Lux ac battery controller

EricMears

I'd posted a similar query on the FB group page for Lux owners and got a clearer explanation of what "Charge Priority" actually means so have now set up a regime that (I hope !) means house will be fed from batteries during the 'Go' day rate but only from mains during offpeak period. :-

chainreaction

So I tried using only the "AC charge enable" enabled and disabled the "Priority Charge" and my system did exactly the same as the hybrids, ie the battery didn't discharge 👍🏻👍🏻. So moving forward I will only use the "AC charge enable", then the battery % in this section will determine if I charge the batteries or not, depending on the solar PV estimate for the following day. 
If I get another AC coupled/battery system and use current system as storage back up for overnight, I'd probably use Wattstored method of blocking discharge during the day via priority charge for my current system.
Eric - what was the better explanation for priority charge?
Ian

EricMears

chainreaction said:

Eric - what was the better explanation for priority charge?
Ian

See the last few seconds of : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPQJ_p2t39M&ab_channel=InfinityInnovations.

Very roughly speaking "priority charge"  can be regarded as "inhibit discharge".   

chainreaction

Great thanks, thought as much and as per how 've been using my system for the last 1 or so.

1961Nick

ianatkin said:

EricMears said:

PolarSolar said:

Soon I will be on Octopus Agile and for a while want to explore setting the charge times etc, manually.
I'd like to stop the batteries from discharging for a block of time during the cheaper agile periods so that the residual consumption is imported from grid at cheaper rates.  

I have a similar question and was expecting to have to look through the whole of this thread to see if it had already been asked (& answered).  So thanks PolarSolar for raising it.

Although we've had solar panels for the last twelve years,  I've only recently decided to add batteries.  Now have a Luxpower LXP3600 with Pylontech batteries.  I've never tried to charge car from solar - mainly because I'd rather be driving it than charging if Sun is shining although might start doing so now that the problem of intermittent cloud cover is solved.

In some ways,  my 'problem' is a bit more straightforward in that I just want to prevent any discharge from my batteries for the whole of my 'off-peak' period.  As presently set up,  if I were to decide to charge my EV tonight (or even run the dishwasher on a delayed setting) the system would try to take 3.6kW from the batteries and only 3.8kW from the mains to leave me with an empty battery by dawn.

Ideally,  I’d like to find a setting for Lux that would prevent any discharge during offpeak period but there doesn’t seem to be a setting that does exactly that.  I'd be quite happy to buy all power at offpeak rate but wouldn't want to buy any overnight power at the 'day rate'.

Last night,  I set the “System Discharge Power Rate(%) (?)” to 10 hoping that would limit battery depletion to my background level of 300W (hovering over the question mark on that line brings up a message that rated discharge power is 3000W so 10% should logically be 300W).  In fact that resulted in discharge being capped at 400W – not a major problem as it still meant that when I wasn’t drawing a large load,  battery would still cover my background usage but only having ‘wasted’ 1.6kWh.  If I desperately wanted to make that exactly 300W I expect I could drop the 10 down to 7% or whatever.

An alternative approach might be to tell the battery not to discharge below (say) 40%.  But both these methods would mean that I’d have to set the reduction just before going to bed then cancel it first thing next morning and do that every night I wanted to use significant amounts of off-peak power.   Ideally,  I’d like to find a setting that meant I’d take nothing from battery during off-peak period but have it fully available during peak rate times.

I’m wondering what might happen if I told the system to ‘force charge’ for the whole of the offpeak. period but to do so at a zero or trivial rate.  Would the fact that it was charging inhibit it from discharging at the same time or would it carry out both operations at the same time so effectively deplete battery at almost its max rate whilst I was charging car ?  Even if that had something like the desired effect,  I’d still have to amend it occasionally – though perhaps only a few times a year.

Similarly,  would ‘force discharging’ at a zero or trivial rate mean that total discharge was limited to that rate or would it just mean that batteries would discharge enough to cover consumption plus the force discharge rate ?

Or is there some setting on the inverter itself and not available via the ‘maintenance tab’ that would do exactly what I want ?

Apologies if I've missed some blindingly obvious solution described within the luxpowertek.com webpage.

Hi there

You can achieve this by turning on "AC Charge Enable", setting the "AC Battery Charge Level" to say 20% and the AC Charge Start and End Times to your off-peak hours. This should basically turn off the battery and allow you to charge your car during the off peak hours without draining the house battery. 

This is exactly how I operate my Sofar ME3000 in summer - set the SOC to 30% for the Intelligent Octopus off peak period (I also have a 2 & 3 hours schedule set up in addition to the full 6 hours.).

chainreaction

Anyone know what the quick charge button on the main screen of the app is supposed to do? I've just pressed it and it stopped my battery from discharging but didn't charge as I thought it might. Do I need anything else enabled to get it to charge the battery?

ianatkin

chainreaction said:

Anyone know what the quick charge button on the main screen of the app is supposed to do? I've just pressed it and it stopped my battery from discharging but didn't charge as I thought it might. Do I need anything else enabled to get it to charge the battery?

It's apparently meant to force your battery to charge for an hour - maybe it only does it up to your AC charge % limit?

chainreaction

ianatkin said:

chainreaction said:

Anyone know what the quick charge button on the main screen of the app is supposed to do? 

Ah my AC Charge Limit was set to 50% (although I didnt have AC Charge Enable, enabled), with my batteries at 87%, so will have another go at a suitable time and ensure the Charge Limit is above battery SOC. 

EricMears

Charging car last night / this morning,  I managed to put nothing in or take anything out of batteries by enabling 'charge priority' during my offpeak period :-

GAJ59

Quick question in case anyone knows the answer please?

On the LuxPower Monitor screen you get the top image, at the top left of the Monitor screen.

If you click on it you get the second image with a 'breakdown'. I've never understood why Load and Export add up to over 100% and why Charge is negative (though it does correct the sum to 100%!)

Worse, if you hover over the segments you get different figures for Charge & Export, which do add up to 100%.

This information is almost certainly of no use to me in any case, but I'd dearly like to understand if it has any basis in reality - all the other figures presented on the Monitor screen make sense, as do those on the various Data screens.

If somebody knows, I'd be very interested. Google has been no help.

Cheers, Graham