question

Thanks Guy,

My occupation for the past 31 years has been a fire protection office (fire fighter) and yes the frogs and lizards can cause short circuits just like the sun shining through a glass bottle can start a wild fire however it’s pretty rare and difficult to prove as the house has burned down or the wildfire has covered vast areas. Reputable manufacturers of modern electrical equipment to my knowledge have pretty well vermon proofed their product and in my case I have a purpose built room for my off grid system so the equipment is not exposed to out door elements including lizards and frogs etc.

August where I live is winter and the lizards and frogs etc usually aren’t active.

I am seeking advice at present as to what direction I should take, I have been told by others who have had issues such as mine with Victron equipment that they don’t usually repair and depending on the circumstances may offer a replacement unit at cost. Still a considerable outlay. Then there is the safety issue and a responsibility to report issues with electrical equipment to the Electrical Safety Office. Have no idea what to do, the service agent when hearing the age of the unit went a little flat. As time goes by, what about powering my property. I would say the best way to do that would be to buy another unit, not something I would have expected to do, unless the lifespan of Victron equipment is like the cheap white goods of today where they are on the footpath waiting for the curb side pickup to take them to the tip after five or six years.

Will keep you posted

I have a 5K/48V/120V Quattro which was installed in my sailboat in 2013. I powered it down to transport the boat overland. Just tried to power it back up and experienced the same grinding noise you experienced followed by the overload LED. Tried resetting and same result. Took some measurements with power off. Output #1 appears to be a dead short circuit inside the unit.

At last an answer. Sent the unit to service agent. New board required $900.00. Cause of damage unknown. Unit installed back into system. As part of the system I have a BMV 602s and have the relay set to close when the battery SOC drops to 80% and opens when the battery SOC reaches 95%. This in turn activates another relay that pulls in contactors and connects and disconnects grid power to the Quattro. This system has worked without issue for the entire life of the system.
With the repaired Quattro back up and running I attempted to monitor the system as close as possible. By pure luck I was next to the system when I heard the click of the contractor pulling in and the Quattro changing from Inverter to Mains. I had only just checked the SOC , load on system and voltage and everything was ok with very little load and system almost to 100% SOC.

There was no reason for this to have occurred. As I waited to see what happened next the grid disconnected and the unit went to inverter mode but just as it went into that mode the contactor engaged the grid again. Before I could shut the system down this connecting and disconnecting occurred several times.
I decided to disconnect the BMV relay wiring and booted up the system. The system has performed without a problem since and earlier this year I purchase a BMV 712 and installed the wiring into the relay an the 712. Configuration completed with Bluetooth the system has worked without error.
I believe a fault in the old BMV caused a cycling of open close conditions that overloaded and caused damage to the power supply and board controlling the changeover switching operations.

I would say the fault started with only rare occurrences and slowly developed into a situation where it caused the components to fail and the switching locked up and started to over heat and smoke with that horrible grinding noise. Lucky my son was their to save the day!

I hope this helps someone! At the end of the day , the old BMV is in the bin and all is working great! If anyone has a better answer please let me know.

Cheers

Brad