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The crimper itself has worked great. I like it. I think the problem may be that the lugs here are thinner than they should be, which leaves the finished crimp looser than it was designed to be. It's hard to get good quality products here. It is also possible that the cable itself is not...

Using a bought-in-Thailand hydraulic crimper (around 700 baht), we quickly learned that the cable sizes did not match the crimp dies. The nearest size die to the cable diameter left the lug loose on the cable--loose enough to be able to slide back and forth on it about a millimeter. Of course...

If your welder requires 240-volt, 20-amp input to operate, that's about 5 kw of power (volts x amps = watts). You should be looking for a 5kw or better inverter. I think the welder might operate at lower amperages as well if it is not using its highest settings, e.g. if it is, say, a 160-amp...

Class T fuses are not cheap. And they are not instant, either. When I was doing my research on this (on account of the high price tag for Class T), I discovered that whereas I had thought they were almost instant, they also have a delay before blowing. Another fuse, at a much cheaper price...

Yes. I'm not sure exactly where or how the battery is produced, but it looks nice, both inside and out. I torqued the connections inside once it arrived and found only one of them loose. The cells are 280AH CALB cells, rated for 9000 cycles. The BMS is a JK 150-amp version. It has four RJ45...

Well, I would like to know how the inverter will communicate with the battery's BMS via WIFI. Because the manufacturer finally got back to me yesterday saying that the RS485 port was not designed to communicate with a battery, but rather to be used for WIFI. The problem with this explanation...

I'm still trying to reconcile this statement with your tagline: "I don't want to know why you can't. I want to know how you can!" I have never heard of LiFePO4 batteries becoming bombs. Do they? I used to have FLA batteries in my bedroom--never had any major troubles, but I did notice some...

Thanks for chiming in. I'd sure appreciate some documentation to back this up, if you or anyone else has the details. And would 5-volts on an RS485 port be expected to cause damage?

Yes, seriously. If you really wish to look into this, you may download an English translation of the Thai "Commission of Computer Related Offences Act" from the United Nations server HERE. The law specifically applies to internet activities, including "defamation" (which still applies here...

Well, if you can believe it, I don't have the option to buy any of those in Thailand. Not one. Victron is completely unavailable here, and I've looked for the others, too, with no success so far. Now, if you can point me to a domestic source within Thailand, and/or one that is accessible via...

I'm not convinced that is the answer. The Sigineer seems quite different from the LVTOPSUN model that I had. The LVTOPSUN is a toroidal, LF inverter, with an advertised momentary peak output of 3x its rating, whereas that Sigineer makes no such claims, resting on a 2x peak for five seconds...

Well....supposedly, LVTOPSUN doesn't either. Just the same, I have one.

Well, take this with a grain of salt. I'm in Thailand, and good information here is scarce. What's more, it is against the law here to post negative information online about anyone or any company, punishable by jail times, which exacerbates the information gap. But here is the information I...

I believe this may be accurate for Deye, Sunsynk, and Sol-Ark. However, with LVTOPSUN, the firmware is definitely not the same--at least, the GUI/interface is rather different. The LVTOPSUN, for example, has no option of setting battery-usage times, as I understand the Deye to have, and the...

The manual that came with it gives the pinouts for both RS485 and BMS. However, the 3KW model has only one port, which is labeled "RS485" on the unit itself. The 48-volt version of the 3KW LVTOPSUN seems uncommon. I don't find any in stock at the moment, and the manufacturer does not even...

I guess it's not as necessary as I had previously understood to have communication between the inverter and the battery. The seller of the battery had insisted, however, that there be such communication in order to provide me a one-year warranty on the battery. Presumably, the battery might...

In attempting to achieve communication between the inverter and the battery, I connected a standard Cat. 5e patch cord between the sole RS485 port on the 3KW LVTOPSUN inverter and one of the several ports of this same label on the JK BMS of the 48V, 280AH LiFePO4 battery. The magic smoke was...

Yes, I already have the controllers. They were the best quality, as far as I am aware, that I could find in my location for a charge controller. At least, they were about the only name brand with good online reviews in English. In Thailand, Victron is nowhere on the market, and having had a...

Thank you for responding. But this would seem to address damage to the battery, not to the controller. The documentation says somewhere, IIRC, that the controller won't be damaged by being hooked up to the PV panels without the battery; however, the battery should be connected first so that it...

The EPEVER manual is difficult to understand. I think @Browneye might know the answers I need, but I as I continue to study, I just have more questions. 1) Will the unit actually be damaged with a LiFePO4 battery? If so why and/or under what conditions? 2) What happens if running two EPEVER...

Now you have me curious. I don't think they were actually intending to repel the lightning itself...I understood that they were preventing the...what are they called?...runners?...for the lightning from forming which create the lightning's path a few milliseconds before the strike. If no path...

I'd be interested in knowing if the LVTOPSUN, apparently a rebranded model of Deye, would exhibit these characteristics. That's what I got--an off-grid hybrid model. There is no grid power in the village where I'll be installing this, so nobody is grounding anything. I don't yet know what...

In my case, I believe the lightning connected with the large adjacent pond. I had pounded a 2-meter copper-clad ground rod clear down to the water level to make sure I had a good ground. Too good, I guess. At that time I had no solar panels. The ground wire came into the house from that rod...

In theory, yes, you're right. But in practice, the kind of soil we have, which is largely clay, is not very conductive. This means if one creates a good ground somewhere, it will have superior conductivity, perhaps even better than the nearby tree. Again, I have personal experience with this...

I don't think we have such a thing as "hardie board" here; at least, I don't remember seeing any. We do have one type of plywood that is somewhat protected from the humidity by being inside a plastic sandwich. The edges are still exposed, though. I've bought a piece of plywood that I had...

Wood doesn't last well in my climate. Cement board doesn't seem designed to carry much weight. Plywood, if obtainable, quickly falls apart in the humidity. Concrete walls exist, but are not very portable. The whole system is expected to be moved to a different building within two years, so...

Do any of you use a Tracer AN with a LiFePO4 battery? If so, are you using this dry contact connection?

I'm finalizing my design, and already have two EPEVER Tracer 8420AN units planned to handle one string of panels each in conjunction with an LVTOPSUN inverter on a third string of panels with all three connected to a 51.2V, 280Ah LiFePO4 powerwall battery. As I'm studying the manual for the...

FWIW, I agonized a bit over which kind of drill to buy--Ryobi being the more expensive one, and it came in a set of two of them. The salesman at the store encouraged me to go with Ryobi, saying it would last. It has. That was over ten year ago, and both the drills and their batteries are...

Manual for LVTOPSUN LT-3048M60: PDF reduced in Gimp due to size limitations on file upload (the original scanned file being about 18 MB). I hope it is readable and may be of help to someone seeking this manual, as I was unable to find it anywhere online. Though sold/purchased in Thailand, the...

I recently attempted a $2000+ purchase from a reputable and well-known-in-this-forum Chinese vendor and was unable to make the payment. The online money transfer service for international transfers had been halted by the bank as of January last year, the bank claimed the SWIFT code for the...

I realize I'm late to this thread, but I found it very enlightening. Early on, from the problem descriptions, I was intuiting that the problem had to do with power-factor issues. But I know little about power factor. Years ago, I enrolled in a distance-learning electronics course from CIE...

Not that you're trying to pull the wool over the inspector's eyes, as a knowledgeable individual would certainly know what the full voltage of an LFP battery is, but nominally it is a 48-volt system, after all, and I would recommend speaking of it as such. When dealing with inspectors (building...

The best shape in metal to resist twisting is round, i.e. round pipe. It's amazing how much it resists twist. But round pipe would not work well in a square wall, which is why, if it were my project, I would use galvanized square tubing. Square tubing resists twist quite well, just not as...

We have trouble with termites here, too. The best solution in Thailand is to use teak wood (the best) or one of two or three other hardwoods. Termites don't like gnawing on teak so much, and it tends to last a very long time. But it is expensive, and increasingly rare. The harder the wood...