darkskies
New Member
I'll check it, but there has been a bunch of issues since last posting...Hey Darkskies,
They came out with another application note 3.0 dated April 23 and now shows direct connection and talks about latest firmware and how it is supposed to behave. Still minimal on technical details like connections and programming, especially for different generators. Originally they promised a list of compatible generators and we have not seen that yet. Fingers crossed things will start coming out now.
Through discussions with my installer, I mentioned that the system production was not performing as well as expected and that the temp ATS installed was not handling all circuits. I negotiated with them to upgrade my inverter from 7.6kW to 14.4kW and to replace the ATS with a 200A ATS to cover whole house.
In May, they came out with an ATS and inverter and they did the inverter update. There was a problem during the update and the battery breaker kept tripping. Inverter was reporting battery comm error and there was an error about no firmware on battery. Installer speculated that maybe it was trying to update the battery F/W and failed in that process. Kinda hard to believe though, as I would think it could fallback to older F/W. All speculation, of course.
In any case, the installer talked with SE and LG and an LG guy told them to RMA the battery. No reason as to what was wrong. However, the LG support person said that generator integration now works. After two weeks, we had the new battery, and several more weeks, the installer was out. So, in June, we had the replacement battery installed and system was working fine. The installer stated that he needed a relay, and that they could try the BUI with generator, and if it didn't work, they could replace the 100A ATS subpanel with a 200A ATS to cover all circuits.
Well, I nagged the installer for months to come out and they kept procrastinating, until yesterday. They came out, installed the relay, and removed the 100A ATS subpanel. Everything connected and worked. They simulated grid loss, and the generator came on. They couldn't test system running off battery and then switching to generator, as it was a sunny day and the PV system was handling all the house load and battery was not being used. I figured I'd test that, once we have an outage this Winter. I was cautiously optimistic.
Well, today, my little monitoring app, reported a FAULT at 11:30am. When I got home at 2pm, the generator was running. However, the inverter showed it was producing ~2kW, house was drawing ~700W, and 1.3kW was going to the grid. There was no grid failure, and the battery was at 100%.
My guess as to what happened, was that the Generac generator was turned on (by Generac) for its weekly test run. It usually comes on, every Tuesday, about 11:30am. This put the system in a funky state. I called the installer, and over the phone we did the following...
First, I turned off the generator and then turned it back to auto. It immediately came on (unexpected). I turned off the generator.
Next, I did a shutdown and startup of the inverter. It came up, still with a fault alarm and eventually (after grid test), PV was generating and it was driving house and excess to grid. However...
The battery breaker tripped. We did a power cycle of the inverter and system came up generating power. Once I turned on battery, the system went back into a grid test mode, and after about 2 minutes, the battery breaker tripped. We have a battery comm error from the inverter, and under the battery section of SetApp the battery has a 69 error. This is the same thing we had before, with the previous battery. Argh!
Worst still, the indicator on the relay for the generator is still off (implying that the generator would run, if it was in auto).
So, not only do we have a unusally, fully charged battery, but the generator will now run continuously (even though it isn't providing any power to anything). Essentially, one step forward and two steps back.
Installer was going to have SE see if they can do anything remotely (comms work), and will be out tomorrow to contact SE and LG and do the finger pointing game again...
I did look in June and didn't recall seeing any newer firmware than what we had and I don't recall seeing any releases this year that mentioned generator integration. Also, I had opened a ticket with SE two weeks ago, asking if integration was working and they said not yeat, and no ETA (hence I was skeptical that this would work).
I'll double check tonight, RE the releases.