Solar controller reading

DIY
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1

I fitted a 20ah solar controller and I have winter sun here in Scotland , this
is the reading , does it look right…I have 200w of solar and a 100ah lithium battery

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2

It can both be not enough sun, as wel as a full battery, becasue the MPPT is in float modus.
Your PV panel does 23.08V, so it’s a live, and the battery does 13.48V, so it will be near full…

1 Like
3

Open the gear wheel, then Battery, and take a screenshot of the battery settings and post them.

4

If it is a new install check panel polarity.

5

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6

No it was just an upgrade to my controller . The readings are different to my previous controller, so was just checking it was reading right.

7

Looks good to me;

  • You say you fitted a 20ah controller - that’s probably a typo, you mean a 20A? Looks like a 100/20 which are fantastic controllers, a real workhorse with our customer base.
  • your controller was in float in the first screenshot, with the battery at 13.48v.
  • The settings screenshot shows that the float voltage set point is 13.50v, so its logical to presume that with the controller pushing 13.50v, if the battery is at 13.48v, almost nothing will be flowing, and the solar yield and battery current confirm this.
  • You say your battery is Lithium, so its a safe assumption you mean LiFePO4 and not Lithium Ion, and your controller is using the Victron SmartLithium presets which have always worked well for our (RoarPower) batteries, and other vendor LiFePO4 batteries (Dyness, BYD, and others)
  • The values you show don’t confirm that your cabling is good (nor do they point to a problem), but now would be a good time to go over every connection and check for tension.
  • You won’t be finished comissioning your new controller until you have checked the charge rate on a battery that is not full. i.e. you could have a really bad connection somewhere, and it would look exactly like it does now. Bad connections show up when current is significant.
  • Nice work !
8

Yes it’s 100/20 controller upgrade from a Evever mppt controller. The battery is an Eco worthy 100 life4po4… The readings are different figures from the EV that’s why I asked if they looked right to users … I’ll wait till battery drains and see what app says

9

If your experience is similar to our customers - you should get an improvement in energy collected from the Victron. We work with Epever as well, and the main two issues with Epever are slow tracking and not being able to over-panel. In theory you can over panel an Epever, and it will certainly work initially, but we have so many burnt out controllers that we no longer recommend over-panelling an Epever. But Epever are cheap, so there was definitely a place in the market for them until the recent Victron price adjustment.

We have over panelled the Victron mppt controllers by huge amounts at times, and never had an issue.

The market now is very interesting; the cheapest Epever 100A controller on TradeMe (New Zealand) if you ignore the PWM-marked-as-mppt scams, is $800 incl GST, plus $45 to get bluetooth. The price in NZ for a smartsolar 150/100 is $914 incl GST. These are both 150v max Voc, 100A controllers, but obviously there are a ton of features in the smartsolar that are not in the Epever, and the price diff is ~8%

10

Switch on some load in the system and see if the MPPT starts producing power.
If nothing happens you should check all connections and fuses between the MPPT and the battery.