Sol-Ark-8k-48-ST. Grid Tied - Collect Excess Solar to Battery - Power loads from Battery

[slypig]

Current Situation
Solar system is AC coupled to Home Breaker Panel. Unused excess solar is exported to grid.


fig1

I purchased the Sol-Ark from a gentleman up in Wyoming who bought it 5 years ago but never unboxed it. His plans changed and it has never been connected to anything. I got it from him a month or so ago. I called in to Sol-Ark and the wifi dongle on it was so old they didn't know how to add it to their system. Sent me a newer dongle that has ethernet/wifi and yesterday they were able to connect to it and "it's all up to date".

Goals using Sol-Ark 8k 48 ST
- Collect as much excess solar as possible, save to batteries.
- Batteries full? excess solar continues to export to grid.
- I DO NOT want to export from batteries to GRID, ever.
- Not too interested in a critical loads panel (but can/would do it)
- Grid down is rare, not too concerned about that.


fig 2

I have connected equipment up like this diagram.
I've not yet enabled any settings related to:
- TOU
- charge settings
- discharge settings

'Limit to Home' is checked. What I'm trying to do is learn as I go and see the results to prove what I'm doing is working the way I intended them to.

The batteries are running the Sol-Ark and nothing is coming in from the grid, which makes sense as there is no load on and I've not told it to charge the batteries.

Before I made further changes I wanted to see if the Sol-Ark is seeing what is happening between the meter and the breakers.

Issue:
- I don't see any CT data on what is going IN/OUT of my home breaker panel.
- Inspected the CTs and they are connected with the L pointing toward the meter.
- Connected a multimeter to the CTs and see changing reading depending upon how much power is being imported/exported right now.
- Called Sol-Ark Tech Support and they tell me that the CTs will not read in this setup.

Solution from Sol-Ark
I need to route the Solar, AC Coupled, into the GEN port and enable 'Limited to Home', which is a setting that I'm aware of. I do not want the Sol-Ark to ever send to the Grid from the batteries. I do have an export agreement, but I don't want them getting power outside of those hours that I have excess solar being produced. I especially do not ever want power from the batteries to go out to the grid.

From what I was told my revised diagram should be like this below:

fig3

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I was wondering of those of you that are doing the same,
- saving excess solar to battery
- using stored power saved to battery for loads until solar is back
what have you found to be the best solution?

---

If I HAVE to bring the AC solar into the Sol-Ark then I might just make a Critical Loads panel and move over circuits that I want out of the Main panel.


fig 4

I'm lazy. I want this to be simple. If my inverter suddenly stops working I want to have power in the house the way I have it now.

 

[slypig]

Current my setup is Fig4.

I have one circuit on the Loads panel just so we can test it out.

Sol-Ark have taken a look at my inverter and it needed some more magic performing on it. I assume it was related to firmware or some settings that I don't have access to in the menus or through the PowerView application. Once they did that the arrows started to appear on the main screen telling me that power was coming in from the GEN and to the GRID and then once we switched on some charge settings it powered the battery and started to charge.

I'm still looking for the simplest answer, so if you have any input to share or Links to conversations/threads on this matter, please do.

Many thanks

 

[slypig]

The sol-ark tech was trying his best to figure out why the inverter was misbehaving. I did mention that it was a old/new unit and the last tech had "got it all up to date" which may or may not be true. He ran some more updates on it and then it seems to change how it was performing.

We will, again, look at it today and see if we can get it all to make sense. Last night we made it charge the battery from the incoming solar, by which time was quite low in production but it can be seen to drop off in unison with that incoming power.





The CT sensors are now reading the correct power in the main panel it is connected to. This pleases me because one of the techs that I spoke to told me that the CTs were working and they wouldn't read the way that I thought they would. I'm not new to using energy monitoring tools. I have numerous CTs report the values so, my thought is that, it doesn't matter what the sol-ark is doing, CTs read and report activity, they should still read it what is happening.

Looks like the changes they made last night are working better now. I can follow the incoming solar from around 6pm until it stops completely around 7:30pm. The house power usage is being tracked. I can even see the car charger I have running hit the panel after 9:30pm.

I'm thinking that I still want to go back to fig 3, unless a critical panel is the best idea. I'd like to put a manual transfer switch on it so if I have issues with the inverter/battery and can just switch the connection and bypass the inverter.

 

[DIYrich]

I'm still looking for the simplest answer, so if you have any input to share or Links to conversations/threads on this matter, please do.

Answer to which question? If the AC PV is coming into the Gen Port, keep it there. That is the best place for it. You can go directly into the panel, but that reduces your options during grid down.

Never exporting from batteries is easy.

Fig 3 doesn't give you power during grid down. Not a problem since you don't care.
Fig 4 allows powering the critical loads panel when grid down.

 

[slypig]

Answer to which question? If the AC PV is coming into the Gen Port, keep it there. That is the best place for it. You can go directly into the panel, but that reduces your options during grid down.

Never exporting from batteries is easy.

Fig 3 doesn't give you power during grid down. Not a problem since you don't care.
Fig 4 allows powering the critical loads panel when grid down.

My apologies.

I went back and made the single question stand out with bold font to make it easier to see.

Following your suggestion, I have setup fig 4 at this moment. I like the option of having "off-grid" ability should the grid be down. I also like to have cleaner voltage from batteries, not that our grid is that bad around here. Maybe that is just a myth that I've not researched enough yet.

I'm very sorry. I am finding the wording of the Sol-Ark manuals to be a little difficult to follow as I'm not yet used to all the terminology. I am trying to be very careful about not exporting power that the power company is not expecting to see from me. They are expecting to see me deliver solar, minus what I use. I'm attempting to collect as much of that as I can before they get it.

The three sol-ark support techs that I've dealt with were great to work with yet didn't seem to know how to setup the system using the menu items either. It could be the possibility that the system wasn't, and still isn't, functioning properly as it should. Settings might not be behaving the way they expected for them either.

The batteries are charging at a maximum of 10a. and have been since they were at 43% SOC. (now at 90%) I understand that batteries typically need to slow down as they get closer to 100% but I think that the settings that I've changed are not updating how the inverter is handling the batteries.

I've reviewed the battery specs Pytes v5 100ah says that 75a is recommended. Then another article from Pytes says to set the charge amps to 50a x the number of batteries. Having two connected in parallel, I suspect that 100a is good. I also assume that it is 100amps at DC voltage, so I'm not to look at the breakers to AC for limits on batter charge/discharge.

I am trying to learn. I like to learn for myself, it's fun. Learning through the wisdom of others is much preferred and I honestly think that my hardware might have some misbehavior and not just me misunderstanding the settings in the menus. I'm going to keep on trying.

 

[DIYrich]

Never sell from battery:
1) limiter screen, other tab: check batt first
2) limiter screen, limiter tab:
Grid sell: check, and set to watts of your pv (6000)
Limit power to home: check
Limit power to load: uncheck
Time of use: check

Power column: 8000
Batt column: 20% or whatever you want to reserve for grid down.
Charge column: uncheck all
Sell column: uncheck all

 

[DIYrich]

Charge rate: max 0.30c, or 60 amps in your case. You could go up to 0.50c, or 100 amps, but I would Limit to 0.30c. All dc amps.

Battery screen, batt tab, max A charge: 60
Max A discharge of 200a or lower?

 

[slypig]

Never sell from battery:
1) limiter screen, other tab: check batt first

Reviewed settings this morning. Step 1) matching.
What I think that the 'Zero-export Power' setting is doing:
- telling the inverter bring in at least 20watts of Grid power to make sure we don't send out any out

Never sell from battery:
1) limiter screen, other tab: check batt first
2) limiter screen, limiter tab:
Grid sell: check, and set to watts of your pv (6000)
Limit power to home: check
Limit power to load: uncheck
Time of use: check
Power column: 8000
Batt column: 20% or whatever you want to reserve for grid down.
Charge column: uncheck all
Sell column: uncheck all

Limiter Screen - Limiter Tab:
- before your advised changes.



Limiter Screen - Limiter Tab:
- Applied your advised changes.



My Thoughts or what I think I'm learning from these.
- 'Charge' and 'Sell' columns only related to the Grid
- No relation to solar incoming on PV or 'AC-Coupled on Gen import' those auto go to the batteries anyway as we checked that box 'batt first'
- By unchecking them we are telling the inverter to NOT import or export from the Grid for the battery charging.
- not sure why we checked the box for 'Grid Sell' but if I was correct on the Charge/Sell columns, it's not going to happen anyway.

 

[slypig]

Charge rate: max 0.30c, or 60 amps in your case. You could go up to 0.50c, or 100 amps, but I would Limit to 0.30c. All dc amps.

Battery screen, batt tab, max A charge: 60
Max A discharge of 200a or lower?

Applied these changes to match your advice.




Readings from my Emporia energy monitor:



Reading from the Powerview page:


close enough for now.

Thank you @DIYrich for your directions. I'll see what I learn from this.

I need more batteries, obviously, but I wanted to learn more before I got too far into this.

 

[DIYrich]

- not sure why we checked the box for 'Grid Sell' but if I was correct on the Charge/Sell columns, it's not going to happen anyway.

So you can sell excess PV to the grid.

 

[slypig]

So you can sell excess PV to the grid.

Thank you.

It seemed to be doing that before, so maybe this inverter needs some more love from a sol-ark techs. I've noticed that the screens on the Powerview service don't seem to show much, the main screen doesn't show power to the loads which I know are pulling between 15-400 watts throughout the day. But this is behaving, so far, as I intended it to.

I'm starting to take my solar power more seriously and maybe I'll gather enough batteries to effectively become off-grid and just use the grid for backup. It will be a journey. one that I'm having some fun with right now. no idea what I'm really doing, but grateful for this forum, Will's videos and community members like you willing to share knowledge that you've earned.

 

[slypig]

Found a link to a document that I've not seen before. This is helping to answer some questions I have about all the options that I see and don't understand what they mean. The vague unit display menu and Powerview webpage UI don't help as much as I'd hoped, the manual supplied with the equipment or on the website that I looked around didn't seem to volunteer this either.

https://www.sol-ark.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/PowerView-Pro-Settings-V1.0-OCT-8-2021.pdf

Thank you to @CAD for posting this on thread: https://diysolarforum.com/threads/sol-ark-12k-signal-on-message.37190/