What kind of batteries do you have, I can't tell what they are from the picture?
Fault tolerance also increases with more batteries.
What kind of batteries are those that you have in the picture?
So I went with Trophy Batteries. Not a single complaint at this point. I guess my question is why have 12 separate pieces of equipment (12 BMS’s, 24 battery connections, etc)? In my experience each piece of equipment has multiple points of possible failure. Except for the fact that the 100 Ah batteries are lighter and easier to handle and the rack system looks great I can’t see any advantage. I have 4 batteries with a combined Ah of 928 now. Every battery cable is a potential point of failure too. Trophy now has a 300 Ah monster so 4 of those will equal 12 of yours. Less is more in my book. And if you have any issue 4 pieces of equipment are easier to troubleshoot than 12. Not even mentioning comms. That’s a whole discussion in itself.
Those batteries are pretty awesome, for only a few cents more they're pretty nice. It's certainly given me something to consider, the 300amp looks awesome but it's like 250lbs... wow, gonna have to watch the fingers with two maybe three people helping you move it. I don't see Trophy listed as one of the batteries that Sol-Ark talks to for BMS. Do you happen to have that working with the Sol-Ark? Also, would you happen to have a wiring diagram for your setup?? It's kinda hard to follow the wires from your pictures.
Mine are like 175 lbs a piece and we used a skid steer to unload the pallets. Then a hand truck to get them into the equipment room then a floor Jack to lift them up on to our shelves. They come very well packed. Shipping was insanely quick ordered on a Friday showed up on Tuesday. Support has been outstanding.
Ok now to the wiring part. I don’t have a diagram but this is what I did. I bought 2 Victron Power In’s from Amazon $156 ea. I modified them to accept Mega Fuses. You can used the Victron Distributor but it’s $225 ea and I didn’t need the extra electronics. Since I planned to have six batteries total I needed two. They interconnect so you can add as many Power In’s as you need. I brought (4) 4/0 (2 neg/2 pos equal length) from the Sol Ark to the Victrons. I landed the 2 positives one on each end of the positive bus. I would have treated the 2 negatives from the Sol Ark the same way but I wanted to have a Victron Shunt. So I brought the 2 Negatives from the Sol Ark and landed both stacked onto the shunt. I attached the other end of the shunt to the negative bus bar. Each Victron Power In has 4 connections. I used 2 power Ins so I have 8 positions to work with. Two were used for the Sol Ark connections so it left me with 6 positions to land batteries. I can add another Power In if I ever need to. Now I then figured the distance for my farthest battery (ended up being 68 1/2”) and made up my 4/0 cables with 5/16” lugs from each battery back to the Power In’s. I bought the lugs, covers and heat shrink on Amazon. I can’t remember where I ended up buying the Victron 48v 300 amp mega fuses from. So the only thing I really don’t like is the cable management. Using 4/0 there is really no good solution to keeping it neat and tight with all cables being equal length. I don’t think it looks awful but not as neat looking as a cabinet. However it is very efficient with low loss. When I charge my batteries at 275a I get about a 3-5 degree increase in wire temp. I placed the Temp sensor that comes with the Sol Ark in the toroidals within my trough. Hope this makes sense. If not let me know. For your racking, I bought a heavy duty 24” deep shelving unit at Walmart. My second choice was a super heavy duty shelving unit by DeWalt found at Home Depot. They were about $100 difference. The one I bought is rated 800 lbs per shelf.
So if I'm following you, basically like this, which leaves you one more input on each (I used the wrong Victron image) for positive and two more negatives? I know I left out that little negative shunt thing.
That’s pretty much it. If you don’t want to use a Victron Shunt then land the negatives from the Sol Ark with the positives on each end of the bus.
I'm a visual guy, so I'm assuming this is kinda what you're talking about, which makes the wiring a little more strait forward to follow as the connection points feed left to right and over to the Sol-Ark.
Looking at the available ports, I think with this you could still get another 2 batteries juiced in on each Victron.
I think this would be fine maybe someone with more technical knowledge can jump in and comment.
@jfpetesn , thanks so much for your time today, I really appreciate the collaboration, super cool stuff and I'm really excited to try mine in the future when my full off-grid home is completed.
