Looks like I may have declared victory prematurely. I got the overcurrent fault again this morning. It wasn’t even full sun at the time, and we weren’t home. Power draw to the house couldn’t have been much and the PV was only about 13 kw when the batteries got to full charge. (The last couple of days they were closer to 20 kw and did not fault). So I guess I’ll try float voltage next.
Sol-Ark TOU and Overcurrent Fault
- Thread starter robertk
- Start date
LifePO4 should NEVER be charged/absorb with more than MAX 3.65V per cell.
You can damage the batteries.
Absorb should be max 3.65V per cell or lower, I prefer 3.55V to enlong the lifetime of the cells.
Float should be lower as I wrote above. 3.45V float is a good number per cell.
You can damage the batteries.
Absorb should be max 3.65V per cell or lower, I prefer 3.55V to enlong the lifetime of the cells.
Float should be lower as I wrote above. 3.45V float is a good number per cell.
Well I called the battery manufacturer (Storz-Power) to talk about these issues, and the person I spoke to said that if the battery is in closed loop communication, the battery itself will tell the inverter what voltages to use, so it won't do my any good to set it. He said they could log into the inverter remotely and check things if I shared my plant in PV Pro, but apparently I can't do that because the electrician set it up and while I can change settings all day long, I don't seem to have rights to share the plant. Sigh. So, the electrician will be back out here next week and I'll see if we can make any more headway.
At this point, the settings I've got (40% SOC except in the charging slots) seem to work most of the time. Prior to that, it would throw AC overcurrent once the battery was at full charge on a sunny day, every time. But it didn't fault on cloudy days. This past week, running on the 40% setting, it did not fault on sunny days, but did fault on most of the cloudy days, but not all. The only part of the pattern that remains consistent throughout is that the fault happens when the battery reaches full charge.
Hopefully the electrician will have better luck this time....
At this point, the settings I've got (40% SOC except in the charging slots) seem to work most of the time. Prior to that, it would throw AC overcurrent once the battery was at full charge on a sunny day, every time. But it didn't fault on cloudy days. This past week, running on the 40% setting, it did not fault on sunny days, but did fault on most of the cloudy days, but not all. The only part of the pattern that remains consistent throughout is that the fault happens when the battery reaches full charge.
Hopefully the electrician will have better luck this time....
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629658
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Id unplug that battery communication cable and enter in lower charge values and see if that helps
I tried changing the float value without unplugging the cable and even though it let me change it and saved the changes, they reverted shortly thereafter. So I guess that at least verifies that the closed loop part is working. :O
The electricians will be back tomorrow to take another look.
In the meantime, I had a thought. Since the fault only happens when the batteries hit full charge (so therefore the PV is switched from DC side to AC side to sell back to grid), and it seems to mostly (but not always) happen when generating near capacity... could this be a capacity problem? I mean, there are two 12K inverters. They are rated for 9 kw continuous and 12 KW max, so a combined 18 kw continuous. If the panels are putting out more than that continuously, would that make it fault? (The panels are rated at max of 23.8 kw, but the most I've seen so far is about 19 kw on a sunny day).
Though I guess if it were a capacity problem, it would happen whether or not TOU was on, and it just doesn't happen if TOU is off.
The electricians will be back tomorrow to take another look.
In the meantime, I had a thought. Since the fault only happens when the batteries hit full charge (so therefore the PV is switched from DC side to AC side to sell back to grid), and it seems to mostly (but not always) happen when generating near capacity... could this be a capacity problem? I mean, there are two 12K inverters. They are rated for 9 kw continuous and 12 KW max, so a combined 18 kw continuous. If the panels are putting out more than that continuously, would that make it fault? (The panels are rated at max of 23.8 kw, but the most I've seen so far is about 19 kw on a sunny day).
Though I guess if it were a capacity problem, it would happen whether or not TOU was on, and it just doesn't happen if TOU is off.
OK scratch my previous theory. That isn't it. We just had it throw a fault (same thing, F18 AC overcurrent) and it was nowhere near capacity. It's cloudy, it's late in the day, PV was generating 3KW, and the house was using 2 KW. There is nothing in the house that could spike it that high, even for a moment. The only thing I can imagine might make a big spike is the A/C, and it's not even turned on for the season yet. So I don't know what's going on. But like I said, the electricians will be here (...again...) tomorrow.
On the plus side, at least this late-in-the-day fault recovered itself without my having to toggle TOU. I could live with that, though I'd really like to have it not fault for no reason....
On the plus side, at least this late-in-the-day fault recovered itself without my having to toggle TOU. I could live with that, though I'd really like to have it not fault for no reason....
6
629658
Guest
Very strange keep us in the loop when you get a handle on the solution.
Well the electricians came out and said that we are literally the only installation they have ever done that has had this issue. Apparently they've been in touch with Sol-Ark and even they say we are the only ones having this issue. But... Sol-Ark says they have a fix. They are pushing a software update that is supposed to, as they put it, "completely fix everything". Uh huh. We shall see.
Bright and sunny with a few scattered clouds today. We'll see when the batteries hit full charge...
Bright and sunny with a few scattered clouds today. We'll see when the batteries hit full charge...
SHTF Power Anyway
Power Pig
I'm wondering if your inverter issue was indeed fixed. I called Sol-Ark yesterday because we were seeing random F18 errors even when we had pretty light loads running on our parallel 12k's. I was told I had an old inverter that needed a new board and they'd send it out right away. I was a bit surprised by this. If you're still having issues, maybe it's the board???
robby
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Is it the first generation Indoor units that have a clear front area for seeing the breakers?
SHTF Power Anyway
Power Pig
No. It looks just like my newer slave. It was a 2021 model.
SHTF Power Anyway
Power Pig
We had a second fault but it was on the other unit so now both have had F18 errors and that just literally shouldn't be the case so I'm wondering how it can be a board on an older model... I'm going to have to call tomorrow.
SHTF Power Anyway
Power Pig
I've now had two F18 errors on my master from 2021 and one on my slave from 2022. As I was typing my reply, it happened again. There are no heavy loads running. Very strange.
robby
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On a different topic, how do you manage to charge 52KWh of batteries with 14Kw of panels?
I assume that you are not running the batteries down to 20% SOC every night or your using very little power in the day? Was adding more panels not an option due to space?
Nice setup by the way.
SHTF Power Anyway
Power Pig
In the winter, we found we can run almost nothing on solar mostly because of the parasitic load of the equipment combined with poor production. I knew the production was going to be bad but I didn't know the batteries were going to use so much power. It's been a hard pill to swallow. I would have chosen different equipment if I had known. But it is what it is for now. Right now, we can stay off grid with the entire house and we only get down to around 50% on the batteries. I couldn't even use all of the solar production we've been generating this week. Our high was 67kW in production the other day and I had a hard time trying to use enough to see such high numbers. I was running my washing machine, my dryer, my air conditioning, a second air conditioner, the electric oven, the stovetop and I was thinking about running a vacuum too as it was the only other appliance I hadn't turned on. We didn't trip the system at all when all of this was running. It's been mild weather so nothing's running too hard. We do have a lot of refrigeration which may prove a bit hard in the evening when production is low but temps are still high. We'll see some much higher temps this weekend which will be interesting to see how the system performs. This is our first year having the system up at all and, mostly, we've been using the grid for everything while we work out the kinks. We are definitely adding more panels. I'm hoping to get enough to cover the parasitic load so we can actually keep the water and a couple of freezers running off the system in the winter months without having to revert to other power sources. The bank is too large for winter but may be too small for summer. We're in a weird spot, for sure.
robby
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I would love to see a snap shot of your PowerView graph for a 24 hour period. Maybe I can make some suggestion.
SHTF Power Anyway
Power Pig
This was yesterday. Unfortunately, I have nothing from the winter because we didn't have our monitoring up yet (we had to hard wire a stable ethernet connection into the shop and get the wi-fi turned off on the dongles because I'm EMF sensitive). When MurphyGuy had me testing the parasitic load from the batteries at idle (no loads but just on without even the Sol-Arks) we had a problem with SOC calibration of the bank and in the process of working with Sol-Ark to get things worked around to recharge from the grid, a factory reset became necessary and we lost all of the data from the Master. :-(
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Balthazar-B
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So just curious...if you were to do it over again, what equipment would you have chosen/installed?
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