Hi. In the country I install Victron products it is typical to pay for reactive energy, and it is even differentiated whether this is inductive or capacitive reactive energy. Energy meters that are installed by the utility are so called 4-quadrant meters, which register reactive energy in one of 4 quadrants depending on the P and Q (negative vs positive). Additionally of course active energy is being recorded as well.
I like victron meters with their fast 100ms aquisition rate and wonder if there are any meters being able to provide such accurate information about reactive energy as well? Looking into manuals I could not find anything about reactive energy/power except to the information, that because of its presence apparent power is higher than active power.
In general, possibilities of affecting reactive power generation / power factor and eventual dynamic compensation is very badly lacking in victron inverter products. In order to change settings related to reactive energy / power factor one has to use VEConfigure and perform VE.Bus reset (disrupting power to load). Other vendors provide way more dynamic means of adjusting those factors (for example solaredge allows steering of reactive power simply via modbus in realtime)
But back to my main question - is there any support for better reactive power handling in meters / invertes planned in near future? Do you know victron compatible power meters that provide detailed 4-quadrant classification of reactive power?
Ps. Welcome everybody, as this is my first post to this great forum!
Best Regards,
Bartee
Thanks for pointing those meters out, but the manual for EM530/540 does not mention differentiating reactive energy in 4 quadrants - it just counts received and sent reactive energy but there are still 2 quadrants missing… Maybe those are accessible via modbus, i’ll check in detail.
And victron seems to run only in cos fi = 1.0 hardcoded mode. Not that this is really bad, but having a lot of induction or capacitive loads one may want to adjust the inverter to provide better compensated power. And there is not even a built-in support to measure those in official victron meters… that is a bit sad.
If you have a grid code then they are already held compliant to grid power factor. (Grid responsive PF).
Victrons are designed to be a PF1/unity in battery charging. They don’t introduce harmonic distortion into the grid system.
You can alter its response if you use wide frequency response and weak ac if your grid code allows.
For loads and reactive power the capacitor bank does alot of the work there to compensate (power assist) it to some degree. But for the most part if your PF is that bad (and is probably also moving out of grid compliance) get something more dedicated like and SVG.
And then again - you can’t really move out of a certain range because of grid compliance and synchronisation. So its a bit of a catch 22 isn’t it?
