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ikeakayke avatar image
ikeakayke asked

Quattro + cerbogx + ESS keeps injecting huge current at random times with feed-in disabled

I have a simple setup in awaiting of the solar panels and charger - just the quattron 10000, 16kw of victron gel batteries with lynx shunt and cerbogx and NO other DC circuit. Meanwhile I use it as a UPS but also loaded ESS to try and learn the various options. The problem is 2-3 days after ESS was activated, the quattro starts randomly to invert. It blinks the led, I hear the buzzings and all, I can also confirm it with the smart meter and VRM graphs.

I even flushed the new firmwares 2 days ago, seemed stable when fresh but now it is again erratic.

It is set as keep batteries charged and always does this... it feeds-in without reason, and from the batteries!

The only way to make it stop (inspired by other threads here) is to set ESS to optimezed with BatteryLIfe , min SoC 100% and limit invert power set to 0, but then although quattro says Float, batteries slowly drain because of cerbogx.

What am I doing wrong? For me this seems completely illogical and unacceptable. And the thing in the graph below is just a huge one, because just looking at console the battery is always charging 1kw, discharging and so on. It never settles properly.

I can confirm it is a ESS problem only (at least in the current simple basic setup with no solar yet - but even with solar, will it do the same at night?), as without it it works as a stadard UPS should.

screenshot-20220426-095032-vrm.jpg

ESS
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4 Answers
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ikeakayke answered ·

During the day it's normal to have spikes due to regularization from PV power vs consumption, but at night this shouldn't happen. It kept spiking then charging and so on. I just want the batteries to 'rest' at night so I made a tiny script that disables the grid charger when night is detected by mppt, and enabled in the morning when day detected. No more spikes.

It basically disables with: dbus -y com.victronenergy.vebus.ttyS4 /Hub4/DisableCharge SetValue 1

when: dbus -y com.victronenergy.solarcharger.socketcan_can0_vi0_uc181324 /State GetValue

is not zero.

I'm very happy with it. Hope it helps others as well

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ikeakayke avatar image
ikeakayke answered ·

It seems adding the MPPT PV charger fixed something in ESS logic and now works fine. Will get back if stable the next few days as well.

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kevgermany avatar image kevgermany ♦♦ commented ·
It would be interesting to see that graph for the hour that spike occurs. It's negative input, so you're spiking to the grid.
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ikeakayke answered ·

Adding the MPPT didn't fix anything, just the 1-2 days in which it works ok, then again drifts to sudden spikes at night, from the batteries (with keep charged). For the moment I set min soc to 99% with dbus and all seems ok (with min soc to 100% and batterylife it still spikes)

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ikeakayke answered ·

You can check realtime behavior here https://youtu.be/hoVKwUIARrc

It's getting worse and more chaotic... first discharge from battery to feed AC loads, then draw current from mains to charge back the battery. This does not happen with ESS removed from the quattro.

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