House Consumption shows 0 W after adding Huawei SUN2000 to Victron ESS

Q&A and troubleshooting
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1

Hi,

I have a customer with the following system:

  • Quattro 8000
  • Cerbo GX
  • ET112
  • Pylontech battery
  • Fronius Primo 6.0-1 (Modbus TCP)

We added:

  • Huawei SUN2000 4 kW (single phase)
  • 8 × 460 W PV modules

The Fronius is connected to AC-OUT.
The Huawei is currently connected to AC-IN.

After the installation:

  • Total PV production in VRM looks correct.
  • Battery works correctly.
  • Grid import/export looks correct.
  • However, House Consumption drops to 0 W whenever Huawei production exceeds the actual house load.

My questions are:

  • Is this expected because the Huawei is connected on AC-IN?
  • Would moving the Huawei inverter to AC-OUT solve this?
  • Or is this simply a limitation when using Huawei together with Victron ESS?

I’m trying to understand whether this is a wiring/configuration issue or an expected limitation.

Thanks!

4

This is expected and logical behaviour: The energy originating from the Huawai will immediately cover any consumption there is, and only the remaining (unused) energy will become visible at the grid.

Thus, the Victron-System has no indication to know, if there is:

  • 2000W Solarproduction and 0 consumption, or
  • 4000W Solarproduction and 2000W consumption.

To fix this, you need to explicit tell the Victron System about the added Solar-Production, then it could conclude the real consumption:

  • If the Huawai supports Modbus TCP (Sunspec) it as easy as adding it through the PVInverter Integration in the gx, after enabling the Modubus TCP Endpoint on the Inverter.
  • If it does not support that, you could add a dedicated meter in front of the Huawai inverter and add this as Role PVInverter to the gx. This won’t give you all the details Modbus TCP could, but it will satisfy the need of knowing about additional Solar-Production, allowing to calculate all other figures correctly.
6

Thank you very much for your answer.

That makes perfect sense.

Our installer now has a few practical questions before making any changes:

  1. Does the Huawei SUN2000-5KTL support the required Modbus TCP (SunSpec) integration with Cerbo GX?
  2. Could you please provide the required configuration steps?
    • Which settings need to be enabled on the Huawei inverter?
    • Which menu in Cerbo GX should be used to add the inverter?
  3. If Modbus TCP is not supported, which energy meter do you recommend?
  4. Where exactly should this meter be installed in relation to the Huawei inverter?
  5. How should this meter be configured in Cerbo GX (Role = PV Inverter)?

Thank you for your support! Regards, Dima

7

Perhaps you could search this Community for answers.

I did a bit of googling and found this discussion: https://community.victronenergy.com/t/support-of-sunspec-inverters-via-modbus-rtu-and-extended-sunspec-support/34855/19

Some of those questions should be answered by the manufacturer, distributor or installer.

8

I can’t give you any detailed guide on this, as I neither own a Huawei Inverter nor do I have the dedicated Meter Case for my ACPV.

I would have said, it is best to ask your installer, since he sold you the devices, he should be aware on all of that - but since the questions came from your installer, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

So, you or your installer would need to check the corresponding manuals of the devices to figure out all steps required.

For the dedicated Meter solution: Any Meter rated compatible with the GX would work, it should just measure the raw output of the Huawei, no consumption branching of in between.

Biggest Impact on the choice may be price and intended position: Can you run a bus wire to the meter, better use Ethernet or even need a wireless solution, etc.

This manual provides some details on that using the ET340:

9

Hi again,

Thank you for your previous advice.

We have now installed a second ET112 on the AC output of the Huawei inverter.

We now have installer access to the customer’s Victron VRM account.

Could someone please explain how to find the new ET112 in VRM / Remote Console?

Which menu should we use, and how can we identify the newly installed ET112 when there are now two ET112 meters in the system?

Once we have identified it, is it simply a matter of changing its role to PV Inverter, while leaving the existing ET112 as Grid Meter?

Thank you!

10

Was the second ET112 connected to the GX with a separate adapter or to the same RS485 bus?

If it is connected to the same USB adapter, you would have to change the bus address of the new meter. This is possible with the software of Carlo Gavazzi.