question

john-holloway avatar image
john-holloway asked

Quattro 24v5kva charger cuts out intermittently on shorepower

A friend has a barge which has a Quattro 24v 5kva inverter charger (apparently professionally installed, certainly to a high professional standard), which intermittently swaps from "battery float charge plus sockets fed by shorepower" mode to "sockets fed by inverter and no charger" mode, exactly as though the shorepower had been disconnected (but the isolation transformer still hums, and the shorepower meter shows a small consumption, so it is not a shorepower failure) The status lights on the battery charger go out, and the battery bank starts to discharge. Eventually, it returns to charge/shorepower mode.
The load on the system is modest (typically about 500w max) and the shorepower current limit is set to 30A., so it's not overload...
Any ideas?

MultiPlus Quattro Inverter Charger
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1 Answer
Daniël Boekel (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image
Daniël Boekel (Victron Energy Staff) answered ·

Try turning off 'UPS function'
Maybe the incoming voltage dips (due to loads on board or on shore) and the inverter takes over due to that.

disabling UPS function makes it a bit less trigger happy.

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john-holloway avatar image john-holloway commented ·

Thanks for coming back to me so swiftly. I've spent another six hours on this one today, so have some more data with the switch over to the right "charger only" position as well as to the left. I can rule out excessive load on the boat, and a voltage drop on the pontoon.
Here goes:
When I fired the system up, the load on the shorepower socket was about 1.5Kw (indicated by the Efergy monitor) . The lights on the remote panel took a couple of minutes to come on, but then showed mains and battery charger mode. As the charger went into float mode, the consumption dropped to about 800w (part of which was a 500w fan heater, which I was using so that I would hear when the power failed) After about three hours the 220v sockets tripped out. The charger lights on the remote panel had gone out went out as had the mains light. I selected inverter mode, and the sockets came live, with a corresponding drain on the battery, confirmed by the BMV monitor. I disconnected the remote control panel and tried the switch on the front of the inverter/charger. That made no difference. It only worked in inverter mode. I measured the output from the isolating transformer which was at 240v, and it was the same at the input terminals of the inverter/charger. The inverter was slightly warmer than the surroundings - it was maybe five degrees above ambient, which is about 15-18* here today
I reconnected the remote panel, switched it to the "charger" mode and then I started the onboard diesel generator. The mains light on the remote panel came on, and the charger went into bulk, then absorption and finally float mode, and the 220v sockets worked. I stopped the generator, and all the lights on the panel went out again, and the sockets went dead. Turning on the inverter gave me power at the sockets, but no charge. The shorepower was still on, and we had 240v at the transformer. There are only about half a dozen boats in the port with anyone on board, and his is the only boat with anyone on board on that branch from the main distribution board.
It's as though there is some sort of switch inside the Victron which turns the shorepower off and on at random intervals.
Does any of that give any clues as to where I should look next?
.


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