Indepently powered cerbo shutting down

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krl asked Nov 27, '22

Indepently powered cerbo shutting down

Following up with my previous question I tried powering the cerbo exclusively out of a 12vcar battery. Still the cerbo shut down by itself. Managed to measure continuous 49.9v out of the pylontechs. Mppt went into safety 48v mode. Multiplus recorded low battery. Not sure why of 49.9v is above its 48v minimum.

Unplugged cerbo from car battery and plugged in again, system turned on as normal

Following is the information from my previous question. Opened a new one as now I believe I have an issue in the cerbo. Is this correct or am I doing something wrong

I have a cerbo with touch, multiplus 48/5000, smartsolar mppt 150/85 and 5xpylontech us2000

After 1 year with no issues, the cerbo has started to shutdown without recording any kind of error, the multiplus also shutdown, taking my house power with it. This appears to be happening when the batteries are above 90%.

Cerbo fully off, nothing on its leds or on the touch screen. Multiplus off with steady Red led on "low batery" ( battery at 93%). Mppt green led on float. Batteries, simple blink on run led as usual.

cerbo gx shutdown

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Answer 1 · 2022-11-27T17:14:34Z

nickdb answered · Nov 27, 2022 at 05:14 PM

As already advised, the capacitor has nothing to do with this behaviour.

The inverter should not shut down without a cerbo, it is not required to make the system work.

Have you manually set the correct settings on the inverter? When the cerbo goes, the mppts and inverter revert to their internal settings.

That it cannot work without a cerbo is indicative of a misconfigured system.

Your cerbo may well have a fault, or a bad cable/connection. Check that or have it replaced, nonetheless, the multi shouldn’t care and should just go into pass through.

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krl commented · Nov 27, 2022 at 05:53 PM

I thanks for the answer. Sorry about the cap mention. I copied it from my pervious explanation. Should have taken it out.

If pass through in multi means connecting ac input to output, I have no ac in. Just a generator I sometimes turn on. Rhe multi is signaling low battery in the led and outputting nothing

I have thoroughly followed the instructions in

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

Checked the multi parameters with an mk3, and set them accordingly again nevertheless

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Answer 2 · 2022-11-27T17:40:06Z

Alexandra answered · Nov 27, 2022 at 05:40 PM

@KRL

The cerbo is reporting errors from two other components there, one is the battery, the second is the multiplus. Both are battery related issues. It is possible your ess settings are triggering the low battery on the Multiplus (although not likely if you have been running a year now) and your battery master is glitching in its comms with the cerbo. Or somethingnon the pack is a little unhappy (not uncommon with Pylontec).

Try switching your bank around (with a different address system) a bit and see if it uncovers an issue, or resolves the comms glitch.

The next thing to check would be all battery connections and dc cabling maybe something has worked loose or corroded or something like that.

The capacitor was for a select range of cerbos, and they prevented power pack faliure. If that was the issue, you would have no power on your cerbo.

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krl commented · Nov 27, 2022 at 05:57 PM

Thanks for the answer. I know about the cap. Should have taken it out of the explanation sorry.

I have tried swapping the master battery in the pack for another one, and a new bms cable with no success. What worries me is that this is ONLY happening when battery is above 93%soc, so that wouldn't be related with a faulty wire no?

And I'm pretty sure if this because we spent a cloudy week with no issues, charging sometimes with the generator to 100%. And it only happened again on the first sunny day it the mppt went back upto 96%

What I don't understand is why is the cerbo shutting down when it's not powered by the pylontechs at all

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krl commented · Nov 29, 2022 at 03:17 PM

This is still happening regardless what I try.

If I unplugged communications from pylontech to cerbo, the system will simply go on working. Mppt charging and multi inverting. If I straight up unplug cerbo from power the same, multi still inverting.

Still sometimes, cerbo will go off and multi will go into low battery.

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Answer 3 · 2022-11-27T19:18:51Z

krl answered · Nov 27, 2022 at 07:18 PM

I tried shutting down the batteries, with the system running. Cerbo didn't turn off as expected, its still powered by the car battery.

Mppt just disconnected, I guess as there is no sun it doesn't care

Mti logged the same low battery error, but this time with a voltage value, so I guess something different is happening here. Its not the batteries shuting everything off and then going back on.

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Answer 4 · 2022-11-27T19:21:20Z

krl answered · Nov 27, 2022 at 07:21 PM

Cerbo settings

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krl commented · Nov 27, 2022 at 07:22 PM

Please note all this were taken while trying 4 out of 5 battery modules. Ccl now 50A, dcl 125A

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krl commented · Nov 27, 2022 at 07:24 PM

2nd half of dvcc

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20221120-133350.jpg (3.1 MiB)

Answer 5 · 2022-11-29T16:01:01Z

nickdb answered · Nov 29, 2022 at 04:01 PM

A couple of things to consider.

A low voltage alarm is expected if the BMS is "lost", the question is why?

It can be a bad battery/bms, so try changing which battery is master.

Replace the cable used for the BMS-2-CERBO comms.

Please attach a copy of the multis config file here so we can check the settings.

Also, pull charts from VRM which show the battery voltage and current reported from the BMS and the same chart from the VE bus (multi), perhaps there is some loss along the way.

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