Generator won’t auto start with sol-ark 15K.

[Teprewitt]

Hello! First time poster here. We recently completed our off grid build and moved in. Our solar guy installed our generator, a generac 14k propane generator. Our house is completely off grid so we often need the generator, but it won’t auto start. The generator is wired to the Gen Breaker, but for some reason the sol-ark won’t take the power unless both “Gen Charge” and “Grid Charge” our both selected under battery charge tab. When both of these are selected I can select “Gen Force” and the generator will start and power the house and charge the batteries, but the generator still won’t start or turn off automatically. My solar installer doesn’t know anything about generators, so doesn’t understand how to fix the problem. Attached are the relevant pages on the sol-ark settings. Thanks for your help!

 

[DIYrich]

Uncheck "on grid always on"
Uncheck "gen connected to grid input"
Uncheck "grid peak shaving"
Uncheck time of use settings.

On the "charge" tab, you have it set to start charging at 20% soc. I belive it will then run until batteries are about 90-95%.

Since you are off grid, I would move the generator to the grid input, and check "gen connected to grid input". That would free up your gen input for something else.

 

[Teprewitt]

Thanks for the response! I’ll try that and report back.

 

[Teprewitt]

Uncheck "on grid always on"
Uncheck "gen connected to grid input"
Uncheck "grid peak shaving"
Uncheck time of use settings.

On the "charge" tab, you have it set to start charging at 20% soc. I belive it will then run until batteries are about 90-95%.

Since you are off grid, I would move the generator to the grid input, and check "gen connected to grid input". That would free up your gen input for something else.

That all worked perfectly! Thanks! The only thing I had to modify was I had to leave the Gen Connected to Grid Input checked. For some reason if that wasn’t checked the generator would bog down and only generate 4,000 watts and the sol-ark would kick it off. My solar guy said that the generator is wired to the Gen input, and both Gen Charge and Grid Charge have to be on in order for the Sol-Ark to accept the power from the generator. Also, for Time Of Use I had to go into the TOU settings and uncheck each day that was checked or the TOU setting wouldn’t turn off.

 

[Oldphile]

My solar guy said that the generator is wired to the Gen input, and both Gen Charge and Grid Charge have to be on in order for the Sol-Ark to accept the power from the generator.

I'm on grid so that's not going to work for me. I want to charge from my generator, but not from the grid. This sounds like a bug. What firmware are you on? For the 15K current version is M7.2.2.2