Solar, battery storage and Immersion controller

Bristol_Welsh said:

Hi all,

First time post as need a little bit of help. We had a our system commissioned this week based on 10 PV panels, Solis 3kw hybrid converter, 5kw Pure Drive battery and a Solic 200 hot water inverter.

The operating plan for this system, in order of priority, was to 1. Meet our household demand, 2. charge our battery and once that is full, 3. Divert excess PV power to the Solic 200 water inverter.

However, what I've found this week is that the Solic 200 is creating 'demand spikes' during the day and drawing between 2.5kwh per hour and 3.kwh, mostly from the battery.

This is not what I want as I'd like the battery to provide energy to the house after sunrise. I did speak to the installer but they were not too sure what I needed to do but suggested that I speak to Solis technical support which I did this morning but to no avail. Does anybody have any ideas of how I do this....to put it another way.....ONLY divert energy to the Solic 200 inverter from excess solar and NOT from stored battery energy or the grid.

For what its worth, Solis Technical Support said I should be careful about changing charge/discharge limits on the battery due to the potential to missing charge points in the evening whereby the battery drops below 17% charge and then automatically charges from the grid to top it up. He said that there would be an impact to battery performance if it couldn't do that.

Thanks in advance.......

Click to expand...

nelson88 said:

Hi I have a similar system to yours and having same problem, did you ever sort it out
Cheers Nelson 88

Click to expand...

designer-silver said:

Solution found…
I have upgraded my solar system with a Solis 3kw hybrid converter with batteries and like you I already had a Solic 200 which diverts excess solar to the immersion heater. I found it just drains the solar battery whenever it activates.
What I did was to loop the Solic 200 immersion AC feed wire back through the Solis CT clamp. This cancels out the immersion current detection in the CT clamp and has the effect of making the operation of the immersion invisible to the Solis Hybrid controller. The battery will now charge first and then the Solic 200 diverts excess generation to the immersion heater as before.
This arrangement means you can install less battery capacity and still be able to use all of your solar through the summer months.
Hope that helps.

Click to expand...