ESS

System - Venus GX, Multiplus II 3000VA

I have set the charge current to 30A(rather than 32A) - I have tried to change the charge power in ESS to a lower value, but any change has not had an effect (eg: when I dropped the charge power to say 500W, it still charges at 30A roughly 1650W).

Battery - Li Ion

Hi, I just switched on my installation of 2 Multiplus 3000s and a Venus GX and am now looking at scheduling power draw from the grid. I'm in the US and have a grid tied SMA inverter in parallel with the Multiplus. Since I can't set a grid code here I can't use ESS.

I'm able to handle turning on and off AC input with modbus but couldn't find a way to disable charging without using one of the relays which I'd prefer to avoid just to keep wiring nicer. It looks like there's no way to disable charging or set the DVCC limit to 0 over modbus without ESS, is that correct? Any workarounds?

Hello there!

I am trying to figure out something rather simple but can't find the answer:

* The system is a three-phase system with three Multiplus II 48/5000. There is also a Fronius Symo 8.2 connected at the AC OUT of the victrons.

* Grid is connected to the AC IN (Spanish grid).

* Victrons have a 20 kWh BYD LVS battery.

We want to allow exporting all excess energy towards the utility grid, while the grid is available.

If the grid fails, we want the system to keep running, without feeding any excess to the grid, and regulating the power output of the Fronius Symo, in order no to overcharge the batteries.

What would be the recommended settings for VE Configure/ESS? Would I need anything else like an external contactor? If the Grid code was configured to Spain, will the Victrons still work in the case of grid failure?

Thanks!

Are there and Assistants where one can improve self consumption with a Multiplus where the Solar Grid inverter is on the input to the Multiplus and where there is no requirement to limit grid feed in power. Obviously an Energy meter and a Venus device is required. Seems to restrictive that it appears that this is not possible presently

Hello,

I would like to limit my Fronius Galvo export to zero , but have "Feed-in excess solar charger power" turned on as to only use the DC coupled solar for export, not the AC coupled.

Would this work?

Thanks!

I might repeat myself but i am scratching my head and the problem is not solved.
My ESS is 3 phase, with Multiplus-II 5000 on firmware 474, Venus on 2.60. I use external control.

Sometimes one of the Multiplus units on one phase apparently decides to ignore the setpoints and starts doing odd things .. with the result being a wild ride between feed-in and consumption.

The situation resolves after some time, but that can take an hour or so. The other multiplus'es follow the instructions without issue.

[image]

[image]

Any advice appreciated.

Johannes

Hi All

We have been coming across sites with high grid voltage, where we have some ESS systems installed these sites have PV on the Output side of the inverter. Due to our local requirements for PV inverters the grid voltage is so high that the PV won't ramp up to produce enough to charge the batteries.

We still have some legacy systems that run with the HUB2 v3 Assistant and its great for ignoring the AC input with PV on the output side.

Just checking to see if anyone else is in need/or there is a demand of a Ignore AC input on the ESS assistant when there are AC coupled PV inverters on the output, seen as though HUB2 has been depreceated.

Hello i have a customer with a easysolar 48/5000/70 with an additional 150/35 charge controller on the dc bus.

When in ess mode grid connect as4777 can we set this to not charge battery from grid and supply all loads during the day from pv/battery only and only draw grid when excess is required? I have had a look through the settings but could not find an option for this.

Also can anyone confirm the firmware version required for the easy solar, it is about 2 years old and was running as an offgrid setup previously. He would like to export once battery is full and all loads are supplied via pv. i have not yet been to site to retrieve the current firmware data.

Hi guys. I recently bought a Victron AC current sensor to measure PV inverter output but I'm missing the AUX in ports and I want to keep temperature compensation so I'm looking at alternative ways to do this. My current setup is as follows, setup as ESS, AC coupled:

[image]

I could add another ET112 as follows:

[image]

I want to use the same USB-RS485 cable if possible. I remember reading that you can't change the MODBUS address of the ET112 without software from Carlo however my CCGX devices pages appears to let me change the MODBUS ID as below:

[image]

If I change this to 30 for example, I get two grid meters on the main menu briefly, with one showing "not connected", and the other reading the grid and I can go into this new one in devices and it shows Modbus ID 30. Does this change the Modbus ID of the ET112 itself or is it a Venus OS address?

The other option is to add an ET340. I've had a look at the standard diagram for this as below:

[image]

Just looking at this, unless I'm reading it wrong, the grid metering only appears it would measure current going into/out of the multiplus and pv inverter whilst ignoring the AC load currents (are they supposed to be top right? Or are the loads expected to be connected to the AC OUT of the multiplus? which would be different to my setup so I came up with the following diagram but not sure if it is correct depending on how the CCGX is setup and what it expects in this special dual function mode:

[image]

Does this seem like it might work or is there a diagram I'm missing for a parallel grid setup and the ET340 dual mode function?

I am using a pre-used 65Ah car starter battery on a tiny trailer camper. It will eventually need replacing, but I am hoping to squeeze two more years out of it. It's only feeding LED lights and phone/tablets (oh, and the potable water pump)

The MPPT is set to BatteryLife. To preserve the battery I would like to go even less deep into the battery. So while I know the BatteryLife modifies the cutoff based on whether it has seen Float that day, what is the actual base cutoff, and can it be uplifted a bit.

While I am assuming it is one of the common numbers of 10.6v or 11.1v, I feel to be safe 11.6 is a good number too. I can set that by disabling BatteryLife, but I trust the Victron engineers knew what they were doing when they game up with that adaptive cutoff. I would just like to tune the latter to "extra-safe-BatteryLife" or "conservative Battery-Life"

Do you have an idea, how to solve the risk to damage the generator in an ESS system, when the grid fails, batteries are low but CCGX starts generator for backup. Fronius with MG is AC coupled in the output of the Quattros, if Sun comes suddenly and AC2 input relay from generator is closed Fronius could feed back. Do you have an idea to solve this risk? or there is not such a risk to damage the generator? I can not change frequency in the generator it is 60Hz (stable).

Hi,

I have installed the following components and need some help, please:

[image]

The system is running fine - as long as the AC-Out is not connected to the grid.

the grid is a typical german house-installation with 3 phases (L1 + L2 + L3 + N + Earth)

The AC-IN is connected to the grid (L1 - same phase as the AC-Out)

If our electrician tries to connect the AC-Out of the Multiplus to the grid (also L1), the RCD-Fuse and the circuit braker triggers. It doesn't matter if the Multiplus is ON or OFF.

Thanks!

I'm trying to work out how to add a MultiPlus-II 5000 for ESS to my existing solar installation.

I think my setup will look like the below image.

[image]

Currently I've got the Solar edge inverter and ET112 meter in place.

So I've got two questions that I can't work out (I've checked all the diagrams!):

1. Can the MultiPlus-II provide power to my house back out through the AC-In, without having to get perform a significant re-wire of the house?
2. Do I need a CT on the Live from the Solar Edge inverter? I'm aware the CCGX can read the data from the ModbusTCP out of the inverter. But don't know if that's sufficient.

Hi,

Recently I've installed ET112 grid meter on my system (which was using CT sensor previously) and I've noticed that the Multi is very slow on response to load. Currently my system looks like this:

[image]

The grid set point is set to -10W. The multi needs a good 15-18 seconds to stabilize after large load kicks in and another approx 15s to stabilize after load drops off. Check the video from VenusGX (the load is switched on at about 16s of the clip and switched of at 43s of the clip):

Is that how it should be? The difference in the load is just about 1.4kW, why is it taking so long to handle that?

Previously I was using CT Sensor extended with Cat5e cable to over 25m long, the system looked like this:

[image]

The response to load was pretty much instant. I've recorder video using the same load as on the previous one (load switched on at about 10s and switched off at 23s of the video):

The system need seconds to stabilize

Also you can see a clear difference on the Grid use graph from VRM portal:

[image]

[image]

As you can see, with CT sensor the system is very close to grid set point, with ET112 grid meter it is way off and hardly ever stay close to set point. The situation is even worst during cloudy day when PV power is fluctuating (you cen see it on my other youtube video).

Is it normal behavior? It looks like Multi can handle this load easily, the problem seems to be in the feedback from the grid meter (or algorithm when ET112 is in use). Is there anything I can do to improve this reaction time??? Please advice.

Kind Regards

Good day everyone,

I have a setup similar to this: https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/31886/et340-multiplus-ii-gx-and-external-non-critical-lo.html except my single multiplus II 5kVA is setup on L2 instead of L1. There is an ET340 to monitor the phases as well as non critical loads beween the meter and AC in of inverter.

The system is setup in ESS with solar. Unfortnately it is exporting power out to the grid on instead of zeroing that phase. I have tried turning phase compensation on and off to no avail.

I have tried all the settings I can think of to try stop it. Is it because I am using L2 and not L1?

I have Victron MultiPlus II 5kVA, 4x 3.5kWh pylontech batteries, 12x 395W 3s4p PV panels, 150/100 Victron MPPT, Venux GX, ET112 grid meter, all in a ESS configuration. When the grid fails (South African loadshedding, currently happens about twice a day), about 30% of the time I can see lights flicker and PC and TV and sound system etc. will reboot. The salesperson originally told me the system can switch within 20ms and will perfectly act like a UPS. The strange thing is that this happens even when in strong sunlight (basically all power supplied by sun, except for the small "grid setpoint" amount) or when already primarily using battery storage (early evening, after sunset), so in both cases everything should already be powered by the inverter, doesn't make sense to me that there would be a long enough dip in power when the grid (supplying merely a small "grid setpoint" amount of 150W) fails. At least two of the times these reboots/dips happened, there was no significant power draw, no stoves/ovens/geysers using the non-essential circuit, less than 1kW average drawn for the essential circuit,

[I have a perhaps tangentially related issue, where sometimes the system feeds back to much power into grid (while grid is working), causing prepaid grid meter to reset and cut-off the mains supply for a few seconds. There are various posts about this topic on these forums, and one of the hypotheses is that this is related to some kind of slowness between victron and the ET112 grid meter, so just mentioning that here in case that same alleged slowness could be causing this slow response to grid failure too]

Needless to say, this is extremely annoying, as the main reason I got this system was to act as backup against downtime from loadshedding. Any ideas?

I have MultiPlus II 5000VA, 12x 395W 3s4p panels, Victron 150/100 MPPT, Venus GX, 4x 3.5kWh pylontech, ET-112 grid meter, all configured for ESS, in South Africa. Initial symptom I've observed is that whenever a large load (say 1.5kW or more, like kettle, heater, geyser, stove....) is disconnected, there is several seconds (I've seen up to 15) of back-feed into the grid, and this causes the Conlog prepaid electricity meter to cut-off the grid temporarily, which cuts off the non-essentials and i.a. causes the oven to lose it's time and timer and current status (so if it was on, it goes off, and remains off, making it impossible to use it to cook food). I've looked up the specs of the BEC23 Conlog regarding reverse energy tripping, and it allows 40W for 15s or 600W for 1s, or anything in between, so it does allow for a reasonable-sounding bit of back feed before it will cut off the grid, it integrates the power every second and looks at the energy within a 15s sliding window basically AFAICT. However, what I've noticed from the victron remote console (on local LAN, not via VRM) is that it takes a very long time for it to adjust to load changes, in both directions -- if a kettle is switched on, it uses grid power initially and slow ramps up how much comes from PV or batteries, over about 15s or more, and when that load goes away, it feeds the excess that comes from PV or battery into the grid for about the same length of time. I spoke to my installer about this, and since some posts here on the forums were potentially implicating the ET-112, he disabled that in the ESS settings for now (which then also loses the benefit of essential vs non-essential loads on the ESS apparently, so wouldn't be a permanent solution anyway). In any event, this seems to have made no difference at all, I still observe the same slow ramp-up and ramp-down on load changes, the latter leading to the grid back-feed causing the prepaid meter to trip.

The municipality refuses to replace my prepaid meter, as they have an exclusivity arrangement with Conlog apparently, and the L&G apparently needs some sort of power-line comms GSM concentrator to be installed city wide, which is not in place. The installer wants me to privately replace the Conlog with a Landis&Gyr 4-quadrant meter with GSM comms module, at a very high price to me, but this seems like the wrong solution to me. At best, if it actually works, I'm being asked to pay a hefty sum for a workaround to (what I perceive as) the slow Victron response to load changes? At worst, the problem might persist after this expensive experiment.

There seem to be a number of posts on this or related topic, but nothing more recent than two months or so, and no satisfactory answers that I can see. Some posts even have answers from Victron staff saying a solution is being worked on, but no follow up to that which I could see... FWIW, all the firmware was updated as part of the installation a few weeks ago, so it's not more than a few weeks outdated at worst. Based on forum posts here, I've tried increasing the ESS "grid set point" from the initial 50W to as high as 300W, and while it somewhat reduces the prepaid meter tripping incidence, it does not at all resolve it, and the higher I set this, the more ESS advantage I'm losing of course.

So my question is, is this something known to Victron which will have an imminent firmware fix? Is there some configuration parameter/setting that needs to be changed? I really don't want to go down the arduous and costly route of replacing my otherwise-perfectly-good Conlog prepaid electricity meter with a very expensive (over R8000, or 400 euro, excluding installation) 4-quadrant L&G meter if not absolutely necessary.

Two Phase ESS setup with 2 x 48/8000/110 Quattros, 15kVA three phase generator with Titan 48/50 Charger on third phase.

Firmware: CCGX 2.53~2, Quattos 469.

Generator on AC-IN-1 with current limit of 14 Amps. All good while loads are low and system in Bulk, charging battery. Current hovers around 12 - 14 Amps. The problem I have is when a large load turns on, the mode changes to "Pass Thru" and excessive current is drawn continuously from the generator. I was monitoring the system when the 3kW water heater came on. I watched the Quattro draw 27 Amps from the generator for 30 seconds before I turned the generator isolator off. This is virtually twice the limit set.

Dynamic Current Limiter - disabled

UPS Function - Enabled

Was going to try the "Dynamic Current Limiter" but the increase in current is not temporary. It matches the loads applied and completely ignores the “AC Input Current Limit”. Also I don’t want it working while connected to the grid.

Please advise if I’ve overlooked something.

Hi.

I just bought a small SmartMPPT 75/15. It works well, but I notice it is preset for " Victron deep cycle" and I have a "regular" (probably AGM) 65Ah VW car battery. I understand from this post that charge voltages do not vary much, but I worry about the discharge load cut-off.

Any advise on the settings, all of them, but mostly the discharge voltage?

Thanks

I just assembled an battery of 86 kWh. In the setup screen (ess) however the max ah that can be put in is around 65 kWh. Any tips to modify this?

As the title says, I’m trying to figure out if I should be using DVCC or not. My setup is expansive, but not complicated, and it’s a marine application.

10kw generator

1x Quattro 12/5000/220 utilizing the VE.BUS BMS

2x Battery Protect

8x Victron MPPT’s hosting 3kw of solar,

5x Victron Smart Lithium 300AH.

B700 Battery Monitor

1x D400 Wind Generator

I’m looking for some advice, I inherited this system when I purchased the boat, but went from a dual Quattro in parallel to a single Quattro. So I’ve had to configure everything from scratch, with very little knowledge.

I’ve read up on ESS - and it appears I should NOT be using the ESS assistants because of the lack of Anti Islanding.

I’ve attempted to read on the DVCC system, but I’m not sure if it would be helpful.

I’d love to hear from someone that’s using a similar setup, and understand what configuration, assistants they are using, and why.

I have a 3 phase Multiplus II 5kVA ESS system with 28kWh of BYD battery, 15kW of AC coupled PV on the AC-OUT of the Multiplus II's and 2kW of DC coupled PV. I believe I am compliant to all of the Victron design guidelines for this system.

During a grid failure, the AC coupled PV flows into the batteries until the Multiplus II's decide that they are running too hot and shut down. This then causes a complete power failure.

How can I either:

a) Get the system to dial back the AC coupled PV through frequency shifting so that the Multiplus II's don't go into temperature overload

or b) limit the charge current to the batteries during a grid failure? I already have a "Maximum Charge Current" set under the DVCC settings but seems this is ignored during a grid failure.

EDIT:

To be clear, my assertion is that the Victron doesn't even try to use frequency shifting to avoid inverter overload when charging the batteries.

Thanks in advance

Hi

I have recently switched from the CT to the ET112 and noticed something odd

I have a Multiplus-II 3kva + ESS + 140Ah 48v Li-Ion + Batrium BMS (CAN-Bus) + Cerbo GX + PV on ACin

Everything is working fine expect I have noted the following oddity

I was uing the CT and could see the MP2 quickly adjusting to the PV lows and spikes during cloud movment and demands on the ACin during normal operation mode, but since switching to the ET112 I was able to see the MP2 is now really very slow at adjusting the inverter power output and charging, so much so that I can see 1.8Kw export happening from the battery when the sun comes out for 5+ seconds and importing while charging due to the cloud covering up the sun, this is very odd becasue with the CT it was super quick to change and keep the grid at Zero import or export.

I think because the metering has been moved to the Cerbo GX this now has to tell the MP2 to adjust I just wasnt expecting it to be so poor at controlling it with such a slow delay

Everything is working fine just really slow, I'm not runnign anything extera or doing anything extra with the cerbo gx, it is however in superuser mode running v2.52 (came out the same day the cable arrived to pulg in the ET112 so unsure if its a v2.52 related or just expected behavoiur) and i have node red connected to it, no perf issues though and only 1 flow (your charge at night flow) connected to it. Top is not showing any processes that would slow this device down.

Is this expected behaviour when using a ET112 or any Grid meter?

Regards

Mark Boys

my Multi, MPPT, BMV and 4 x victron gel battery (in series) setup is generating frequent low battery voltage alarms as it dips beneath 49V (which is reportedly around 69% SOC according to the BMV).

The alarms clear almost immediately. I read some posts that suggested ESS can trigger this frequently as battery charge dips.

Is this normal for ESS and is there a way to make the alarms less frequent?

thanks

Hi

SO I see some references to ToU tariffs in the ESS documentation, but it all seems to talk about external control (writing to MQTT or modbus registers).

I'm not scared of doing this myself, but I was wondering if there was any standard option in ESS (current or planned) to allow optimisation of costs when on ToU tariffs?

Eg, charge the batteries from grid up to xx% on the cheap tariff, then run off batteries during the expensive period...

Is there some option (that I might be missing) in remote console (or VRM or wherever) to activate an immediate charge from grid state? I know of the schedule options, but sometimes we (in South Africa) will hear about an impending grid failure (load shedding) a few hours in the future, and the battery SOC might not be as desired ahead of that. It would be nice to have an option to just tell the system to charge from grid right now, perhaps until some kind of settable SOC and/or time limit or so. Let's say my battery is at 50%, and I hear there will be 2.5hrs of loadshedding in an hour from now, I'd like to be able to select a quick charge option, set it to (say) 80% SOC and 55min time limit, and have it start immediately. Right now (unless I'm missing something) I need to add a new schedule to start in a few minutes and it's a lot more keystrokes in a sense to get to what I really want: charge now.

(apologies if this has been asked and answered, I did try to search for something similar, but could not find anything)

--

multiplus II 5000, 4x 3.5kWh pylontech, 150/100 MPPT, venus GX

Hi, I have an existing grid-tied SMA inverter (SMA 5000TL) and 2 strings of 13 panels for total of 6.5kW. I want to add storage and am considering the QUATTRO with 4 x Pylontech US3000 batteries (@48V nom).

The main aim of the exercise is to be self-sufficient in case of extended/indefinate grid outage. I am no expert, but my reading suggests that the Victron QUATTRO would provide a mini-grid on the AC-OUT-1 and that the SMA solar inverter would run 'normally' on this channel regardless of whether the grid was connected or not.

Assuming that the above is correct, would the SMA inverter connected in this way be a stable and reliable configuration. I ask this because I have read some posts/articles that indicate that there are situations where the inverter may go over-voltage and shutdown the QUATTRO.

Is this a potential problem, and what would be the recommended way to deal with this?

Note, the loads would include 1000W and 1500W pumps (bore pump etc), inverter aircon, fridges and freezers, lighting and misc.

thank you,

Ron

Hello Community,

Our company is struggling with a number of installations in the Tshwane (Pretoria) region of South Africa. The municipality (utility provider) has rolled out the installation of Conlog meters. The majority of these meters are overly sensitive to reverse energy detection. One of the meter models is the Conlog BEC42X (Single Phase).

Many of our installations consist of an ESS setup like the following: MultiPlus II 5kVA, BlueSolar MPPT Charge Controller, Color Control GX, Carlo Gavazzi Energy Meter, BMV700 and a Lithium Battery.

Many of these installations, in the Tshwane area, are experiencing frequent tripping of the Conlog utility meter.

Some forums have indicated that these meters are tripping at a point as low as 20W over 15 seconds - or some 300 Joules of reverse (export) energy detected. This is incredibly sensitive and clearly the root problem. However, this is very difficult to resolve with the municipality (utility provider) and they are mostly unwilling to assist.

We have had to resort to setting the grid set point significantly higher than desired, sometimes around 300W and have had to limit inverter power, in some instances to as low as 750W. With these restrictions placed on the system, we are mostly unable to process (store and discharge) all of the solar energy available from the solar array resulting in compromised economic performance.

What can we do to improve the control of export power to the utility?

It is inevitable that some export energy will be supplied to the utility in a grid-connected ESS system, but one observation that we have made is that the MultiPlus & Quattro inverters appear to react quite slowly AFTER a large load is switched off - this observation comes from the Color Control display panel where we can see the grid import/export as reported by the Carlo Gavazzi Energy meter, as well as the amount of power being discharged by the battery, as reported by the BMV700.

Once a large load is dropped, can the inverter not reduce it's power faster to avoid overshoot and subsequent export energy being supplied to the utility?

From this link, we see that the response time of ESS has been limited to 400W per second as per ESS version 162... but now we need a work around?

This thread comments on a similar aspect: https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/51697/victron-ess-et112-slow-response.html

After reading the above thread, can we not adjust the refresh rate and baud rate for the energy meter (Carlo Gavazzi) to aid the situation in swiftly recognizing the change in the grid import/export condition?

Alternatively, is the 100A:50mA Current Transformer a temporary solution for MultiPlus II ESS installations?

If this cannot be achieved with the ESS assistant, is there a combination of assistants that will allow us to operate in a similar fashion to ESS while overcoming the issues presented by the hard-coded rate limiting?

Thanks in advance for your input and suggestions.