NiyiOmoIyunade:
A quiet weekend allowing me to benchmark my home-office energy system performance and evaluate the design choices I made with single phase 15kva vs 3 phase 5kva

Picture 1 - Battery @ 100%, Peak loads running and Solar just matching house loads

Picture 2 - Earlier in the day - Battery @ 100%, Base loads running and Solar just matching house load demand.

Picture 3 - Couple of days ago - solar production at historic peak - sustained for like 12 minutes.

Picture 4 - Couple of days ago - testing new energy dashboard in the cool of the day - 6pmish - low solar, aiming for peak loads and testing out Victron's power assist and AC current limiting engineering miracle - basically using a 5.5kva Diesel Gen to drive 9kw+ of loads - the inverter was set to take only 4.5kva from the Gen and source the balance from the DC bus (battery or solar). Mix everything AC and DC sources together thoroughly and spit out combined power to the loads

This is a fantastic feature, so you can set the max power the inverter should get from your AC (Gen)? and then it takes the rest from other sources? Otherwise how does the inverter determine it needs to take 3kw from your Gen (AC) source?
MPP does mixing with solar power and AC but you can't set the max power it should take from AC it does that by its own algorithm dependent on how much sun power is left after/while charging the battery.

NiyiOmoIyunade:
This is why I am hesitant about trying brands with no local presence or service center.

With most of these transformerless hybrids, you are looking at a board change if anything breaks and the board can usually only be sourced from manufacturer/seller who sends it in from abroad.

Either I buy the equipment + spare board on hand or buy 2 units of the inverter against the rainy day.

Yeah, very valid point.
Transformerless inverters have an achilles heel..very fragile.Mpp readily stood up to the challenge for Ojeysky. Hope phocos and sorotec would do same when the time comes.

@ Ojeysky, Valto is the reigning sorotec king for now, perhaps he can chime in, Kiekie i think is just selling and not using phocos, so cant really tell us much.

I like the inbuilt wifi logging and streaming capability of Sorotec, phocos promises something similar.
Hope that famous youtuber would do a comparism some day.

Mustpower and Easun are also not doing badly in the hybrid biz.
Would surely switch to a hybrid when am upgrading.My trusted 4kva mustpower transformer based inverter is gulping over 130w, by just being on , thats enough energy to keep a decent freezer powered 24/7, as an equivalent hybrid would gulp less than 30w idle consumption.

NiyiOmoIyunade:
With more than 3,000 promised cycles it would need at least a year before one would see any signs of degradation even under abuse. Realistically 5 years plus with normal daily use

Indeed, I put in a BMV into the mix about 4 months ago and I am still less than 60cycle. It's going to be a long wait to see any degradation. I may decommission it soon though as I am planning my final bank upgrade for many years to come (hopefully) - not happy that the sun power is wasting once the bank is full, need to store more energy to cater for days sun is not smiling

NiyiOmoIyunade:
I assume you are running EmonCMS locally and using the dataplicity reverse SSH tunnel to view your dashboard remotely?

That's correct

Lucky you with this approach as you can have so many data feeds on your dashboard. EmonCMS.org charges me £1 per feed per annum and this without UK Vat levied. I have to choose carefully what I want to host/show publicly to keep hosting costs low.

Good side is I can share publicly to a nearly infinite number of users (currently 2 family members and 3 staff have access to regulate their power usage).

Does dataplicity support more than one user logged in per time? I played around with a few multi user access local hosting options but they were not stable - random downtime needing me to dedicate time to fix things so I ditched them in favour of EmonCMS.org

It does but at a cost, but why will you need more than one user? I am using the free option which gives me limited daily bandwidth to access my emoncms web interface remotely. When I am home I have the option of using my home WiFi instead which does not count against my dataplicity bandwidth.

I prefer logging locally as it's a sure way that removes possibility of network downtime associated with remote logging

earthrealm:


Yeah, very valid point.
Transformerless inverters have an achilles heel..very fragile.Mpp readily stood up to the challenge for Ojeysky. Hope phocos and sorotec would do same when the time comes.

@ Ojeysky, Valto is the reigning sorotec king for now, perhaps he can chime in, Kiekie i think is just selling and not using phocos, so cant really tell us much.

I like the inbuilt wifi logging and streaming capability of Sorotec, phocos promises something similar.
Hope that famous youtuber would do a comparism some day.

Mustpower and Easun are also not doing badly in the hybrid biz.
Would surely switch to a hybrid when am upgrading.My trusted 4kva mustpower transformer based inverter is gulping over 130w, by just being on , thats enough energy to keep a decent freezer powered 24/7, as an equivalent hybrid would gulp less than 30w idle consumption.

What! That's massive, here are figures of my 3kw MPP:

1. When just on and not powering load(idle) 18w
2. When powering load through AC only 30 to 40w
3. When powering load through battery only 40 to 60w when less than 500w of load and up to 70w as load increases.
4. When powering load from solar 30 to 50w
5. When powering load from AC and charging from solar - no consumption

That said the the xtm and victrons have better power efficiency but I rather spend the extra cost on more battery bank to cater for higher consumption and provide more capacity to my household +extra Board

Yup! All Victron MultiPlus & Quattros support these advanced features natively.

You can set precise AC current limits on both AC Mains and AC Gen inputs and dynamically even adjust the limits of one input on the fly from VEConfigure or VictronConnect or GX Device (with a GX device you can even adjust the AC current limit over the internet)

Having set your AC current limit, you can then set PowerAssist boost factors (allows the inverter to borrow power from the DC bus to assist a Gen or Mains supply and prevent it from being overloaded). Thus a 2.5kva Gen may power over 5kva of loads with no stress on the gen - Victron afficionados catchily call this "Small Gen, Big Power"

Once the two above are set, then you still have a Dynamic Current Limiter that allows the inverter to smoothly transfer loads to a Gen AC input so the Gen sees no sudden shocks - this is much like how inverter ACs ramp up power slowly. The inverter absorbs the power difference and passes it to the Gen small small up to the user set limit.

In my case I am taking about a max of 4.5kva from a 5.5kva Diesel Gen - the Gen takes on the loads slowly over like 15minutes and doesn't even realise it is loaded 80% - it just chugs along happily.

The last feature is "Weak AC Input" - if you set this your inverter will take power from the worst of supplies - low frequency, low voltage, poor surge response and still charge the battery successfully but you sacrifice some efficiency as the power factor derates.

These are the features that make a premium product like Victron worth the extra expense - they do easily and reliably what other brands cannot even imagine to begin to do - again this is superior engineering as at today - in the future it may become a normal standard feature of all inverters.

ojeysky:


This is a fantastic feature, so you can set the max power the inverter should get from your AC (Gen)? and then it takes the rest from other sources? Otherwise how does the inverter determine it needs to take 3kw from your Gen (AC) source?
MPP does mixing with solar power and AC but you can't set the max power it should take from AC it does that by its own algorithm dependent on how much sun power is left after/while charging the battery.

You guys are doing well.

Although I have the Victron and Fangpusun BMVs, I ditched local monitoring for the more robust reporting features available via a GX device.

I had to choose the Venus GX (no screen) as only that device in the Victron world had the required number of ports to connect 4 CCs, 2 inverters, smart managed battery and bring them all under smart management and BMS control. To my chagrin, Victron released the CerboGX designed to robustly connect multiple devices less than a month after I already bought a Venus GX.

The lack of a display screen motivated me to develop proprietary software to interface with GX devices, Battery & Tank level monitors, Currrent and Weather sensors and post directly to EmonCMS and other dashboard sources bypassing Node Red, SolPip... and other similar crutches that the average DIYer would use - this allows one to flexibly monitor and dashboard any and every metric of interest - if your device outputs a signal over RS232, RS485, TCP, Modbus, MQTT, DBUS, chances are high we can catch it and dashboard it for you.

The current house dashboard updates every 10 seconds - one could point it to EmonCMS local or public or PVOutput.org or a number of other sources just at the press of a button. Right now it outputs to a screen at the office and 6 phones all over Lagos. Whether I am at home or on the road, I can see a view of whatever my power system is doing as at 10secs ago - this works seamlessly regardless of location and number of connected users.

More importantly I can benchmark the various sites I maintain either via the Victron VRM portal or EmonCMS - I can spot issues and signs of trouble early.

These are the justifications for multiuser accessible remote monitoring - customer support, performance benchmarking and just basically keep updated on the status and health of your system.

When I have the chance I want to add early morning email notifications that contain that day's weather and solar insolation forecasts and yesterday's performance summaries.

ojeysky:


That's correct



It does but at a cost, but why will you need more than one user? I am using the free option which gives me limited daily bandwidth to access my emoncms web interface remotely. When I am home I have the option of using my home WiFi instead which does not count against my dataplicity bandwidth.

I prefer logging locally as it's a sure way that removes possibility of network downtime associated with remote logging

NiyiOmoIyunade:
This is why I am hesitant about trying brands with no local presence or service center.

With most of these transformerless hybrids, you are looking at a board change if anything breaks and the board can usually only be sourced from manufacturer/seller who sends it in from abroad.

Either I buy the equipment + spare board on hand or buy 2 units of the inverter against the rainy day.

Exactly, although full off-grid users tend to enjoy the most benefit from the fragile hybrids. No phcn high voltage or low voltage wahala.
One of My client has been running off-grid 9kw pv with a 5kva axpert almost clocking it's 4th year with no inverter damage for once. I also integrated a vill power to handle the heavy loads when needed. Both have been running smoothly.
I only retired the vil power and changed to victron this year as a kind of partial upgrade.

Fantastic features! victron is certainly on a different level of premium and with all these features it's definitely a wish to have but I will need multiple kidneys like you
For now make I dey manage my MPP GK

NiyiOmoIyunade:
Yup! All Victron MultiPlus & Quattros support these advanced features natively.

You can set precise AC current limits on both AC Mains and AC Gen inputs and dynamically even adjust the limits of one input on the fly from VEConfigure or VictronConnect or GX Device (with a GX device you can even adjust the AC current limit over the internet)

Having set your AC current limit, you can then set PowerAssist boost factors (allows the inverter to borrow power from the DC bus to assist a Gen or Mains supply and prevent it from being overloaded). Thus a 2.5kva Gen may power over 5kva of loads with no stress on the gen - Victron afficionados catchily call this "Small Gen, Big Power"

Once the two above are set, then you still have a Dynamic Current Limiter that allows the inverter to smoothly transfer loads to a Gen AC input so the Gen sees no sudden shocks - this is much like how inverter ACs ramp up power slowly. The inverter absorbs the power difference and passes it to the Gen small small up to the user set limit.

In my case I am taking about a max of 4.5kva from a 5.5kva Diesel Gen - the Gen takes on the loads slowly over like 15minutes and doesn't even realise it is loaded 80% - it just chugs along happily.

The last feature is "Weak AC Input" - if you set this your inverter will take power from the worst of supplies - low frequency, low voltage, poor surge response and still charge the battery successfully but you sacrifice some efficiency as the power factor derates.

These are the features that make a premium product like Victron worth the extra expense - they do easily and reliably what other brands cannot even imagine to begin to do - again this is superior engineering as at today - in the future it may become a normal standard feature of all inverters.

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As I saw all the beautiful charts I thought this is biblical do you understand what you are reading?
I just want to know if the battery is performing within name plate specifications and a good buy?

ojeysky:


What batteries? You mean my LFP? Battery is going fine, no issues at all. I have discharged up to 80% before and it's kicking fine. No sign of degradation of any form.

earthrealm:


Yeah, very valid point.
Transformerless inverters have an achilles heel..very fragile.Mpp readily stood up to the challenge for Ojeysky. Hope phocos and sorotec would do same when the time comes.

@ Ojeysky, Valto is the reigning sorotec king for now, perhaps he can chime in, Kiekie i think is just selling and not using phocos, so cant really tell us much.

I like the inbuilt wifi logging and streaming capability of Sorotec, phocos promises something similar.
Hope that famous youtuber would do a comparism some day.

Mustpower and Easun are also not doing badly in the hybrid biz.
Would surely switch to a hybrid when am upgrading.My trusted 4kva mustpower transformer based inverter is gulping over 130w, by just being on , thats enough energy to keep a decent freezer powered 24/7, as an equivalent hybrid would gulp less than 30w idle consumption.

Idle consumption is detailed in Phocos datasheet and other technical data are also included for prospective clients... See snapshot below ! Cheer's

Contact for enquiry & orders,
Smartcell global services
Call:: 081-350-31951
WHATSAPP::: https:///2348170385620

durodee:
As I saw all the beautiful charts I thought this is biblical do you understand what you are reading?

Lol.....I built the dashboard so yes each value communicates to me, I shared it so you see the 170AH discharge at battery voltage of 25.2v

I just want to know if the battery is performing within name plate specifications and a good buy?

Certainly a good buy and meets the specification. Though I think it's sold at 500k now....if you are interested, mine will be available for sale in near future (when I get to do my planned upgrade)

NiyiOmoIyunade:
Although I have the Victron and Fangpusun BMVs, I ditched local monitoring for the more robust reporting features available via a GX device.

I had to choose the Venus GX (no screen) as only that device in the Victron world had the required number of ports to connect 4 CCs, 2 inverters, smart managed battery and bring them all under smart management and BMS control. To my chagrin, Victron released the CerboGX designed to robustly connect multiple devices less than a month after I already bought a Venus GX.

The lack of a display screen motivated me to develop proprietary software to interface with GX devices, Battery & Tank level monitors, Currrent and Weather sensors and post directly to EmonCMS and other dashboard sources bypassing Node Red, SolPip... and other similar crutches that the average DIYer would use - this allows one to flexibly monitor and dashboard any and every metric of interest - if your device outputs a signal over RS232, RS485, TCP, Modbus, MQTT, DBUS, chances are high we can catch it and dashboard it for you.

The current house dashboard updates every 10 seconds - one could point it to EmonCMS local or public or PVOutput.org or a number of other sources just at the press of a button. Right now it outputs to a screen at the office and 6 phones all over Lagos. Whether I am at home or on the road, I can see a view of whatever my power system is doing as at 10secs ago - this works seamlessly regardless of location and number of connected users.

More importantly I can benchmark the various sites I maintain either via the Victron VRM portal or EmonCMS - I can spot issues and signs of trouble early.

These are the justifications for multiuser accessible remote monitoring - customer support, performance benchmarking and just basically keep updated on the status and health of your system.

When I have the chance I want to add early morning email notifications that contain that day's weather and solar insolation forecasts and yesterday's performance summaries.

I think I may have misunderstood what you meant by multiuser, thought you meant shell access to your server (in my case pi3+), my emoncms can indeed be accessed by multiple number of users home and remote. The only limitation I have for remote access is data due to using free version of data duplicity though I have never hit my daily remote peak, but I guess if I include my emoncms link on my footer for folks to take a look on live data, I will easily hit that limit daily. I also log at pvoutput and that is linked on my footer

I look forward to seeing your arsenal of gears someday, I can imagine what it looks like. We na baby DIYers for your stable o

Excellent! It's me that I was referring to about understanding what I was reading. I will be glad to take the battery of your hand at the appointed time. Please keep me in the loop.

ojeysky:


Lol.....I built the dashboard so yes each value communicates to me, I shared it so you see the 170AH discharge at battery voltage of 25.2v



Certainly a good buy and meets the specification. Though I think it's sold at 500k now....if you are interested, mine will be available for sale in near future (when I get to do my planned upgrade)

Gradually winding down on DIY and experimenting o my oga. E be like say I don reach where I dey go with this PylonTech stack.

I have been giving out assorted inverters and gadgetry that pushed me through these many years. I have some 12v 200Ah batteries in very decent shape available for sale and should put these up soon.

We are all on the journey of continuous improvement and the good thing is all that we have learned cannot be taken away from us by God's grace and we shall definitely keep improving as well.

Business needs are making me focus more on Lithium batteries vs lead acid and also higher end inverters with proven track record. Whatever offerings will stand the test of time and give solid value to customers, you will find me there.

ojeysky:


I think I may have misunderstood what you meant by multiuser, thought you meant shell access to your server (in my case pi3+), my emoncms can indeed be accessed by multiple number of users home and remote. The only limitation I have for remote access is data due to using free version of data duplicity though I have never hit my daily remote peak, but I guess if I include my emoncms link on my footer for folks to take a look on live data, I will easily hit that limit daily. I also log at pvoutput and that is linked on my footer

I look forward to seeing your arsenal of gears someday, I can imagine what it looks like. We na baby DIYers for your stable o

Finally closed the day at 59KwH solar harvest and 49KwH energy consumed by appliances during the day (see pic 2 of 2).

This was a stress test passed in flying colors - I do believe the PV array is rather oversized but it gives the assurance to run large loads as if on Mains - this is key as the only backup power I have is a 5.5kva Diesel Gen - no connection to PHCN grid whatsoever - no cables or service pole near me

NiyiOmoIyunade:
A quiet weekend allowing me to benchmark my home-office energy system performance and evaluate the design choices I made with single phase 15kva vs 3 phase 5kva

Picture 1 - Battery @ 100%, Peak loads running and Solar just matching house loads

Picture 2 - Earlier in the day - Battery @ 100%, Base loads running and Solar just matching house load demand.

Picture 3 - Couple of days ago - solar production at historic peak - sustained for like 12 minutes.

Picture 4 - Couple of days ago - testing new energy dashboard in the cool of the day - 6pmish - low solar, aiming for peak loads and testing out Victron's power assist and AC current limiting engineering miracle - basically using a 5.5kva Diesel Gen to drive 9kw+ of loads - the inverter was set to take only 4.5kva from the Gen and source the balance from the DC bus (battery or solar). Mix everything AC and DC sources together thoroughly and spit out combined power to the loads

Na near Wole Soyinka you de stay when pole non near you.

NiyiOmoIyunade:
Finally closed the day at 59KwH solar harvest and 49KwH energy consumed by appliances during the day (see pic 2 of 2).

This was a stress test passed in flying colors - I do believe the PV array is rather oversized but it gives the assurance to run large loads as if on Mains - this is key as the only backup power I have is a 5.5kva Diesel Gen - no connection to PHCN grid whatsoever - no cables or service pole near me

100A 12/48v MUST MPPT charge controller available, #120,000. Call/WhatsApp us on 08168986461

That's X3 your array.... that's cool. It also gives me good confirmation that my 7 to 8kwh+ yield on a 2.5kw array is not bad one for a "non premium" gear, will do a proper stress test after my bank upgrade, but men bros you dey use power o

NiyiOmoIyunade:
Finally [b]closed the day at 59KwH solar harvest and 49KwH [/b]energy consumed by appliances during the day (see pic 2 of 2).

This was a stress test passed in flying colors - I do believe the PV array is rather oversized but it gives the assurance to run large loads as if on Mains - this is key as the only backup power I have is a 5.5kva Diesel Gen - no connection to PHCN grid whatsoever - no cables or service pole near me

NiyiOmoIyunade:
Gradually winding down on DIY and experimenting o my oga. E be like say I don reach where I dey go with this PylonTech stack.

I have been giving out assorted inverters and gadgetry that pushed me through these many years. I have some 12v 200Ah batteries in very decent shape available for sale and should put these up soon.

We are all on the journey of continuous improvement and the good thing is all that we have learned cannot be taken away from us by God's grace and we shall definitely keep improving as well.

Business needs are making me focus more on Lithium batteries vs lead acid and also higher end inverters with proven track record. Whatever offerings will stand the test of time and give solid value to customers, you will find me there.

my oga,abeg the 12v 200ah battery, I'm interested oo,when your ready to sale them,make me too start from there

ojeysky:


Lol.....I built the dashboard so yes each value communicates to me, I shared it so you see the 170AH discharge at battery voltage of 25.2v



Certainly a good buy and meets the specification. Though I think it's sold at 500k now....if you are interested, mine will be available for sale in near future (when I get to do my planned upgrade)

Ojesky the man.this guy keeps falling in love with lithium. This your marriage strong o

ojeysky:
That's X3 your array.... that's cool. It also gives me good confirmation that my 7 to 8kwh+ yield on a 2.5kw array is not bad one for a "non premium" gear, will do a proper stress test after my bank upgrade, but men bros you dey use power o

Yeah good result imo

ojeysky:
New 60A charge, 100A discharge Daly LFP BMS with balance. 35k

You forgot to put the BMS voltage o.

NiyiOmoIyunade:
A quiet weekend allowing me to benchmark my home-office energy system performance and evaluate the design choices I made with single phase 15kva vs 3 phase 5kva

Picture 1 - Battery @ 100%, Peak loads running and Solar just matching house loads

Picture 2 - Earlier in the day - Battery @ 100%, Base loads running and Solar just matching house load demand.

Picture 3 - Couple of days ago - solar production at historic peak - sustained for like 12 minutes.

Picture 4 - Couple of days ago - testing new energy dashboard in the cool of the day - 6pmish - low solar, aiming for peak loads and testing out Victron's power assist and AC current limiting engineering miracle - basically using a 5.5kva Diesel Gen to drive 9kw+ of loads - the inverter was set to take only 4.5kva from the Gen and source the balance from the DC bus (battery or solar). Mix everything AC and DC sources together thoroughly and spit out combined power to the loads

You know what? All I can say is wehdone sir.

But 9000+ watts consumption, abeg na you dey feed your street?

NiyiOmoIyunade:

These are the features that make a premium product like Victron worth the extra expense - they do easily and reliably what other brands cannot even imagine to begin to do - again this is superior engineering as at today - in the future it may become a normal standard feature of all inverters.

As a premium brand, I will say these guys are justifying the price on their fantastic products.

These are features most upcoming brand will only get to include in their product line up much later. Not much is put into R & D by these ones so the option is to wait out and reverse engineer

NiyiOmoIyunade:
Gradually winding down on DIY and experimenting o my oga. E be like say I don reach where I dey go with this PylonTech stack.

Bro, you never use LTO chemistry o. So gbabesky say you still dey on the journey. I can assure you that with DIY solar, the temptation to just push the limit a lil' more will keep nagging you.

Very nice!
Unless i missed it, can you elaborate on the bolded? I suspect you'd have been better served with a 3 phase 5kva build .

A typical Quattro's second output is limited to 50A ac, around 10kw.
This means your heavy loads are at 10kw or lower. If higher, do you use assistants to start a Gen to Power Assist? I'm assuming your loads are split into Essential and Auxiliary loads.

NiyiOmoIyunade:
A quiet weekend allowing me to benchmark my home-office energy system performance and evaluate the design choices I made with single phase 15kva vs 3 phase 5kva

ceaser:


You forgot to put the BMS voltage o.

LFP (3.2v) for 8s 24v