For several months my Phoenix inverter has worked fine. I’m running two fridges, one chest freezer and a water pump on it. The maximum power consumption of all these loads (including start-up currents) is just below 1000W. The Phoenix is rated for a maximum of 1000W and 1600VA (but the latter only applies to non-resistive loads). There are no other loads connected to the Phoenix.
I also have a Multiplus inverter/charger connected to the same battery. This supplies additional mains charge (using the AC Input Control settings, detecting high and low battery SoC by voltage only, which is not 100% accurate but good enough for me) when there is no sun and the PV panels don’t supply any significant power.
This seemed to work well, but today (a very dark and rainy day) the Phoenix keeps going into overload when the water pump kicks in while the compressors in all three fridges/freezers are running. The Multiplus gives a “battery low” alarm at that time, which tells me the battery charge level (and therefore the voltage) is getting low.
I have been manipulating the AC Input Control voltages on the Multiplus to maximize PV panel yield by switching off the AC input sooner, and obviously I’ve cut it a bit too fine and I need to reverse that. But that’s not the issue here. I’m seeing two things I don’t understand:
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The Multiplus manual states that if the Phoenix green LED blinks at a double rate and the red one is on (which is what I see) the Phoenix is in overload alarm mode: “The inverter has shut down due to prolonged overload and will no longer automatically restart.” However, I do see the Phoenix automatically restart from overload alarm mode (and due to the same overload that caused it going straight back into overload alarm mode, and so on. As I understand the manual, this should not happen.
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I’ve not seen this problem before and the load on the Phoenix has not increased. However, I do (or did, before unplugging things) now have a situation where the Phoenix is trying to supply close to (but not quite equal to) its maximum rated output while the battery voltage is getting quite low (about 26.5V). Is the Phoenix more prone to going into overload when the battery voltage drops?
I’m trying to understand what’s happening here, and the answers to the above two questions would help a great deal!
PS: I installed a Phoenix firmware update about two weeks ago and now there’s another one (which I just installed, but I’ve disconnected the fridges for now because I don’t want the on/off/on/off to damage anything). Could this be firmware related? Where do I find the release notes for each firmware revision?