question

dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc asked

Quattro will not run ESS correctly

My system worked just like it should on initial set up. But I want to use the grid to supplement what energy that my battery and solar can’t power. I went through setting up ESS assistant and it said that the install was successful and the ESS settings showed up on the Cerbo but now all it will do is bleed a little power to the battery or draw power from the battery and will not charge the battery above 45% SOC. It also wont use solar to charge the battery or power loads. I have spent 5 days reading manuals and tech support questions and answers, researching everything I can find online and watching YouTube videos and have yet to find an answer. The company I purchased the equipment from has no idea what’s wrong and had me send pics of everything including multimeter test and all my settings. They are still working on trying to finure out what’s wrong. I have uninstalled ESS assistant and reinstalled went through all setting and restarted the Cerbo and all the other components but nothing has worked.

This is my systems components:

Victron Quattro 48/10000/140-2x100 120v

Victron MPPT RS 450/100-Tr

Victron Cerbo GX

Victron GX Touch 70

Victron Autotransformer 120/240-100A

Victron Smartshunt 2000A/50mV

1 - SOK 48v 100Ah Rack Mount Battery

Renogy 550w panels 8 in series

Renogy 450w panels 4 in series


Settings

TAB: General

System frequency 60Hz

Shore current 100.0 A

Overruled by remote checked

Secondary input shore current 30.0 A

Overruled by remote checked

Dynamic current limiter unchecked

State of charge when Bulk finished 95.0 %

Battery capacity 100 Ah

Charge efficiency 0.95

TAB: Grid

Country / grid code standard Other: not compliant to any grid code standard

AC input 1 Above selected gridcode plus LOM B (safe)

AC input 2 Above selected gridcode plus LOM B (safe)

Accept wide input frequency range (45-65 Hz) checked

AC low switch mains off 90 V

AC low switch mains on 97 V

AC high switch mains on 135 V

AC high switch mains off 140 V

UPS function checked

TAB: Inverter

PowerAssist unchecked

Inverter output voltage 120 V

Ground relay checked

Inverter DC shut-down voltage 37.20 V

Inverter DC restart voltage 43.60 V

Low DC alarm level 43.60 V

Do not restart after short-circuit (VDE 2510-2 safety) unchecked

enable AES unchecked

TAB: Charger

Enable charger checked

Weak AC input unchecked

Stop after excessive bulk unchecked

Lithium batteries checked

Disable VSense (for diagnostic purposes) unchecked

Configured for VE.Bus BMS unchecked

Charge curve Fixed

Absorption voltage 56.80 V

Float voltage 54.00 V

Charge current 63 A

Repeated absorption time 1.00 Hr

Repeated absorption interval 7.00 Days

Absorption time 1 Hr

TAB: Virtual switch

TAB: Usage

Virtual switch usage Do not use VS

TAB: Assistants

TAB: Assistant Configuration

ESS (Energy Storage System) (size:982)

*) System uses LiFePo4 with other type BMS

(This can be either a BMS connected via CAN bus or a BMS system in which the

batteries are protected from high/low cell voltages by external equipment.)

*) The battery capacity of the system is 100 Ah.

*) Sustain voltage 50.00 V.

*) Cut off voltage for a discharge current of:

0.005 C= 52.00 V

0.25 C= 50.00 V

0.7 C= 49.20 V

2 C= 48.00 V

*) Inverting is allowed again when voltage rises 1.20 V above cut-off(0).

*) Relevant VEConfigure settings:

- Battery capacity 100 Ah.

- PowerAssist unchecked

- Lithium batteries checked

- Dynamic current limiter unchecked

- Storage mode unchecked


Can anyone help me with this ?

ESS
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20 Answers
haelo avatar image
haelo answered ·

Does your mppt charge the batteries to 100% when you switch off the Quattro? Is the charge current correct?

2 comments
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dukeofsc avatar image dukeofsc commented ·
No. I finally got enough sun this morning to try it and it shows the MPPT is producing 18w but nothing is going to the battery. I think the power is going to power the Cerbo and Smartshunt. The MPPT is showing PV-1 has 380.49v and PV-2 has 158.80v. I believe the charge current is correct. The SOK battery is connected through CANBus so it’s my understanding that it controls the system and tells it what it needs.
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dukeofsc avatar image dukeofsc dukeofsc commented ·

51727c35-fbc4-4932-8445-d0c5222d6211.png

Screenshot of control with Quattro turned off.

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haelo avatar image
haelo answered ·

The battery shows 52,38V That seems to Be a full battery( lipo4? )to me. Only the mppt validatie it on 46% That looks strange to me.

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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

I went back through all the settings and reset everything for the 10 time and disconnected the BMS can connection and restarted it as just a standard lithium battery without BMS control and got it to start charging the battery but once the battery was fully charged it dropped the solar and started powering everything from the grid. So I went into the settings on the MPPT and manually set every parameter that SOK suggested for this 48v battery and did the same thing with the SmartShunt and made sure it had the same SOC that the battery said it had. After that it still didn’t work but if I shut the grid off it increased the solar and was running the loads and charging the battery simultaneously. Turn the grid back on and all the loads went back to the grid and solar stopped. I then went ahead and set the battery back to CanBus connected to the Cerbo and went through all the settings and made sure anything that had a settings for what controls the battery SOC to the SOK battery and it seemed to start working. I only had about an hour of useful sun left so I ended up loosing the solar so can’t be sure it is really working or not. Ill post pictures of Cerbo screen to show what was happening

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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

01c7cdf3-6611-45db-ada2-39164ff89148.jpeg842d9c3a-80d2-4135-bcba-845a4b6ae799.jpegfe9ee9e4-8fa9-4266-9087-604d13a59c4e.jpeg

These photos are after I disconnected the battery BMS from the Cerbo CanBus. And changed the settings to standard Lithium battery and manually entered all of the charger settings that SOK suggested. It finally started charging the battery and charged it to 100% which it would not do. But once the battery was charged it powered all loads from grid. And disregard solar.


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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

0eac6266-2659-468d-a5ee-8eb0ec9bed9b.jpeg

This is with the same settings as last pictures but I shut off the grid and it started using solar. This is right after the first pic on last post that shows the solar at 28w. All I did was shut breaker off supplying grid and the MPPT went from 28w to 2498w


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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

08887600-1c71-47e5-b923-18f5f864d1bc.png

dd44bab5-76d8-4c55-95d4-74c89f763fc9.png

I then reconnected the battery BMS to CanBus and changed the settings for that type of battery setup and went through every device and made sure they were set to use the battery as the SOC Monitor. It seemed to start working but then I lost sunlight so no solar. So I will see tomorrow if it Is working or not. A SOK battery technician and the company that I bought the Victron equipment from are both trying to figure out why this is not working. Nobody Has any idea what’s wrong !!!!!!!!!! I’ve spent over a week now trying to get this system to work and had to buy a windows computer because I use all Mac and its not supported with the VE Configuration tools program that you have to use to install the ESS assistant. At this point I’m wondering if I made a mistake going with Victron equipment.


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haelo avatar image
haelo answered ·

Is the quattro enabled to return energy to the grid? May I ask ...did you configure the quattro with VEC, to enable ESS, put in the landcode, charger, etcetera.? And did you set the ESS parameters in the remote console, pages, settings, ESS?


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nickdb avatar image
nickdb answered ·

SOK batteries usually present as Pylontech, the GX will force a low battery charge as pylons are usually 15 cells. Update to v3 RC and there is a fix that allows for 16 cell batteries, this may resolve your issue.

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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

No grid feed in. I tried turning that on and set to feed in zero but that made no difference. I first used the Victron connect program on my Mac to set it up but then realized I didn’t have access to install the ESS. The program I used was the VE Configuration tools for VE.Bus Products. I had to buy a computer to run that program because all I have are Macs and that program wont work on Mac. Yes after installing the ESS assistant and making sure it loaded correctly I used the controller to set up the parameters. Where do you Update to v3 ?

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nickdb avatar image nickdb ♦♦ commented ·
Change the online update gx setting to release candidate and check for updates.
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shaneyake avatar image
shaneyake answered ·

Can you check on the GX -> battery -> parameters and just check to see what the BMS is commanding.
On the GX under system setup, make sure the BMS or the SmartShunt are set as the battery monitor and not the inverter. Also check the correct AC input is set to grid.

You can also check what the MPPT is being told to do, GX -> MPPT -> Networked Operation and see if it been told to charge.

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dukeofsc avatar image dukeofsc commented ·
Where can I find what the BMS is commanding on the GX ?
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shaneyake avatar image shaneyake dukeofsc commented ·

GX -> Menu -> (Your Battery, could say pylontech, depending on how the battery is detected) -> parameters
That will display commanded voltage, charge current and discharge current that is coming in over CAN.

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dukeofsc avatar image dukeofsc commented ·
The BMS screen on the battery says DSG
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dukeofsc avatar image dukeofsc commented ·
The Battery monitor on the GX is set to

Pylontech battery on CAN-bus

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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

b4f0feaa-f31d-4a60-a40b-a9c8fc0aedfc.jpeg

f10ccbde-3c0e-4f0c-8221-eb99f2719004.jpeg

This is where I was at this morning. Grid off and grid on. Stopped using solar again with grid on


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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

b817122b-e519-4448-8ace-77c57f437b89.jpeg

Parameters


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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

38442789-8de5-46ac-a35c-dfb45830db13.jpeg

I updated this and have probably checked 10 times over the last week for updates. It always said it was up to date. What Did the release candidate do? Is this an update to the GX or to the Battery BMS?


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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

009c562f-d587-4e7e-b549-c13003c83350.jpeg

Right now after updating


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derrick thomas avatar image
derrick thomas answered ·

Release candidate is beta firmware

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dukeofsc avatar image dukeofsc commented ·
That may have fixed it
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dukeofsc avatar image dukeofsc commented ·
If I upload pics of my ESS settings would you be willing to look at it and see if it looks good to you


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derrick thomas avatar image derrick thomas dukeofsc commented ·
Throw them up here and I'm sure you will get more than one response.
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dukeofsc avatar image dukeofsc derrick thomas commented ·

I will add 3 photos of what it’s doing right now. It was pulling like 79w from the grid but I’m guessing that was to supplement the solar power to bulk charge the battery. As the battery SOC started increasing just by 1% increments the watts from grid decreased and the reading is now jumping around from negative to positive. I have the grid set point at 10w. So im just guessing at why it was pulling 79w

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nickdb avatar image
nickdb answered ·

ESS is behaving like it should. It is showing state #1 and #2 which means you have hit the minimum active battery SOC for the system so all PV will go to battery charging until it is ~3% above the minimum active, grid will be used for loads until then.

This is documented in the ESS docs and numerous other posts here.

It may help you to brush up on the training for ESS so you can get your head around it.

You either need to do away with batterylife or lower your minimum SOC.

On face value you have insufficient PV if the battery isn't charging fully, though this could be affected by the current GX code.

Make sure in DVCC that it is configured for 16 cells and the CVL is not fixed at 52.1V.

Edit: from the pic above I can see the CVL is sufficiently high enough, so you will need a decent charge cycle to see how it goes and for batterylife to sort itself out.

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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

24a9a851-0597-477a-8ae0-fd9be3f2acff.jpeg

119e83e0-6b33-4404-8ebf-9c7275a4a24a.jpeg6bc7bcc1-3c97-4d7b-bdfa-a7bb613eb5cb.jpeg

Do these settings look right?

The setting for Peak Shaving was not there before going through the update with release candidate, this is what it set up on its own. I haven’t had the chance yet to find out what that’s for.

I have the inverter set to a maximum of 4600w because I only have one 48v SOK battery running a Quattro 48v/10,000w 120v inverter And the Max Continuous Discharge Current on that battery is 100 amps. If I’m figuring correctly that would be 4,800 watts. So I set it to 200w less. Does that sound right?



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Alexandra avatar image Alexandra ♦ commented ·
@Dukeofsc

The release notes for beta explain the peak shaving. A newer feature being tested. That will allow some users to have peak shaving at min state of charge if the battery allows it.

The same as support for 16s batteries that identify as Pylontec who are 15s at the moment, so mess with the charging. That's why it charged when the bms was disconnected.

The limit inverter power feature only works if there is grid and you are trying to reduce load on your batteries and inverter especially if the load on the output is too high for the inverting ability of the inverter.

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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

81171c22-6fd8-4277-b932-6a6fe0860d8d.jpegb8b8436a-ae87-4d3a-8415-38db7b275b2f.jpeg

5ce1b243-1e02-42c9-a7f5-be273aafd581.jpeg

Where it’s at right now. As battery percentage went up the grid eventually went to negative.


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nickdb avatar image nickdb ♦♦ commented ·
Looks fine, if you don’t want a negative setpoint raise your grid setpoint slightly.

Ess has stopped blocking since you are above 58%.

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dukeofsc avatar image dukeofsc nickdb ♦♦ commented ·
Default was 50w so I may go back to that and see how it goes. In response to your other message I did do tons of research. I spent days reading every ESS programming papers I could find and all the setup and programming info on all the equipment that’s on this system. Watching videos, on YouTube and on Victron directly, signed up for a Pro account to get access to all the training videos and info they have on there for dealers and installers and watched the training videos. I followed everything exactly as was instructed but nothing worked. I searched Forums for the problem and found some people with the same problem but there was no answers to a fix. I then contacted Signature Solar which is who I bought most of the system from and they had no idea what was happening. They had me send pictures of everything including showing the whole system and how everything is wired, pics of my multimeter voltage testing different connections and an entire list of all settings. I believe they was going to get with Victron to try to find an answer but that was last week and I haven’t heard back from them yet. Also a SOK tech was supposed to call me last Friday because I contacted them to see if it could be a battery problem. Haven’t heard from them yet either. At that point I decided to go ahead and post the problem on here and hope for the best. I don’t want you to think that I had a problem and hadn’t even looked at a manual and just hoped someone here would fix it. It looked like I had it working late yesterday but this morning it was back to just using grid for everything and not charging battery at all. So my hopes aren’t high for this being completely fixed.
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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

026b557a-fbce-4272-90e2-745766a3f36c.jpeg

This is where it’s at right now. Outside it’s completely cloudy and looks like there is some rain moving in.


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dukeofsc avatar image
dukeofsc answered ·

The battery charged to 100% then I started having high voltage warnings right after another. Probably every minute or 2. I read that a lot of people say it’s a balancing issue and to put controller into keep battery charged setting and let it go And the battery will eventually balance and the high voltage alarms will stop. Does this sound right?

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