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I follow you. And I do agree that it needs to be tested in both scenarios! Gee, wish I'd have my youtube channel up and running already! I'd have plenty of scenarios to test it out and show videos of! Maybe I need to do it anyway once we start installing them! I'm talking grid tie with battery...

I love this! I have been wanting to do this myself, as I have Victron inverters with a Fronius AC coupled, and it bugs the tar out of me when my batteries get 100% full and solar throttles back for half a day! My only problem is that I have virtually zero experience with node red, and as such...

We switched our one job to voltage mode because SOC mode ran so far off that gen start literally didn't work. The battery would run completely flat dead with the TOU set to 50%. Voltage mode was our last ditch effort to at least keep the batteries from going completely flat dead! 2 days ago we...

2m is indeed pretty small! I am personally biased towards HAWTs because of having been involved in a business venture where myself and another fellow had been going to begin producing ~10 foot diameter (~3m?) HAWTs with a 900W alternator. The unit was based off of designs in the book that I...

I have been throwing this idea around for a while.... I currently have a 98 gallon natural gas water heater that runs my infloor heat. What I wish I could do, is have gas keep my water temp at maybe 130ish and allow an air to water heat pump to run when I have excess solar, but I wish to then...

I currently actually have node red running in Venus OS on my Cerbo GX. I didn't think about the fact that I could import a flow once I have it running on Windows. Thanks for the tip!

Solar direct water heating is more efficient than solar panels> electric heater> hot water. The reason being that solar panel efficiency is only ~20-25%. (This is the ratio of available power in XX area exposed to sunlight vs. the actual power that gets output from the solar panel.) However, I...

Awesome! Thanks for the info! I am more and more letting our customers know about Solar Assistant as well. I really like that you then have locally stored data points that will be available for review and/or troubleshooting, even if the internet goes down for a day or something!

From what I learned, I believe the reason your Sol-Ark is showing that 58%, (which like you showed is the average SOC%) is because the "master" that is plugged into the Sol-Ark is getting the net average and "telling" that to the Sol-Ark. I would be curious though to know if that makes sense in...

Awesome!! Having bypass built-in would be absolutely great!

@robby or anyone else.... Has anyone heard if there will be data points closer than every 5 minutes? Hopefully they will at least get every minute! Makes troubleshooting remotely kind of a pain sometimes, when you only have data points on a 5 minute basis. Or when you change a setting and need...

I honestly don't know. But when he charges heavy, it's coming from a generator, and that may affect temps, depending on quality of the power coming from the gen.

So, you are suggesting that it is ok for SOC to jump from, say, 70% to 30% SOC in a split second. Then an hour or so later when the battery voltage gets up to the 56 volt ballpark to then jump up to 100%?? And what about the fact that the Victron battery monitor on the same system isn't doing...

From personal experience on probably 50+ single XW with Honda EU7000is combination setups, I will say that setting the breaker size (one a single XW) to 25A will probably not work great! The biggest issue being when surge loads kick in you run a risk of actually overloading the gen. The XWs do a...

Actually, I will respectfully disagree slightly on that charged voltage setting. Always set it to that 0.2-0.3V below ABSORB setpoint. The reason being that if you don't then it can potentially calibrate to 100% prematurely. Normally you should be using the same or very similar absorb charge...

Well, I have had the whole discussion before of how these grid interactive inverters react to a breaker or main switch opening. There are some on this forum who say it takes a much as a few seconds for the inverter to detect that and open the contactors. That is the main reason that I decided to...

@sondro Zonna Energy is absolutely great to work with! We literally buy hundreds of inverters, charge controllers, etc, etc, etc. from them every year! Most of our stuff comes out of their Millersburg, OH location though, as that is local for us. But I personally know the guys at the PA location...

Hey.... finally I see someone else saying what i have been trying to tell sol-Ark!! And the problem that comes with the crap SOC monitoring is that you lose the ability to use time-of-use! If you set the Sol-Ark to 50% SOC in TOU and it ends up actually at 0%...... thta doesn't really work...

That's great! If you posted on here about it, then I probably learned it from you! ;):) Thanks for that! I know when I was looking into that I read a bit on this forum, and most of what I learned came from here somewhere! I am always open to learning new things. But I will also always refute...

I agree with you. And also, over the years there have been plenty of things that have changed in the code book because of evidence over time that something isn't best practice. For instance, outlets serving an island and bar no longer being allowed to be on the side where the cord can cause an...

PV interconnection always gets interesting because of the NEC "rules" on interconnection. I will list a quick overview of how you are allowed to interconnect, as there are some specifics to keep in mind. If you want to just pop a breaker into a main panel the rules are as follows: Either- all...

I think you are asking if the gen input directly feeds a separate charger in the inverter...? The "charger" portion in an inverter/charger is simply the inverter circuitry working in reverse to draw from the AC bus to charge the batteries. AC input, whether grid or gen, is just sync'd up to...

Thanks for that reply. That is kind of what I had gathered. Do you know if it is possible to set up heat pumps in series to boost top end temp? Or is the issue mostly related to the temp of the outside air that is being used for the heat source?

Actually, when the inverter has a shunt to measure the current going in and out it can indeed be pretty accurate! The Sol-Ark has a shunt..... it measures the current going in and out, it has battery efficiency settings to compensate for that, it has temp comp (not used with LifePo4, but needed...

Also check out Midnite Solar charge controllers. Those guys have a background in many of the big name companies out there (they started Outback originally, they were involved in Schneider way back, etc. etc.) Their "Classic" series charge controllers are pretty bulletproof and the best of the...

I second what @jberger said! % will especially drift in the winter months with less sunshine. (Unless you are somewhere more sunny than me.... I'm in Ohio.... lol) Voltage based settings with a delay are always safer than % based settings! As batteries age, you have less capacity as well, so if...

Yes, it "should" do this. I agree. But nobody knows 100% for sure until it's tested. And how would the Sol-Ark know that it's not just seeing gen power yet? There is really no way for it to tell the difference between gen and grid if it's a good stable gen. And from personal experience in...

If you are checking continuity using a multimeter, you are probably getting continuity through the batteries themselves. Your negatives in this setup are common, therefore you could have one tester lead on the Lithium battery positive and the other tester lead on the lead acid battery positive...

If you set your TOU setpoints to 95% as suggested by @Brucey then pv will only charge to that before pushing the rest to grid. Think of the TOU setpoint as the "discharge to...." setpoint. The Sol-Ark will even "sell" out of the batteries down to the TOU setpoint. In other words, "battery...

Clean cut vs. brownout also makes a difference on the speed of transfer. Brownout ends up being a much cleaner and faster transfer because the Sol-ark "sees" it coming, where a clean cut such as breaker flipping causes a longer transfer time. Friend of mine tested this with oscilliscope...