Use battery and PV always unless: A scheduled charge event is active (eg. 10AM-1PM daily), or battery SOC <15% - but do not charge batteries, or manual charging of batteries is selected.
Never feed to the grid
How it is behaving:
As I am writing this (nearly 12AM): most of the load is taken up by the grid, with the battery assisting instead of all load from the battery.
Reading into it, this is usually caused by a low dynamic voltage threshold being reached. I lowered the dynamic shutdown voltage thresholds in ESS - no change. I am struggling to understand what the trigger condition is for the battery charge mode to become active? From my understanding if SOC is above threshold and BMV voltage is above minimum - don’t charge the batteries from grid.
Yesterday it was in a state where charging was occurring as soon grid connection was active, I believe I stopped this by selecting critical loads on self consumption from battery.
Battery appears to have an idle load threshold - guessing around 500W. Battery begins to discharge and ‘assist’ at around 800W of load and will provide around 1/4 to 1/3 the required energy.
What I have tried:
Changed ESS Mode
Changed multiphase regulation to individual phase. This did drop Grid input down to around 600W per phase, but didn’t stop it.
Changed minimum SOC
Reduced dynamic cut off limits in ESS assistant
DVCC on and off - I haven’t played around with this since selecting critical loads on self consumption..
One option I seem to be missing in ESS is Inverter AC Output in use?
Grid setpoint is set at 50W as recommended to reduce chance of export
I want to understand where I am going wrong and get this working as intended. I cannot see anywhere obvious that provides explanation of why ESS is doing X (using from the grid) - there is no information tag - see one of the screen shot. I don’t see any battery status codes?
I want to avoid changing to an ‘off-grid’ configuration where AC IN is typically ignored except for parameters set in assistants.
Screen shots:
Earlier this evening with Multiphase regulation set to Total of all phases:
Nicely documented.
What are your DVCC settings? It should be enabled, even without a BMS, using the BMV as references for the shared sensors.
Your system settings - DC settings should also list the BMV as the battery monitor.
Did you install and configure ESS on every inverter?
How did you calculate your cutoff, sustain and ess dynamic cut off limits?
(you can attach the remote config file here as well).
Battery life is off (Optimised without battery life).
I will try a full system reboot.
Voltage settings are set ‘low’ to eliminate that as a reason - again if I had information displayed that told me why the system is doing X, it would really help.
Current status as of now - ‘bulk charging’ yet battery is at idle.
How did you configure the Smartshunt?
How much tail current?
Peukert-factor = 1,05?
According to manual, this is configured using VictronConnect App.
If you go to gui-v2 / … / Battereis / SmartShunt
What do you see? do you have page “parameters” with charge voltage limit (CVL), charge current limit (CCL) and discharge current limi t(DCL)?
With “normal” BMSes you get those parameters and you can draw them over time in VRM/Advance- > Battery Monitor
It doesn’t look like ESS is running.
I see you’re in Oz. You sure you have the right grid code loaded?
I can see the ground relay is unchecked (automatically) so presumable this is grid code related, ESS would normally have this enabled.
The Aus manual for the inverter has a section reminding you to choose the right one for your installation (there are a few with neutral variations).
I could see that in the config, just querying, given there are various others, and not being familiar with your regs and environment, if that was the correct one.
I noticed you chose 240V for the inverter as well. Not that this should be an issue, it is within the grid code accepted range.
Sorry, I just had to stress the reason behind it and specifically the ground relay being disabled.
Although our national voltage is 230V advertised (used to be 240V 15 years ago) I set them to 240V for a few reasons; We measure 240 - 245V typically from mains, I noticed output voltage at 230V was a tad low, especially given some of my longer cable lengths to final sub circuits.
Definitely in the I position (charger and inverter). To add, it is inverting and assisting when loads are above X threshold.
Another snapshot. PV is charging the batteries, Inverter is ‘assisting’ the grid to the loads, yet Inverter says Bulk charging rather than ‘assisting’ or ‘inverting’?
It shouldn’t be using anything from the grid at all - should be 100% inverting.
After a re- start of my Victron Multi Rs 6000 for maintenance I had un-expected problems with ess; power was dumped on the grid or grid power was used instead of available solar power… ess setting was: “Optimized without battery life”
Then I selected “external control” as ess mode and everything was running as it should be, it looks like as the ess mode functions are mixed up : Optimized without battery life = External control… External control = Optimized without battery life…
Since this adjustment 4 monts ago , everything is running as expected.
