Lux ac battery controller

orrery

I've been around these forums for ages and only just this one. I've had a Lux AC controller and x4 Pylontech US5000 batteries for about a year, added to a previous 4kWp PV system. All is working fine.

Forgive me if this has been asked and answered before but ...

 

What does Charge Priority do? I've always used the standard AC charge option for the IOG overnight period, and I've swapped it to Priority Charge ... with no apparent difference.

EricMears

"What does Charge Priority do?"

The name is rather silly !   What it actually does is to disable use of stored power such that all power used in house comes from grid.   I find it very useful to have that in place normally between 23:30 & 05:30 but extended if I'm charging the car and am offered additional 'intelligent' slots.

AlfaFoxtrot

Is the self-consumption of the Luxpower inverter logged anywhere?

Over the last couple of weeks, the overnight house consumption has increased by around 90W (seems to correlate to when PV is no longer generating, ie house running off battery).

No new/changed electrical items in the house - so I was wondering if there'd been a software update or something that was affecting what the inverter is doing. The house has a constant baseload except for the fridge (which you can see coming on/off on the trace, gas boiler heating is off overnight).

Thought it might be temperature related on batteries (given the colder nights), but then it wasn't doing this in Feb and hasn't changed since it warmed up in the last week.

The only method I have at the moment is to shut off all the circuits at the fusboard and read from the inverter panel, would prefer some logged data if possible!

EVandPV

AlfaFoxtrot said:

Is the self-consumption of the Luxpower inverter logged anywhere?

The manual only gives the standby self consumption which is 10 watts.

EricMears

AlfaFoxtrot said:

Is the self-consumption of the Luxpower inverter logged anywhere?

I don't think the figures they show are really accurate enough to rely upon but if you compare what the battery is charging or discharging with the algebraic sum of Imports, exports & solar contribution there's usually a small difference which might represent self-consumption.  However many of their figures rely on clamp measurements so might have a bigger error than apparent self-consumption.

orrery

EricMears said:

"What does Charge Priority do?"

The name is rather silly !   What it actually does is to disable use of stored power such that all power used in house comes from grid.   I find it very useful to have that in place normally between 23:30 & 05:30 but extended if I'm charging the car and am offered additional 'intelligent' slots.

Interesting - thanks. Although I'm still not sure how it behaves:

I have the 'Charge' level set at 55%, and also the same setting for Charge Priority. If the battery is above 55% when it hits 23.30 to 05.30, then the operation of Charge and Charge Priority seems identical: the battery doesn't try to charge and all power comes from the grid. But, if the charge level is less than 55%, the operation between the two is different:

Charge - from 23.30, the battery charges to 55% and all power is from the grid until 05.30

Priority Charge - the battery fails to charge at all, but all power is from the grid until 05.30

Surely the standard Charge setting does what you are describing above?

EricMears

orrery said:

EricMears said:

"What does Charge Priority do?"

The name is rather silly !   What it actually does is to disable use of stored power such that all power used in house comes from grid.   I find it very useful to have that in place normally between 23:30 & 05:30 but extended if I'm charging the car and am offered additional 'intelligent' slots.

Interesting - thanks. Although I'm still not sure how it behaves:

I have the 'Charge' level set at 55%, and also the same setting for Charge Priority. If the battery is above 55% when it hits 23.30 to 05.30, then the operation of Charge and Charge Priority seems identical: the battery doesn't try to charge and all power comes from the grid. But, if the charge level is less than 55%, the operation between the two is different:

Charge - from 23.30, the battery charges to 55% and all power is from the grid until 05.30

Priority Charge - the battery fails to charge at all, but all power is from the grid until 05.30

Surely the standard Charge setting does what you are describing above?

Never actually tried it, but I'd have thought there was a good chance that once charge level had attained setpoint (ir started off higher ?) the battery might start discharging whereas  the so called 'Charge Priority' setting should guarantee that no discharging could possibly happen during the selected time.

chainreaction

Yes charge priority basically stops the battery discharging below value set  in the period set but you need to set the AC charge to ensure battery is charged to the value set in this function.

orrery

chainreaction said:

Yes charge priority basically stops the battery discharging below value set  in the period set but you need to set the AC charge to ensure battery is charged to the value set in this function.

So, are you saying that Charge and Charge Priority should be set at the same time, and if so - to what end?

chainreaction

I use charge priority to stop the battery discharging during the cheap rate period and use AC charge towards the end of the cheap rate period to ensure batteries full at end of cheap rate period. See screenshot 65% as today was supposed to be overcast where I live.