I have an issue with my Enphase Metered Gateway. It reports “Production Limit incompatible with Metering Mode” right after upgrading to Venus 3.70 last Friday February 27.. The Gateway reports status “error”.
I had no issues, until I noticed that this morning there was no power from the solar panels while the sun was shining and the sky was crystal clear. I managed to get the solar panels producing by resetting the Cerbo a few times and rebooting the Enphase Gateway.
Interestingly enough the VRM portal did not show any solar production, while the GUI did show the correct info for solar production (see screenshot).
This morning same issue again. Power Limit stops solar production. Disabling the Power Limit helps for a few minutes, solar starts producing, but then again, solar production stops. Why does the disabling of the Power Limit not work ?
Restarting Cerbo did not resolve the issue with Power Limit enabled. Restarting Cerbo with Power Limit disabled does bring solar production back up again.
Other strange thing: solar system starts producing at sunrise even when Power Limit is set to zero.
I am aware of a bug in the Enphase implementation, where the “nameplate power” value (published in Sunspec information model 120, or 702 for newer implementations) isn’t correct. According to the specification this is supposed to be a static value, indicating the maximum hardware capability.
What I have noticed with some Microinverters, is that they might not have this information model at all (APsystems DS3 for example), or the value published would be the sum of the microinverters online (Enphase), which means it goes to zero at night.
This means that quite often, if the PV-inverter is detected at night when there is no PV, it will remember this zero (which is supposed to be static), and then the next day the limiter will set the power level to 100% of zero… which is zero.
Switching off the limiter here should cause Venus to leave it alone completely, and is currently the only thing you can do if the device isn’t fully Sunspec compliant.
There is a fix in the Venus 3.80 beta versions which will disable the limiter in cases where the nameplate power is not available or zero, to prevent this situation where the PV is limited to zero. Of course, this will cause the opposite issue: Every morning the limiter will stop working and it will make full power until you restart. I consider this the better solution where the options on the table are all bad.
I agree that this is the best option: early morning feed-in prices will not be negative. Would be great if enable/disable of the limiter could be scheduled. In my case I would schedule it to be enabled around 9 o’clock, when there is PV production, but no negative feed-in prices yet. Or another option could be to enable the limiter when PV production is above a certain threshold.
