"Battery Monitor [512] Module0 High Voltage: Alarms" - VRM bug?

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charly65 asked Apr 19, '24

"Battery Monitor [512] Module0 High Voltage: Alarms" - VRM bug?

Hi there,

I'm fairly new with Victron & Pylontech products and have the following Setup:

6x Pylontech US3000C
3x Multiplus II 48/5000 (not yet installed)
1x SmartSolar Charger MPPT 150/45
1x SmartSolar Charger MPPT 150/35
1x Raspi 4 w/ Venus OS

Currently only the battery stack + PV Chargers + Venus OS is installed.Plus some unmanaged consumers on the 48V DC side.

I'm getting repeated "Battery Monitor [512] Module0 High Voltage: Alarms" in VRM while there is no High Voltage at all. Battery SoC is far below 100% (it happened at 70% as well as at 15% and somewhere in between).

Venus OS does NOT show any errors, only VRM.

Current Cell Voltage is at min: 3.281 V / max: 3.285 V far, total: 49.22 V, so far away from High Voltage.

There is no high current loads (yet), maximum charge around 60 A total / maximum discharge around 20 A total.

I know that Venus OS is not supported, but Venus OS works just fine - it's only the alarm in VRM that puzzles me. When I clear the alarm in VRM it comes back within minutes and I have no idea where this comes from.

Any ideas?

VRM Venus OS Pylontech

vrm.png (78.3 KiB)

pylontech.jpg (30.9 KiB)

alarms.png (38.8 KiB)

details.jpg (44.3 KiB)

home.jpg (38.2 KiB)

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Answer 1 · 2024-04-19T13:10:47Z

duivert answered · Apr 19 at 01:10 PM

Hi have you read the victron pylontech setup manual? Take a look at troubleshooting section, there is a section about this

See: https://www.victronenergy.com/live/battery_compatibility:pylontech_phantom

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Answer 2 · 2024-04-19T15:51:02Z

Hi @duivert,

I've read this about a 100 times (at least it feels so) ...
Do you refer to:
"Note: The “Limit managed battery charge voltage” feature should be left OFF, unless you are experiencing “High Voltage” or “Internal Error” alarms. These alarms can indicate that there is an internal cell imbalance in the battery. It may be useful in this situation to enable this feature, and then adjust the voltage limit down so that the batteries are able to balance charge without reaching over voltage internally. This imbalance is at a cell level, so might not be reflected as a high overall battery voltage if measured with a Multimeter. This can then be turned off once the battery has balanced itself properly." ?

At first I left this feature off as described there, then - after getting some alarms I set it to 52.5 and then to 52.0 Volts. Didn't help.

I *could* set it even lower, however, this morning - for example - the battery was down to 15% @ 48.80 V, so setting the limit to anything lower than 52.0 (but above 48.8) wouldn't have made any change, would it?

Also the Minimum/Maximum Cell Voltage (which I *assume* is reported across all 6 Pylontech modules) shows minimum delta of a few mV. No high voltage visible.

This system is setup up step-by-step, so first I only had one, then the two SmartSolar-Chargers (Bluetooth Network) in combination. Venus OS came about 2 weeks ago and the Pylontech connection was added just a few days ago.

So in case you're referring to:

'High voltage' warning or alarm shown on battery status

The 'high voltage' warning or alarm is not unusual on new batteries that are not yet balanced. To help the batteries balance quickly, keep the batteries fully charged until the errors go away.In an ESS system, set it to 'keep batteries charged', in an off-grid system the fastest way is to either charge / balance the battery before installation, or to fully charge with a generator if not enough solar is available to keep the batteries fully charged.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the battery was in float/absorption a couple of times. Originally (25 days ago) I've played with the Pylontech limit of 53.5 V, then I reduced to 52, 52.5 and 52 again - that was before the battery was connected to the Venus OS just 4 days ago.
The batteries were fully charged a couple of times as well as I had fully charged them one-by-one before connecting them to each other ...

What puzzles me is the fact, that min/max cell voltage is reported to the Venus OS (and VRM) and both Values are always pretty close (3-5 mV) to each other.
If there is/was any overvoltage internally, shouldn't that be reported as "Max Cell Voltage"?

More ideas welcome.

Answer 3 · 2024-04-19T16:22:58Z

nickdb answered · Apr 19 at 04:22 PM

Have you manually set the config on the chargers?

I would suggest you wait until your whole system is ready and configured.

For what you spent I would have rather bought a cerbo, it eliminates issues with a Pi that ultimately makes support interesting.

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duivert commented · Apr 19 at 04:25 PM

yes i agree!

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charly65 commented · Apr 19 at 07:21 PM

"For what you spent I would have rather bought a cerbo"
I probably will ...
I wasn't sure what the cerbo does and what not and wasn't sure which one to buy. In the end I will end up with more VE.Direct devices the Cerbo can handle directly, so I will need extra Interfaces anyway (which is not as clean as I would like it to be). The Raspberry was laying around, so it was an afternoon project to implement.

Honestly: I was disappointed about what the cerbo does (or more: what it doesn't!): All the information history only works in combination with the VRM portal and I don't like using cloud services at all. Most likely I will end up building something with MQTT, InfluxDB & Grafana similar to what is described here: https://github.com/victronenergy/venus-docker-grafana

But I don't expect having a true Cerbo rather that a Raspberry PI with Venus OS will not change anything regarding this problem.

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charly65 charly65 commented · Apr 19 at 07:23 PM

I don't understand the point about having no inverter. The Cerbo / Venus OS does control the DVCC which is clearly shown in the Venus GUI.

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nickdb ♦♦ charly65 commented · Apr 20 at 05:47 AM

What are you planning to connect? There are 3 vedirect and 2 usb that can also be used for a total of 5.

Ignore the inverter comment, only relevant for normal batteries.

All things being equal, HV alarms on new pylons are usually cell imbalances, as it is triggered by the BMS, it is internal to one of the modules.

Usual rules apply - check all individual batteries have the same level of charge - are all the LED status lights the same? One pack may be above others.

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Answer 4 · 2024-04-19T20:10:51Z

lee-taylor answered · Apr 19 at 08:10 PM

Duivert is correct, I had exactly the same issue with my Pylontech setup (4x US5000) I initially set my max. voltage to something like 51.4V having a Cerbo is neither here nor there. The only real advantage is it has lots of inputs. After a couple of weeks it settled down and now Limit managed battery charged voltage is disabled.

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Answer 5 · 2024-04-19T21:37:33Z

charly65 answered · Apr 19 at 09:37 PM

hmm ... I will try ...

However, I still would like to understand where that "high voltage alarm" comes from and why it is not shown in the min/max cell voltages?
Either there is high voltage - then I would expect the "max cell voltage" value to reflect that, or there isn't any high voltage (as reflected in the min/max cell voltages), then I would expect no alarm.

Someone from Victron (SW engineering) should be able to explain where that message comes from. Since it does not show up in Venus OS I don't expect it to come from Pylontech but rather in the communication between Venus & VRM.
BTW: I did have a dbus-monitor running (on the Raspi) for a while - writing all the values to a log file - and couldn't find any traces of those alarms ... strange.

In the end, that doesn't leave a good feeling.

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kevgermany ♦♦ commented · Apr 20 at 03:46 AM

The alarm shows as a battery monitor source. In your setup the battery monitor is the Pylontech BMSs. The Pi is simply reporting what Pylontech tells it.

The 01nn numbers in the battery details show which battery.

Plenty of reports here saying that Pylontechs can take a few weeks to settle down. If it persists, you need to take it up with the Pylontech supplier.

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Answer 6 · 2024-04-20T12:05:44Z

charly65 answered · Apr 20 at 12:05 PM

hmmm ...
"Plenty of reports here saying that Pylontechs can take a few weeks to settle down."
Okay, I can accept that. But WHY don't they show up in "Max Cell Voltage"?

Basically you're saying, the Pylontech BMS sends out the high voltage alarm (which the Venus/Cerbo does NOT show, but it does forward it to the VRM Portal). In parallel the BMS sends out Min/Max Cell Voltages (which the Venus/Cerbo does show and forward) and they all look fine.

This is like saying:
"My truck doesn't fit under that 14ft bridge. And, by the way, my truck is 10ft tall"

So there's two distinct points here:

The Pylontech BMS sends out high voltage alarms while Min/Max Cell Voltages shown are well within range - WHY?
The Cerbo seems to forward all the information it gets, but it does NOT show all of it.

Thanks for your support.

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nickdb ♦♦ commented · Apr 20 at 12:20 PM

All good questions for Pylontech support or your supplier, Victron has control over none of that, nor the access to check.

Maybe a battery/BMS has an issue? Who knows.

The BMS comms are one-way, the Cerbo reports and responds to what it is sent.

CAN broadcasts only send a limited data set, so the Cerbo has access to a fraction of the data available within the battery, and the only way to get proper visibility is to use the battery's BMS analysis tool - batteryview for Pylon.

This is not an end-user tool even though it is everywhere on the internet.

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