Solis RAI 3K AC - no discharge, shows as operational but no contribution to household load?
- Thread starter Umski
- Start date
It's connected now - I was loathed to wait for the 'official' leads - unfortunately the Pylons use some posh Amphenol connectors which Farnell and the like sell at £10+ a pop plus needing a heavy duty crimping tool - so I figured I could chop the end off one the short leads and just about make it to my DC isolator which worked a treat - I now have 2 useless (and rather expensive) Amphenol SurLok connectors sat on my desk! The Pylon seemed happy, it was charged to 50% and seemed to work as is with the Pylon settings, BUT it seems I have the option to set the DoD value and the force charge value which I set to 20% and 10% respectively, I wasn't able to set the max discharge rate as both the charge/discharge values are 80A according to the BMS info coming through the Solis. I managed to get an oven roast done on Sunday but the forecast was rubbish and it didn't brighten up until around 2pm so it cut off at around 5pm, yesterday was also crap as is today so it might get a bit of a trickle up to 25% - I don't want to play with the user-def settings just yet until it's had a full charge and I've observed how it works (I won't have enough excess to top up my DHW diverter as it stands). I noted similarly that the current draw once the cut off was reached was 0.04A so it was dropping 1% SoC every 3 hours or so, I haven't let it run overnight to test the force charge theory yet, so I just powered the whole lot off - seems a bit of waste of precious energy doing diddly squat once it's reached the cut-off SoC!
I got the config in this morning. I can see that the battery comms are still working with BMS data still received by the inverter so that's all good (but it's comforting knowing that the BMS should protect me from stupid settings too...).
I had 30% from my SOC overnight, so I set user-def to 25% and could see that my 40A discharge limit was working, curiously it stopped discharging at 22% rather than 25%. I'll see what happens with the SOC trickle down now - I've disable the time of use to see.
While poking about the solid app I found that the battery BMS reports an operating current of 0.5A (25w). So, perhaps it is mostly the BMS using that trickle of power and not the inverter (or a bit of both).
not the best time of year to get it going, especially today! Can you not charge up at cheap rate overnight?
No sadly not, no E7 or smart meter which is fine by me for the moment - there was a brief glimpse of sun just after 3pm which got it up by 1% from 19 to 20% - I've been trying to calibrate a SoC for my open energy monitoring - I would have preferred to use the BMS value but deriving it seems to be marginally less complex with what I have at the moment!
All useful stuff - I always feel I'm taking from the internet and rarely contributing so this thread has been a whole heap of use and hopefully to others too
20-25W seems an awful lot in idle - that's half our background use (fridge/freezer cycled off) - so just things like the wifi, router and oven clock!
how?
After some discussion on the open energy forums, I was asking how folks were getting their SoC values from batteries (easily) and without a Modbus interface and associated h/w it doesn't really make it easy with my existing h/w so the suggestion was to use the battery charge/discharge power value to add into a kWh accumulator and then do some more calcs to calibrate an SoC within the CMS - it will be a progressive tweaking and is really just a rough gauge to show on my display (there is an app that combines the house/solar/battery values plus SoC which I didn't have)
Yes that's the one - are you making use of an SoC value and if so where is the value pulled or derived from?
So I had a bit of a disaster with the user-def settings. Somehow the battery hit 0% over a couple of hours. It was doing its normal thing, holding steady at 25% then with slow decline. I checked on it a couple of hours later, and it was offline. I don't really understand how it happened. There is no data in that period at all, such as discharge rate, to explain why it happened. All my discharge limits, force charge, low volt setting seemed reasonable and were confirmed with the manual.
Of course, it is a bit of a catch 22 - the inverter is powered by the battery, so needs battery power in order to charge the battery from the mains!
After a short panic my crazy side brewed up a nutty idea... what if I could wire some old DC chargers serially to provide ~53v... some time later after some soldering of 2x20v and 1x12v old laptop chargers and random power brick outputs together I had a reliable 52v @1amp or so. It was enough to power up the inverter via the DC, change the settings to force charge, give the battery 1% of juice and reset the UVP error! I knew there was a reason I kept all those old power bricks! This was their moment! [please don't judge me for Frankenstein electronics]
For now I have reverted to the PYLON setting until I understand why that happened.
Of course, it is a bit of a catch 22 - the inverter is powered by the battery, so needs battery power in order to charge the battery from the mains!
After a short panic my crazy side brewed up a nutty idea... what if I could wire some old DC chargers serially to provide ~53v... some time later after some soldering of 2x20v and 1x12v old laptop chargers and random power brick outputs together I had a reliable 52v @1amp or so. It was enough to power up the inverter via the DC, change the settings to force charge, give the battery 1% of juice and reset the UVP error! I knew there was a reason I kept all those old power bricks! This was their moment! [please don't judge me for Frankenstein electronics]
For now I have reverted to the PYLON setting until I understand why that happened.
Me neither. Obviously the BMS will protect the cells from extremes which is what seemed to happen. What doesn't make sense is why did the inverter not stop using battery power when the overdischarge value was reached (I think you said that was 22%) and why did the inverter not force a charge once the force charge % value was hit (i guess you set that to 10% or 15%)?
I like your style ???? What did you change the force charge setting to?
Sensible move.
Ouch will bear this in mind (still only had one sunny day yesterday that got me up to 80% SoC so just over 24 hours without the grid! But bugger all sun today to recharge!) in case I move to user def settings...good recovery hack mind
Unrelated, how are folks grounding their battery banks - straight to the main incoming ground in the meter box or looping through via the inverter casing and then through the PE conductor via the CU?
Do you mean the case of a metal battery? With my inverter the -ve battery connection is just connected to the inverter and not grounded.
Yes the Pylon comes with a 10mm ground cable that 'earths' the casing - since it's a sizeable cable, just from a practical perspective if folks are just looping through or taking it straight out to the meter much like a bonding?
My case doesn't have a separate ground either...
@SeaGal I had my force charge on 15%, but it seems to have failed to work. Im hesitant to try it again...
I'm thinking about rigging up a contactor on timer or somehow interfacing on 232 to switch it off between certain hours (like I know it will be out of juice by 1am even in the summer). Hate the waste of 30w/ hour.
@Umski 80% charge gave you 24Gb hrs? I'd need a 30kw battery to do that!!
@SeaGal I had my force charge on 15%, but it seems to have failed to work. Im hesitant to try it again...
I'm thinking about rigging up a contactor on timer or somehow interfacing on 232 to switch it off between certain hours (like I know it will be out of juice by 1am even in the summer). Hate the waste of 30w/ hour.
@Umski 80% charge gave you 24Gb hrs? I'd need a 30kw battery to do that!!
me neither, but my case is wooden.
Wish I could get that much broadband speed out of my batteries too
That was a weird typo/auto correct!!me neither, but my case is wooden.
Wish I could get that much broadband speed out of my batteries too
I have a contractor ordered... more crazy science when that arrives.
Hi, Going back a bit to the original question, did anyone get lead acid batteries to work OK?
I have the same issue that there is no discharge. All reading are correct, CT works OK.
One thing, it has a CAN FAIL message. when using LA batteries do you have to have the temperature sensor connector to make it work?
I have the same issue that there is no discharge. All reading are correct, CT works OK.
One thing, it has a CAN FAIL message. when using LA batteries do you have to have the temperature sensor connector to make it work?
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