a/c running. We have A super off peak time at 11pm to 5 am for now I can charge until I get enough solar.

 

[tellingson]

Hi Tellingson, thanks for that! Do you have any more info, or a link to more, about this issue? Would love to know more.

It looks like it got resolved 3 weeks ago. If you are on the latest firmware, you should be good to go.

SOK Owner / Operator Manual: Chapter 4 – Victron Communication Bug Fix – Current Connected

www.currentconnected.com

 

[Nobodybusiness]

Those panels aren't small or light, specs are pretty close to the Q-Cells 480 that I was considering.

Can you even find those not in Bifacial anymore?

 

[barthold]

So nominal rating for my 11 Silab panels is 490W x 11 = 5390W. But today with some nice sunshine and 30F outside, I actually got 7942W, or 47% more than their rating. It is actually hard to believe! Or VRM has a bug somewhere....

 

[tellingson]

So nominal rating for my 11 Silab panels is 490W x 11 = 5390W. But today with some nice sunshine and 30F outside, I actually got 7942W, or 47% more than their rating. It is actually hard to believe! Or VRM has a bug somewhere....


View attachment 128913

Is that 7942W total? Or is that how much it was expecting to produce over an hour at the current rate?

 

[barthold]

Is that 7942W total? Or is that how much it was expecting to produce over an hour at the current rate?

That is instantaneous power that the panels deliver to the Victron MPPT controller (add up the 4556W + 3386W in the screenshot. I have two strings of panels). Since the MPPT controller has about a 5% loss, the output power is 7503W, which is also shown in the screenshot.

 

[SkyMo]

How did you figure out your switch settings? I don't know of any docs that tell you what they actually mean. It looks like the first 4 are the battery address. I thought 5 and 6 set it to be a master battery, but you are setting just the last switch...

 

[barthold]

How did you figure out your switch settings? I don't know of any docs that tell you what they actually mean. It looks like the first 4 are the battery address. I thought 5 and 6 set it to be a master battery, but you are setting just the last switch...

Yes the first four are the address, so you can have 2^4 = 16 addresses. It seemed to make some sense to me that the master battery is address 0, and not address 1. So I tried address 0. As soon as I did that, the CerboGX showed that packets were being received over the BMS-CAN bus, but it still showed an error. But that was real progress, as I had communication with the battery now! After that I just experimented with the four settings for the last two dip switches, and found the one that worked, so that the CerboGX could interpret the BMS-CAN traffic.

After that, I looked at the battery SOC that the master reported to the CerboGX and compared that to the SOC reported on the display of the Trophy battery. I first plugged in a single battery, and the SOC reported was correct. Then I plugged in two, three, four and all five, and looked at the SOC reported each time. Which is an average of the SOC states of each battery, which is exactly what you want reported. So at that point I knew the communication between batteries was working also.

 

[AHTrimble]

Hey barthold,
Nice system!!
I too am a Victron fan...love the built-in inter-connectivity, quality and the reliability...Tier 1 gear!
I also purchased Trophy batteries as well...I love em! And Dan is great to have as a resource, really knowledgeable.

 

[barthold]

Hey barthold,
Nice system!!
I too am a Victron fan...love the built-in inter-connectivity, quality and the reliability...Tier 1 gear!
I also purchased Trophy batteries as well...I love em! And Dan is great to have as a resource, really knowledgeable.

Cool! Which batteries did you buy?

 

[AHTrimble]

Cool! Which batteries did you buy?

I already had 2 Elite 205ah 16cell 48v/51.2v LifePO4 batteries so I wanted to match the new battery to the older ones for current sharing considerations.
So I purchased 1 Trophy 220ah 16cell 48v/51.2v LifePO4 batteries. (https://trophybattery.com/index.php/model-48v220e-1/)