Last Friday we had some strange grid activity in my neighbourhood. I first thought it was just an issue on my side until I later during the day noticed some complaints on our neighbourhood’s whatsapp group.
At 7:52am I noticed the power went off. There was no real loads present, wife was in bed with a cold, I just had a light on and everything else was just on standby. I went down to the garage and the inverter reported a VE.Bus state of “Fault”, the VE.Bus System Overload reported “Alarm”. I turned the inverter off and on again, and all’s well again.
During the day, the grid dropped twice again for about a minute at a time, with the inverter just reporting grid lost and reconnecting to the grid a minute or two later.
What I’m concerned about is why the Inverter reported an overload when I definitely had no loads it shouldn’t have been able to carry (barely had 300W on it). Could it be that the voltage of the grid dropped a lot, but not enough to get the inverter to disconnect quickly enough? I’m trying to understand what happened and whether it is possible to prevent this happening in the future as my wife would not really know what to do if she is alone at home, or if this happens when we aren’t home, I won’t know (can’t get an email as the routers are down due to the inverter disconnecting itself) and so might get some nasty surprises with the fridges…
I have the log which I can post if needed. Multi’s firmware is on 470.
I recall there was an upgrade on the firmware somewhere, that dealt with something similar. I can go and search for it again, or just upgrade the firmware of the inverter ASAP to eliminate that possibility first.
The false overload issue was fixed in 481. So you definitely need to update the firmware first, and then if it still happens… then let someone look at it.
Ah great. I recall there was a thread explaining how to upgrade Multi firmware, but can’t for the life of me find it… Do you perhaps have a link to it?
Obviously, the Venus runs off your batts, so unless you have frequent and regular LS events that are unplanned, unforeseen, and unscheduled, just do it.
Follow the steps to the letter. I’ve done it a few times remotely nogal too.
Then just try it when the batteries is not completely full. Updating the firmware deletes the config file and leaves you without the ESS assistant. This can cause a full lithium bank to over charge and switch off. Leave yourself a gap to fix this after the update.
If you do, do not worry. It can always be fixed. In fact, I’ve deliberately (soft) bricked a Multi multiple times during the testing of that feature, and it is still here…
The multi starts charging, without the config file it will attempt to charge the batteries to the voltage in its base config. Also switch off AC to the unit to prevent that.
After the firmware update the system automatically download a VeBusConfigurator file to your pc. You need the software to open and close it before you can upload the file back to the unit. The file contains everything, but is useless unless you open and close it first.
Thanks! I’ve read through the file I linked above. Seems quite self-explanatory, as I’ve come to expect from Victron’s documentation. I’ll give it a go Saturday morning/evening. Maybe first play around with VE Configure first. Thanks for all the help!
I’m sorry, but I have not seen that? I also do not switch off the AC to the inverter.
The reason is the Multi goes into “sleep mode” waiting for the file to be converted and re-uploaded first because the config on it is not suited for the purpose at the time.
It “looks bricked” whilst waiting for the file upload.
Once the file has been uploaded again successfully, then it will start up again, hence another reason to switch the house back to the main DB before starting the process.
@jykenmynie Also to note, I tend to do this at night. Why waste precious sun hours to do it?
Haha jip! Exactly why I’ll be doing it in the morning or night. I always feel like I’m wasting money when working on the system during the day.
Oh yes, the other day you shared a satellite picture of your house, I recognised the street names, so I know you stay 10 minutes from my house, maybe 5 depending on the traffic at the forum… So guess who’s door I’ll be knocking on if anything looks funny…
We should actually organise a braai next time Jaco is in town.
