recently I started getting Capacity alarm notiffications for my system from VRM app and it is becoming mildly infuriating.
I am running Multiplus 3000/48 with Color Control and JK BMS. The alarm does not come from the BMS, at least it is not listed in alarms list.
Alarms list in VRM is cleared except Communication disconnected alarm and Automatic alarm monitoring, neither of which should include Capacity alarm.
I went through all setup available and was not able to find the cause of this Capacity alarm. Has anyone ever experienced this and/or knows about solution?
That is what I thought. But in that case I suppose it should be marked as alarm in GX device, shouldn´t it?
Also looking into BMS itself, there are no alarms active and no alarms in the log. I use the same BMS in my other system, the BMS setup is identical and it works just fine, no such alarms.
This system is regular MultiPlus, the other one is MultiPlus-II (3 phase config). Except different capacity, the problematic system has less “conservative” settings, meaning lower DC low shutdown, restart and pre-alarm. ESS assistant has same settings.
I think this alarm is originating from the BMS, and being sent to the GX.
There it is being suppressed from the GX notifications, because it’s a nuisance, and we have made some changes there to avoid nuisance notifications. Specifically when a battery was balancing normally in a normal range and would send out over voltage or overcurrent warnings anyway.
In your case even though not shown on the GX, it’s still being passed on to VRM by the GX, I’ll ask the VRM team to look into where it is coming from, and if they can ignore it.
It’s a really fine balance for us. Sometimes there are real system issues, and if we have not recorded the warnings or alarms in VRM, and then everyone is very confused why they weren’t displayed. Then other times we get nuisance ones that help nobody and just make noise.
We can’t control what the BMS sends or how/when it sends it. This is even more so for the 3rd party BMS using custom batteries like in your setup where we don’t specify how they should behave and can’t have tests run to prove that.
I would also suggest you reach out to JK BMS (or their community support site) as well if you haven’t already. There might be something that Victron can do, but it might also have unintended consequences of suppressing an ACTUAL capacity alarm issue (whatever that is). So far better the BMS doesn’t send it in the first place unless it’s necessary.
The confusing part though is that BMS in its log does not list any capacity alarms (nor any other BMS of same type I use with Victron). From older log where I was searching for alarm cause I can see only temperature alarms which are relevant and are properly sent to GX and VRM.
Another thing is, that this alarm is on when battery has SoC roughly over 30 %. When SoC drops alarm goes away. There used to be 100 Ah Pylontech battery in the system, now upgraded to 320 Ah with JK (I did similar upgrade in my other system with Cerbo with no issues). To me it seems, that something still thinks there is 100 Ah battery and raises alarm whenever battery is “overcharged” to more than ~100 Ah.
I have not performed the factory reset procedure. Will do in a few days/weeks when I visit the site. Thank you for now, I will report whether this helped.
So I have made factory reset procedure on Color Control and it did not help, the capacity alarm was still triggering.
Then I tried disconnecting the battery communication and I reconfigured the system to run without BMS which stopped the alarm, but this is not ideal. It was probably due to device ID 512 not being in the system at all.
Finally I have deleted the whole installation from VRM portal and created it all again from scratch. This solved the issue. I assume that it must have been some bug in the VRM system itself. Now everything works with no unwanted/false alarms running over and below 100 Ah for 6 days.
Thank you all for your help.
guystewart
(Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager))
13
Thanks for following up with the explanation, quite the strange case I haven’t seen before.
