Dawie's Solar Setup

DawieZA said:
Nice system and will be a beast after those planned upgrades. How are the Deye batteries mounted?
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I'm using brackets for now. Can't be wall mounted.
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I just two 18000BTU aircons and hopefully can power from the systems when I make the additional upgrades.
Never had an aircon in my house before, but now that I see the potential of this system, I intend having few more aircons for the other rooms.

This is going to be my next new money pit. meh
 
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Fuma said:
I'm using brackets for now. Can't be wall mounted.
View attachment 1682115

I just two 18000BTU aircons and hopefully can power from the systems when I make the additional upgrades.
Never had an aircon in my house before, but now that I see the potential of this system, I intend having few more aircons for the other rooms.

This is going to be my next new money pit. meh
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Ah, I see. That still looks very neat.

I have a 9000 BTU and a 18000 BTU. The smaller aircon is on essentials and the larger aircon is non-essentials. I run the smaller aircon all night long in summer as it is in the main bedroom. The extra batteries helps a lot with that.
 
And my CoCT SSEG application is still not concluded. Provided the ECSA engineer sign-off and other related paperwork to CoCT in February. Not a single response from them since then. Oh the joy.

Scratch that. Just received my commissioning approval letter after sending a "polite" reminder email this morning.
 
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DawieZA said:
And my CoCT SSEG application is still not concluded. Provided the ECSA engineer sign-off and other related paperwork to CoCT in February. Not a single response from them since then. Oh the joy.

Scratch that. Just received my commissioning approval letter after sending a "polite" reminder email this morning.
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Congrats! I’m still waiting after multiple follow ups over 3 months after submitting everything required.

How’s the system covering your needs after the extra battery?
 
The system is performing very well with the three batteries. I can heat up both my geysers in the evening with battery power alone and still have enough capacity left to run the remainder of the night on battery power. That is now if there was enough solar production to get the batteries to 100% before the evening.

Unfortunately I am not able to get them fully charged most days. The weather in Cape Town is not great for solar production this time of year.
 
My prepaid meter is being replaced with a split prepaid model this week. It is a requirement detailed within the commissioning approval letter.
 
Well, my prepaid meter was finally replaced a whole year later than planned. Lekker CoCT lekker.

I had the first bit of weirdness with my system last night. Batteries fully charged during the day and when my load started discharging the batteries after dark I noticed that the master battery remained at 100% SoC. The two slave batteries discharged normally.

Checked the master battery itself for any error lights and could find no issues. Only after the two slave batteries hit around 70% SoC did the master battery start to discharge.

I will keep an eye on the situation this week and if it occurs again I will perform a full power down and power up of the system to see if that helps.
 
DawieZA said:
Well, my prepaid meter was finally replaced a whole year later than planned. Lekker CoCT lekker.

I had the first bit of weirdness with my system last night. Batteries fully charged during the day and when my load started discharging the batteries after dark I noticed that the master battery remained at 100% SoC. The two slave batteries discharged normally.

Checked the master battery itself for any error lights and could find no issues. Only after the two slave batteries hit around 70% SoC did the master battery start to discharge.

I will keep an eye on the situation this week and if it occurs again I will perform a full power down and power up of the system to see if that helps.
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This is not that abnormal. Did not read the whole thread, what batteries and BMS are being used?

The reason why the master did not start discharging at the same time as the others is because the BMS closed the discharge MOSFETS and kept them closed for a reason.

Usually this reason can be beceause the BMS is still trying to balance the cells, especially if there has been a cell overvoltage protect event at the last full charge.

If your current draw from the batteries are low then you can end up with a large SOC difference as you describe.

Next time that it happens, try increasing the load (turn on kettle and microwave) and see if that forces the BMS to open the discharge MOSFETS.

Do you have access to cells voltage data, will be helpfull if you can see what is happening during charging in the upper knee (above 3.45v per cell).
 
After some further reading I came to the same conclusion. The battery was protecting itself in some way. I was just expecting some kind of error light on the battery itself.

So far its been been behaving, but I will give your sugguestion a try next time this happens.

Unfortunately I can only see the highest and lowest cells voltages via Solar Assistant. It also works out the cell imbalance. Will check that as well next time.
 
I experienced an interesting issue today after I had to power down my inverter to resolve a communication board issue.

Flipped the changeover switch to grid power for the essential circuits, headed into the house and everything looked to be powered as normal. I then proceeded with the normal procedure to power down the inverter.

Strolled back into the house and noticed the essential circuits were dead. Headed to the main DB and saw that the earth leakage circuit breaker had tripped for the essential circuits. I then reset the earth leakage circuit breaker and a few seconds later it would trip again. Switched off all the essential circuit breakers and tried to reset the earth leakage circuit breaker in an attempt to isolate the issue. Same thing happened again, earth leakage circuit breaker tripped.

I decided to troubleshoot further after I sorted the communication board issue. Powered the inverter back up and left the changeover switch on grid power. Headed back into the house, tried to reset the earth leakage circuit breaker and this time no trip. Replicated the inverter power down and again the earth leakage circuit breaker kept tripping. I have since then put everything back as it was and all is working fine.

This is a bit concerning to me as it would mean I would not be able to avoid the earth leakage circuit breaker tripping for my essential circuits if the inverter ever needs to go in for repairs. Also, why would the earth leakage circuit breaker trip even with all the essential circuit breakers switched off? That kind of sounds like a fault on the neutral side...
 
Sounds like a neutral issue to me too or the circuits are not as isolated as they should be.
Get the installer or sparky to check it out before you really need it.
 
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