ESS battery life state "Restarting"

Hi,

Today I set the battery life mode to keep batteries charged, I then turned on the geyser and it ramped up both MPPT’s to their max geyser went off, after awhile the NE array went to zero and the the NW array way at ~50W keeping the current loads stratified.

Then the geyser turned on again and the NE MPPT just stayed at 0W, where the NW array ramped up it its max and ~1500W was pulled from Eskom.

I went and checked my logs for this and I see the ESS battery life mode was “Restarting” not keep batteries charged.

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Restarting (and Disabled) is not a state it should get stuck in. It’s just an initial state that the state machine starts in, it should immediately flop into the default self-consumption state (unless you don’t have the ESS assistant installed on the inverter, then it will remain in Disabled).

There is no obvious code path that would allow it to stay in Restarting. Something must be crashing. I’ll get someone to contact you.

Thanks plonkster, I did later in the day repeat the same test and it did what was expected correctly, the only difference though was that the both MPPT’s were running.

I will later today do the same test,

  1. Battery is full, and
  2. 1 MPPT has ramped down to zero
  3. Enable keep batteries charged (From without batterylife )
  4. Switch on the geyser.

Testing again now, and the mode never went to restating this time, however after the mppt ramped down (NE) even if the geyser load was switched on the mppt never ramped up until I disabled ‘keep batteries charge’

It looks like the 150/45 is getting stuck on a false maximum (very low down on the power curve, essentially at zero). It usually happens with very specific solar conditions, which tracks with the information that the array is pointing North East, and you’re just past the solar noon (13:45). It looks like it took a whole two minutes for it to become unstuck even after you changed the ESS mode away from Keep Charged, possibly because a drastic drop in the battery voltage caused it to do a rescan at that point.

It might be best to take this to the community site. The two issues are separate (the ESS state, and the one solar charger getting stuck). I’m not really the best guy to deal with solar charger issues.

Thanks, not the good news I was hoping for testing again now at 16:12 and if did the exact same, stayed at zero till I switched off keep charged then went up to 900W, I am looking at the alignment of the battery voltage sag to see if it picks up at the same time.

I will take the case further on the other side. I need a colleague of mine to assist. He is presently taking a few days leave. So we’ll spend the time gathering some data.

For now I added some extra voltage offset to the solar chargers. I am half-hoping it’s not going to help, because then it confirms my initial diagnosis. But either way, this sort of thing sometimes happens, but it is extremely rare. At least it has nothing to do with the ESS control loop running on the GX.

But for now… better to handle this through official channels :slight_smile:

Same affect today, left if from ~11:20 to ~12:00 with the NE array not picking up in that period. Would have to connect a heater if we need a longer sample window.