Hello all,
I have a client that I helped with product selection and configuration that recently reached out to me with an odd problem and it seems to be from the configuration settings in the Quattro changing for no explainable reason.
It is a Quatro 12/5000/120-2x100 120V and he has 1840AH of 12V Epoch LiFePO4 batteries. The rest of the system is not relevant in this discussion, so I’ll save you the details.
The settings I made in the Quattro are pretty standard, but I used these values for Charging:
Absorption to 14.2V and Float to 13.6V to match the Epoch suggested values.
He has enough solar that he does not have to run his generator often, however, on my advice, he runs it twice a month to make sure he gets to fully charged and so that the cells can get balanced.
This has been working well for him since March, but then he reached out and said that his batteries would stop charging from the genset when the Ekrano and the Epoch Battery App were showing SOC of 90%. The Ekrano would display “Float charging” and the battery bank voltage was at 13.46V.
I downloaded his Quattro configuration using the VRM portal and the settings showed Absorption set to 13.8V and Float set to 13.4V. I pulled out the file I had last sent down to his Quattro and they showed the expected values of 14.2V and 13.6V.
He reached out seeing the problem on June 14th and I could see from his VRM portal that when he last ran the genset on May 31st it was still fully charging the batteries. He had not done any firmware updates since updating the Ekrano to V3.50 when that was released. The firmware in the Quattro was at v552.
The Event log within the VRM portal showed no changes in any other manner.
He has not removed the case for the Quattro, so a manual reset could not have been performed.
Since I was going to have to reset the configuration, I updated the firmware to V556 and then reviewed all settings and re-set the voltages to the desired values. Everything is now working fine, but understandable, he (and I) would like to understand if there is some other mechanism that could cause this to happen.
This was only an annoyance since it lowered the voltages, but could have resulted in some real problems if the values had been set to higher voltages.
Anyone have any thoughts?