Complete guide for 48V using EG4 18k

ksmithaz1 said:

All I want to do is fill my batteries, and the sun doesn't want to come out and play this week. There are load shifting settings with some clock times you can set, never used it. SRP is 5-9,5-9 APS is 4-7P. Load shifting right now is almost a joke with the 0.03/KWH spread, the charge/discharge loss will remove any cost benefit, but should give you time to play with the discharge settings. Similar deal in summer here, with 2-8 or 3-8. Sun is killing it you should have your batteries maxed out by the time the sun goes down, let them fly until they are empty, Probably won't cover the gap unless you have around 30KWH. The point is force charging/discharging batteries has little benefit from a $$$ perspective here in Phoenix. You will be maxing out Solar production when TOU starts, and the batteries will last you for however long into the evening once the sun sets. Places with higher winter spreads might benefit, but you'll get all your summer benefit without even trying by the nature of the TOU timing tracking sunshine with a ~2-3 hour delay.

Last summer I found that 30KWH sometimes did not get me thru until 8PM, even when at 100% SOC by 1300. YMMV

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teeumup said:

Yep this was a tough week to start my system. Had a solaredge without battery for 5 years. Designed all my solar systems and picked EG4 on price since the savings over solark covered the first 14kw battery, don't know if that is a mistake yet. Will be getting the second battery in Feb so close to 30kw. Will buy one battery every year till I have 5. I can burn through 100kwh on a hot AZ Summer day. I am not even trying to run my house, just keep my hard earned Frankie's out of APS hands.
Once they figure out bidirectional EV chargers then my problems go away as I will have 100kw sitting in the garage that I can drive.

Wish there was an EG4 firmware guru somewhere I can bounce my ideas off of. After 3 days working with SS and EG4 this is what I got
How can I discharge 121w into nothing and have zero watts feeding my house from 4pm till now...sad. anyone know what backup power ESP even is?

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teeumup said:

Yep this was a tough week to start my system. Had a solaredge without battery for 5 years. Designed all my solar systems and picked EG4 on price since the savings over solark covered the first 14kw battery, don't know if that is a mistake yet. Will be getting the second battery in Feb so close to 30kw. Will buy one battery every year till I have 5. I can burn through 100kwh on a hot AZ Summer day. I am not even trying to run my house, just keep my hard earned Frankie's out of APS hands.
Once they figure out bidirectional EV chargers then my problems go away as I will have 100kw sitting in the garage that I can drive.

Wish there was an EG4 firmware guru somewhere I can bounce my ideas off of. After 3 days working with SS and EG4 this is what I got
How can I discharge 121w into nothing and have zero watts feeding my house from 4pm till now...sad. anyone know what backup power ESP even is?

View attachment 190994

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y0bailey said:

Where are your CTs? Do you have any install pictures/diagrams?

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teeumup said:

I have a SPAN panel with an outside meter pan. CT's are on the load side tap with arrows pointing to the inverter. Before today's trip to tech support hell everything was working but we could not get the battery to feed the load independently of the grid from 4-7. The only change they made was to sync the clock to AZ time since it was screwed up and turn on grid peak shaving and some switch that stops all export to the grid.
What picture do you want to see, all the wiring is pretty normal, I don't have anything tied to the load terminals as I am not trying to feed a CLP at this time. The SPAN panel will do that eventually...hopefully! I have the EG4 wall mount battery so comms should be OK. Really I am not asking this system to do anything crazy, so if two tech support groups don't figure this out quickly then I made a costly mistake. My buddy put in a solark at my recommendation with zero issues doing exactly what I want to do, I just cheaped out unfortunately.

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teeumup said:

Yep this was a tough week to start my system. Had a solaredge without battery for 5 years. Designed all my solar systems and picked EG4 on price since the savings over solark covered the first 14kw battery, don't know if that is a mistake yet. Will be getting the second battery in Feb so close to 30kw. Will buy one battery every year till I have 5. I can burn through 100kwh on a hot AZ Summer day. I am not even trying to run my house, just keep my hard earned Frankie's out of APS hands.
Once they figure out bidirectional EV chargers then my problems go away as I will have 100kw sitting in the garage that I can drive.

Wish there was an EG4 firmware guru somewhere I can bounce my ideas off of. After 3 days working with SS and EG4 this is what I got
How can I discharge 121w into nothing and have zero watts feeding my house from 4pm till now...sad. anyone know what backup power ESP even is?

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ksmithaz1 said:

My unit runs with EPS on all the time. I think this is the power out to the "load" lugs, and leech. I think it stands for "Emergency Power". I just turned EPS back on this evening after my batteries charged to 100%. It's been off for over two days. No sun no battery charging. Might make it thru tomorrow with the bat's and a modicum of sunlight.

View attachment 191001


I'm paralle (2)l, I run everything from a bus off the load lugs, no flow from/to the grid, but I have it connected with a small breaker to only one inverter for phase sync. When I want to disable output but allow the batteries to charge I tap the 'Power Backup' to 'Disable'. This shuts off the 'EPS' output. Again I'm not in off-grid mode, I just let the unit think the grid is not working properly (only connected to one inverter) so it syncs the phases for the sine wave, (tested with o-scope) but does not appear to otherwise do anything with the grid connections. Thus when the ATS clicks it is not a violent transition (which it was 1/2 the time prior).


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If I understand it the output settings are here: You should be able to set Forced Discharge for your TOU (4-7). Assuming EG4 batteries you should be able to set your "On-Grid" settings as well. My assumption would be if you set control to SOC and cutoff to 50% it would start dumping batteries to grid. Might be wrong. The other assumption is that this may require forced, thus enable this and set the stop to say 30% (assuming it's a tiered approach) and then set a start/stop time. I would start by simply enabling forced and leaving the times all zero's I would think this would be blanket, but I'd play with it.


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Me? I just let the inverter turn off when SOC is 10%, but I think forced discharge is what you want for TOU shifting. Clear as mud in the manuals IMNSHO. Did you download the latest manual? The current rev is like 2.1.

Good Luck!

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teeumup said:

I appreciate your help, are you in AZ. Are you ongrid and trying to avoid the peak load rates and peak load max Kwh tax

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FilterGuy said:

This is an offgrid design I recently helped someone do:

View attachment 161427

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Quattrohead said:

Can we save the present settings into a file so that we can go back to it easily?

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teeumup said:

@Markus_EG4 can you detail how to do this? Who does the "unlocking". I have been asking EG4 for a while to do this exact task. I have to change my settings 2 times a year to keep up with the charges of my local utility. Right now I don't even know what EG4 did during commissioning to make my 18k PV inverter work perfectly, but in May I have to change the settings. I need to download the existing setpoints and also know where the changes would be made. The firmware for the PC app, cell app, and inverter screen all appear to have a different level of detail and the manual does not match all of them at this point. Also I second the motion to be able to save a firmware file and be able to upload it if anything happens or like me you just want to make annual changes.

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bob.longmire said:

Hi! What are your feelings about skipping the Solar Disconnect and using the On/Off switch on the side of the 18K. Using that, instead of the IMO 8 Pole Switch. Any ideas on pro's and cons? The one thing I'd note is I'm using a combiner box on the roof, so I can disconnect power there if I need to work on the lines between the panels and the inverter, I can cut the power there. Thoughts?

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