On-grid domestic battery storage

EVandPV

mickyduck55 said:

EVandPV said:

mickyduck55 said:

Anyone know why my PV is delivering 3kW but batteries seem to top out at a charge rate of 2kWh

 with rest going to the grid

Hi Mick, what sort of temperature is it in your garage ?
Could well be due to low temps, assuming your garage isn't heated.

I guess just a little above ambient... but the charge rate has not changed from day one.. 44.4 %

And your system discharge rate is at 100% ?

mickyduck55

EVandPV said:

mickyduck55 said:

EVandPV said:

mickyduck55 said:

Anyone know why my PV is delivering 3kW but batteries seem to top out at a charge rate of 2kWh

 with rest going to the grid

Hi Mick, what sort of temperature is it in your garage ?
Could well be due to low temps, assuming your garage isn't heated.

I guess just a little above ambient... but the charge rate has not changed from day one.. 44.4 %

And your system discharge rate is at 100% ?

Yes... the rated discharge is displayed as a "tool Tip" when hovering over the question mark

EVandPV

mickyduck55 said:

Yes... the rated discharge is displayed as a "tool Tip" when hovering over the question mark

Your Lux is certainly running a lot cooler than mine so I'm guessing your batteries are too.
Here's mine charging at full pelt from 4am ......

mickyduck55

EVandPV said:

mickyduck55 said:

Yes... the rated discharge is displayed as a "tool Tip" when hovering over the question mark

Your Lux is certainly running a lot cooler than mine so I'm guessing your batteries are too.
Here's mine charging at full pelt from 4am ......

Where can you see the temp its running at or are you taking my ambient comment ?  Probably good news for the summer being in garage

EVandPV

mickyduck55 said:

Where can you see the temp its running at?  Probably good news for the summer being in garage

Here .....


The 'maxchg' and 'maxdisc' figures are amps so yours is setting the max charge/discharge current to 44amps hence the lower charge rate your seeing.

Solarchaser

chamelion said:

Folks, what are the actual tangible differences between lux, sofar, solis, solax? 
Lux seems to be the favourite here, but any reason why?

Presumably all of them allow you to do real time monitoring, schedule charges / discharges, sip from solar PV when you have surplus, and have an API where I can pull data out of for my own use?

As someone who has had a Sofar for over a year, i was pretty happy with it.
Mine didnt have the right internal circuits to record charge and discharge cumulative cycles, so i couldnt say how much i was *saving* using the batteries.
I believe Nick and Joe do have the right circuits for it.

So honestly if i had a newer sofar, id probably have kept it.

Yesterday i removed the sofar and replaced it with a lux.
The 3600w charge and discharge is better than the 3000w sofar, but the monitoring is quite a step forward.
The sofar monitoring lets you see one parameter at a time, adjusting nothing, as its purely for information.
However the lux overlays graphs on top of each other, which imo is better,

But more importantly its an actual connevtion to the inverter, you can tell the inverter to charge or discharge, you can set timers etc, all from the app, this makes it leaps and bounds ahead of the sofar imo.... but ive not even had the thing working 24 hours yet


Im told they can be run as standard models in parallel also purely by being connected to the same supply, ill put this to the test later this week. A few folk have tried paralleling other systems, i know Nowty on Nav tried it with Sofar, and it wouldnt work, so this could be very important if true, as it means modular expansion would be possible for inverters as well as batteries.

chamelion

Solarchaser said:

chamelion said:

Folks, what are the actual tangible differences between lux, sofar, solis, solax? 
Lux seems to be the favourite here, but any reason why?

Presumably all of them allow you to do real time monitoring, schedule charges / discharges, sip from solar PV when you have surplus, and have an API where I can pull data out of for my own use?

As someone who has had a Sofar for over a year, i was pretty happy with it.
Mine didnt have the right internal circuits to record charge and discharge cumulative cycles, so i couldnt say how much i was *saving* using the batteries.
I believe Nick and Joe do have the right circuits for it.

So honestly if i had a newer sofar, id probably have kept it.

Yesterday i removed the sofar and replaced it with a lux.
The 3600w charge and discharge is better than the 3000w sofar, but the monitoring is quite a step forward.
The sofar monitoring lets you see one parameter at a time, adjusting nothing, as its purely for information.
However the lux overlays graphs on top of each other, which imo is better,

But more importantly its an actual connevtion to the inverter, you can tell the inverter to charge or discharge, you can set timers etc, all from the app, this makes it leaps and bounds ahead of the sofar imo.... but ive not even had the thing working 24 hours yet


Im told they can be run as standard models in parallel also purely by being connected to the same supply, ill put this to the test later this week. A few folk have tried paralleling other systems, i know Nowty on Nav tried it with Sofar, and it wouldnt work, so this could be very important if true, as it means modular expansion would be possible for inverters as well as batteries.

This is really useful, thanks! Any idea if there's an API I can use where I can grab data like battery charge / discharge rate?

Did you just buy the LUX? Mind if I ask prices? I've found a great deal for the batteries - substantially less than thinkrenewables, but I can't beat thinkrenewables on the LUX pricing. 

EVandPV

Solarchaser said:

But more importantly its an actual connevtion to the inverter, you can tell the inverter to charge or discharge, you can set timers etc, all from the app, this makes it leaps and bounds ahead of the sofar imo.... but ive not even had the thing working 24 hours yet

There's also more settings available on the web portal that are not on the app and much more data with the option of exporting to excel.

Solarchaser

Well i bought the lux from Michael at think renewables, just over £750 i think.
I also bought another battery (and paid the hazardous network delivery) so i probably dont want to know how cheap you can get the batteries.

Sorry, API, thats a different language to me, but Scott has talked about them (it?) A few times, as has Zarch

EVandPV

chamelion said:

This is really useful, thanks! Any idea if there's an API I can use where I can grab data like battery charge / discharge rate?

You'll get all that on the web portal with an export to excel option but there's also a script that talks to the Lux .....
https://github.com/celsworth/octolux