Solar Assistant EG4 Lifepower

[TomC4306]

I am still working on getting my system to communicate fully so I'm not an expert. But. The addressing scheme for the batteries is kind of important for any functionality at all. If the addresses are wrong, nothing works, and you will get error 60 and 61 on eg4 inverters. Solar Assistant reads the batteries in order, and therefore also relies on addressing. EG4 addressing is odd to me, but the scheme is easy.

up is on, down is off. add the digits together to create an address. Example below.

switches are read from right to left. (8,4,2,1)

Address 1 = down down down up
Address 2 = down down up down
Address 3 = down down up up
Address 4 - down up down down ...

You completely misunderstood my point.
Disconnect all the data cables.
Now you just have four batteries hooked to a common bus bar and your inverters hook to the same common bus bar.
Now let physics take over. You know, electrons flowing.
Wire each of the six devices independently direct to the Raspberry Pi that hosts solar assistant.
You will probably need a $20 common USB hub to accomplish this.
You can change the addressing in solar assistant by moving USB cables on the hub.
The point I was trying to make is that you either use the eg4 communication scheme OR use the solar assistant monitoring scheme.

I still don't understand the benefit of having the batteries and the inverters "communicate".
It seems based on all the discussions in this forum to be more trouble than it's worth.

 

[Dskvid]

I have a Growatt 5K Inverter connected to my EG4 Lifepower, non LCD, batteries for a while. Now adding the Solar assistant but If I change the Dip switches on the 1st Battery off Zero for the Growatt will it still talk with the Growatt or do I disconnect it from the Growatt and just have the battery comms go to the Solar Assistant? Also can I use the USB/Cat5 cable that came with the batteries as is with Green and white connected or do I have to modify it 2 Brown/ Brown White? I wasnt sure if thats just for GLL batteries. Thanks

 

[wildbillpdx]

Per Solar Assistant communication...you either connect the RS485 to the PI or the inverter, you can't have it both ways. The batteries can only talk to one master system.

 

[Dskvid]

Per Solar Assistant communication...you either connect the RS485 to the PI or the inverter, you can't have it both ways. The batteries can only talk to one master system.

Thanks for the reply, once I discount the Batteries from the Growatt port should set the Groawtt #5 to something else so it wont keep looking for batteries and giving me comm errors?