My 18Kpv does not seem to want to charge my battery even though there is plenty of power available. I can force it to charge by enabling the PV Charge priority, but I do not want to do that. As you can see in the top half of the attached picture, the battery is not being charged, yet there is over 2kW available. The bottom half was taken right after I turned on a toaster oven to show that plenty of power was available...at least on PV2. PV1 was still shaded at this time and had limited output. Could this be causing an issue?...if so, maybe I should swap PV1 and PV2? How can I get my inverter to automatically charge the battery when there is excess PV power? Right now, I am just wasting available power.
I want the PV to power the house as its first priority. Any excess should go to the battery. When no PV is available, then it should use only the battery. It should never use grid power unless the battery gets below, say, 15%. So far, I have been unable to achieve this fairly simple configuration.
The inverter will do exactly what you want it to do you’re just missing a setting or two. Look at your “charge first “ settings and your charge and discharge settings. Make sure you have the right battery and amps set for charging and discharging the battery. Where did you buy the unit?
My 18Kpv does not seem to want to charge my battery even though there is plenty of power available. I can force it to charge by enabling the PV Charge priority, but I do not want to do that. As you can see in the top half of the attached picture, the battery is not being charged, yet there is over 2kW available. The bottom half was taken right after I turned on a toaster oven to show that plenty of power was available...at least on PV2. PV1 was still shaded at this time and had limited output. Could this be causing an issue?...if so, maybe I should swap PV1 and PV2? How can I get my inverter to automatically charge the battery when there is excess PV power? Right now, I am just wasting available power.
I want the PV to power the house as its first priority. Any excess should go to the battery. When no PV is available, then it should use only the battery. It should never use grid power unless the battery gets below, say, 15%. So far, I have been unable to achieve this fairly simple configuration.
Would you be able to export the settings and post in thread?
Thanks. I made some changes and will try again today. If it still does not work, I will export the settings. FYI, I purchased this through Solar Sovereign
I finally figured out that I needed to enable Off-Grid-Mode in order to get things working properly. It now seems to be functioning okay. I figured that since I still had a grid connection, that this should NOT be enabled. This should probably be made more clear.
As an aside, before I enabled this mode, I could not figure out why the system was not charging my battery. Attached is a graph from yesterday. Why did it not charge the battery when it was only at 28% and almost 6kW was available. Seems like wasted power.
There are a lot of things that could be made clearer in the manual. I was very frustrated at times. I felt like an idiot but it wasn’t me it was because I was reading the manual, so don’t feel bad.
I’ve learned not to look at SOC and go only by volts, it’s probably a charge setting. There are also a couple of settings in the discharge mode that will affect charging. Find the 100% and 20% voltage of your batteries and use voltage to charge them instead of SOC.
At this point, I am just going to let it run for a couple of days to see how it goes. Today it successfully charged battery in the morning, then charged the car, then immediately went back to charging the battery after the car hit 100%. Supposedly, the inverter is properly talking to the BMS (Pace PC200) directly. I have the inverter only looking at SOC.
There are many things I would elaborate on in the manual. As someone that has written a few technical manuals in my life, it also left me a bit frustrated.
P.S. I guess I should have originally posted this under the Inverters section...next time.
