I wanted to share a recent experience.
My setup is an EG4 18KPV with 3 Internal 280ah wall mount batteries in parallel.
I live in Ohio in the US and during this last 60 days I have only seen my batteries reach 100% twice.
Over the last 2 months I have experienced something odd twice, which is this:
I would wake up in the morning, and expecting to see my batteries at 20% (as I am using the EG4 setting for my lithium batteries and SOC settings to stop using batteries thru the night at 20%). But instead I woke up to my batteries at 0%, yet I still had power.
I state it this way because the only way they would go to 0% is if grid power were off, and for some reason my Generac generator did not turn on to charge the batteries. So this was odd...
This happened about a month ago, and then on Thursday.
So what was being displayed on each battery was, yes they were at 0% power, and also on the EG4 it stated that it had lost communication with the batteries, and checking the alerts, it did report multiple "low power" and then "loss of com". Deducing the problem, this was of course because the batteries were at 0%, and hence they did not communicate.
But this should not happen.. right?
Well in speaking with Signature Solar's Tech support (they are great BTW) I floated a hypothesis that the BMS was confused, and although it was stating the batteries were say at (some percentage) in reality they were not. The tech on the call agreed with my hypothesis and after sharing with him that the batteries never fully charged but twice in 2 months, that the BMS probably learned a different "high" and "low" mark and hence the percentage values must not be accurate.
So in the meantime we have flipped the system to "Lead-Acid" and coded in the proper voltages. He stated to keep it this way for minimally 7 days (oddly specific, but maybe someone can shed some light on that statement)
I also used the AC charge function to fully charge the batteries so they would at least get a full exercise.
So here is the real question for my EG4 friends...
1) Is my hypothesis correct? did the BMS get confused and then was not able to gauge the proper percentage and hence ran the battery down all the way inadvertently.
1.1) If this is the case, wouldn't it make sense to make a "battery protection" or a "BMS protection" mode, that allowed for a full charge via grid or generator after "X" number of days of not having a full charge, to make sure the BMS knows what is going on?
1.2) OR.. possibly utilize the voltage & the SOC values to add a secondary check on the system to make sure things are working as expected.
I bring this up, because not I am stuck with this problem, which is how do I get my wife to understand the issue, and the solution, when she thinks a light a switch is "magic"...
We need a way for the system to be "smarter" and to take care of it's own maintenance functions, or have the ability to enable the "Maintenance" functions for those of us in colder not always sunny climates.
Thoughts?
Thank you
