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ian avatar image
ian asked

Victron / BYD with small wind turbines (Off grid)

Hi all, I would like to add a small turbine to supplement renewable energy production in the Winter (when pv naturally drops off)

It is a 48V victron system (5 Kva inv/charger with a BYD-B Box LiFePO4 10 kwhr with 4.8 kwp of DC coupled pv via a 250V/85A victron charge controller).

1/ What would be the ideal charger settings (a 3rd party charge controller) to suite 55.2V/55.0V or 56.5V ?

2/ As it is "DC coupled" an AC sensor is out of the question, so is there a way for this wind generation to be represented on the VRM monitoring (even if it shows as pv)?

Any suggestions are most welcome!

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3 Answers
offgridsystems avatar image
offgridsystems answered ·

Hi Ian. Nice to see you on here again. I have just installed a Futurenergy 1kw turbine with their new controller. If you ask them, they will program an input to shut down the turbine when the two wire input is closed. As this is a signal input, it works well with the BYD BMU 'stop charging' contacts that we used to use on Victrons a few years ago.

I cannot fault the operation of this function. When the batteries are 100%, the turbine shuts down every time.

The Airforce 1 48v is compatible with the 50v batteries (56v charged) too.

As usual, the turbine needs to be up in the clear air which be difficult to find on most locations. This one is on top of a hill in Wiltshire, so really does the job of trickle charging 20kwh of BYD's on this containerised solution for the customer.



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Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ commented ·

Awesome work, thanks for posting those great photos.

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julian-monedero avatar image julian-monedero commented ·

Nice System. I am quite interested in installing something similar. I already have a BYD battery and a Multiplus II 48/5000 single phase system with a PV AC coupled inverter. I would like to add wind to the system but I am concerned about monitoring the wind turbine with the Color Control and VRM portal. Is it possible to you use a Victron Solar MPPT Charger at the DC output of your 1kW airforce 1 wind turbine? I would appreciate your feedback.

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julian-monedero avatar image julian-monedero julian-monedero commented ·

Just to clarify that my question of adding the victron solar charger is just to be able to monitor the wind turbine in the Color Control and the VRM portal. In this case, the AC PV production would be monitor directly through an AC meter and the wind production would be monitor using the solar charger... Is this possible? Would it work?

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Paul B avatar image
Paul B answered ·

A wild suggestion for you

say set the wind regulators to as HI a charge voltage as you can but under the upper limit of the MPPT Reg, and then install a Smart Solar MPPT unit after the wind regulator and let that control the charging voltage to the batteries, then connect the smart solar via VE Direct to the CCGX


yes it will apear as PV but that may work for you.

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ian avatar image
ian answered ·

Thanks Paul B and off grid solutions for you input. There seems to be a few ways to do it, but the issue is voiding the BYD warranty (as they require minimum error reporting). AC coupling (with a victron or similar inverter)would be inefficient with a small turbine, so it really needs to run through a victron SCC and be DC coupled. So the DC input from the turbine ideally need to be a far but higher than 50V or so ..

Any ideas for a turbine with a DC output that might suite a 150V or 250V charge controller?

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