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The reason I can't quite show you the comparison, even for 2 vs. 1 panels... is this is the mess it made today. There are all manor of different things going on here from top of charge, straight to load, float, boost, HVCs on the BMS, everything! 1000W panels into a 100Ah battery.

It has Bluetooth config. It works. If you want to integrate into VEBus (GX or Raspberry Pi) you need the victron VEDirect cable. Note. It doesn't need to be a victron cable. Any UART to USB, Isolated interface/cable will do. As those are not easy to find and thus rarely cheap the victron...

Sorry I needed to take it down temporarily, there were mistakes in it. I'll restore it this week without the errors.

It doesn't need to hold value. Unless you intend to dump it back for cash. The part 90% of people completely miss is "opportunistic costs" and "offsets". For example. "The solar power I generate is free". This is cutting off about 60% of the real picture. If you didn't generate it you...

Fixation and low power. Mine is the 0.6Amp balancer model, which isn't enough in many cases. It also fixates on a pair of cells and will only balance that pair until it's done. Even if there is another cell approaching or even hitting LVC.

Disclaimer. Please check this IS indeed the required cable for your MPPT. The bigger units switch over to VEBus I believe. DIfferent cable!

Yep! You know what impressed me. Through out all of that chaos on the MPPT DC bus. The Multiplus never once so much as glitched the AC power. At one point I believe, unconfirmed, but the SmartSolar spun up and produced DC output direct to the invert while the BMS charge was disconnected. It...

It's not perfect, but it's a LOT tidier than before!

I had this in a small way when I got the Multiplus engaged this week. It suddenly all felt different. Like it was no longer "DIY" "Hackathon" stuff, it was properly (mostly) specced out, pro-sumer off grid install. I can't really talk about the periles of maintaining and balancing DC loads...

I have an old lead acid which has about 1300 mostly short cycles on it. In daily solar use. Drained 10% charged 5% through winter until it got to 12V with no load. Then I would give it a full charge and a overnight float which the first time seen it through the rest of winter. By the third...

A note on Grafana graph config. I'm torn on the multi-unit graphs. I am also torn on the split axis. By default grafana puts the main axis legend down the left. However the most recent data and the area your drawn to is on the right. So when you try, like I have and mix units, such as...

Sorry for late reply. Absolutely there was "prior work" in my 'core systems' which helped me alone the way. You are not far off from what I have, by the sounds of it. On Paho. If you look into my code base for the mqtt-lib you will see how I wrap it in something a bit more "fit for purpose"...

Got the final MPPT installed today. So I have 3 panels, each with its own MPPT controller. Trying to spare the battery the full brunt of all 990W of panels I have set them up as follows. EPEver - cannot be current limited, so it's charge voltage is set to 27.20V (both boost and float)...

A caveat / annoying bug. The BMS only supports a single BLE connection. So if you have this MQTT bridge feeding on it every 5 seconds, it can become very difficult to use the app. The only "work around" I have right now is a switch on the ESP32 to temporarily disable it while I tweak BMS...

So, turned out to be sunny today and I got to test a whole bunch of stuff at the same time. This link is to a snapshot of the tests. 1. Does the end-2-end graphing solution work? PASS 2. Does the BMS work? PARTIAL PASS 3. Will it fully top charge the cells to 3.65V? PASS 4. Does the...

Putting them in parallel is not the concern. I also bought a bunch of 3Ah shim cells to put in parallel if I need them. It's capacity matching, as best I can, the in series modules (pairs in my case). If, for an extreme example I pair cell 6 and cell 2, the total capacity of that pair might...

FL I assume is Florida. You try finding 5 acres of land per 5 houses in the UK. We get about 10x7 meters or just less than a hectre for our houses. We have a different issue. Having screwed farmers over a few too many times, a lot of them have started converting the fields to solar farms...

Regarding while(true) loops versus event handlers. I think you are describing what I call the "dynamics" or "cadence drivers". Basically, what invokes the code to do something? As you (?) are exploring MQTT the natural answer is... the message receive event for a topic. The "on_message"...

Oh. Of uptmost importance with the "push" model and on_message() callbacks. With Paho, they are "in paho thread". It uses one main thread. If you spend 2 minutes in your on_message handler, then 2 minutes of all messages will cue up. If you can respond immediately you can. If you can't...

Also. Those git repos are open source, so feel free to borrow or steal. I'd prefer you fork it and pass back anything you do that's cool, but I don't mind you even copy and pasting it, just don't take credits and do try and let me know what you use it for, for my own curiosity.

In watching BMS reviews, the destructive test tends to be the overcurrent breaking. The reason is because cheaper BMSes do not properly match or trim their mosfets. So when they have 10 100A mosfets in parallel they will claim a rated and breaking current of 1000A potentially. However. In...

Situation is too temporary for investment. Hopefully by the end of the year I will re-establish balance with 200-300Ah of battery, 3 MPPT controllers to maximise all three panels and all pushing up to 35-40A into the battery without concern. The Multplus 24/800/16-16 becomes the limiting...

So, I was hoping to have continuity between these tests, continueing with the top end tests. However, in between times the system has been completely tidied and rewrited and the MultiPlus installed. In the end I gave up on the sun for top end testing and decided to test out the Multiplus to...

Have we scare mongered enough? Do NOT upset your pet dragons.

This is temporary. Forward plan is to pair these 8 cells with another 8. First I will grade the capacity of these 8 in order. Then I will swap the new 8 cells and take a baseline capacity order for them. Simply pairing the lowest with the highest, should, I hope, prevent the need for shim...

Simple trackers are not hard. I don't know your background, but there are two "layman" routes. "Smart home" stuff like SmartThings or what not commercial entities come with prebuild "cloud based" graphs and dashboards. You then just add your temperature and humidity sensors. If you get...

My other two CraigSolar 330W panels arrived by DPD today. I think in DPD language "Fragile - GLASS" on the packaging means, "Hey it's well packaged then lets kick it a few times). Boxes were in tatters, ripped, holed the works. Inside both panels were luckily intact with only one blemish - a...

Part of the work (hobby horse) I am doing with my DIY lithium system involves testing the "top and bottom end" responses of the system as a whole. Questions are basically: In the setup, what happens at the top of charge with the sun fully on the panel? Also. What "should" or "should not"...

Yes. What happens to the voltage when you put the battery under that high load? So it's not an ideal voltage source either is it? Also. A low wattage LED is a non-ohmic load so not a very good example. A physical device which states it's Cold Current and Max current ratings and declares...

There are a few String formatted items in the topics, which aren't suitable for influx. The formatted total runtime for example. As I mentioned I used python, I'm not sure how much this helps you, but it's how I assigned the units. Those at the end with "none" just get dropped on the next hop...