Maximize Your Battery Bank's Potential: a step by step guide.

hi everyone I'm David and I'm on a mission to take my house completely off grid that means completely self-sufficient for my own power needs including Heating and cooking and clothes drying and whatever else we come up with now that takes a lot of power I have a big solar array that I have built in the backyard over the last few years but I need even more battery capacity to store that energy for night and cloudy weather I just finished putting together this brand new eg4 battery rack this is over 30 kilowatt hours inside the cabinet is six batteries each battery 5.12 kilowatt hours now in this video I'm going to show the assembly putting it all together updating the firmware which man that was a big task for me because I'm not good with computers but I'll walk you through it one of the parts of this build that I'm most proud of is adding a fuse in here so that all the wires that exit the cabinet are already protected here we go [Music] one of my favorite features of these cabinets from signature solar there is a locking handle on here and I need that because I've got a couple of kids that love to come out here 's my son who's only two years old figuring out how to open this cabinet so they are clever little kids [Music] okay foreign solar's website you'll find a few different versions of battery cabinets this one is the sixth slot so it can fit six batteries up to 30 kilowatt hours this is the pre-made version so it comes with a set of casters and it's already assembled and ready to go I think this is worth the little bit extra money that they charge for it because if you buy the other version which is flat packed it does not come with a bottom plate and it does not come with the casters uh now I don't know about you guys but I want to make sure that mice will never get inside the cabinet and chew on those wires without me noticing so I like the idea of that bottom plate being on there the casters came inside they were zip tied to the rails there was also a bag of Hardware this has the mounting hardware for the casters it has some wire and it has a couple of the screws casters are on and screwed in place everything's tightened down [Music] we've got a key hanging on there and they've now added plastic covers over the bus bars the original version did not have that I've got a little extra tape this is where the casters were taped on there well the new bus bars are looking pretty nice inside here so they've added heat shrink in between the bolts we still have four large bolts for connecting up uh to the inverters and charge controllers we still have those red standoffs inside there those red standoffs are what isolate the metal of the bus bar from the metal cabinet so that means that this screw is part of the standoff you don't take that one off this will go to battery number one so the original bus Bars were solid copper and they had tapped the copper so you were threading right into the copper it looks like they have added a clinching nut on the back side which is awesome because now you'll be threading into steel threads and not the copper threads and I just finished putting all six batteries inside now they look good except that not all of these holes line up quite right uh now I don't live in an earthquake zone so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to move the nuts around I'm going to try to get at least one screw in each side if I can't then I'm going to Mark out where the nut is and I'm going to drill a new hole in the little flange here so I use this silver marker to mark on the black rails about where the holes are lined up and now we'll move a couple of these and as you can see it needs to move up one and down here we need to move one down okay and same on this side I got one in each side as a minimum so hey I'm good with that let's move on I'd like to do one thing that's a little custom for this setup I'd like to add a class T fuse now this is just a class T fuse holder this one happens to be from Blue C I've also used Magnum energy in the past and really I'm happy with both of them I just wanted to try a different brand on this setup now why add a fuse to this setup after all all these batteries they have a circuit breaker on them when I have all six batteries inside this cabinet they're capable of 600 amps continuous now that would exceed the rating of this four Ott wire that I'll be using I don't want to have any part of my circuit without over current protection and that four out wire needs over current protection now this is a class T fuse holder and I've been using class T fuses for quite a while because they have such a high intro option rating IR rating so that would be for short circuit Interruption these are capable of a lot of amps discharge so you got to be really careful once I have the fuse holder installed I can put on a fuse that is appropriately sized for the four out wire in this case I'll be screwing it up to the underside of this cabinet which is very thin sheet metal so how do we go about attaching it well I'm going to use rib nuts foreign [Music] here's the tools [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you and at the top you can't even see the top of the screw on here really well as you can see I can move the whole cabinet if I pull on that fuse block now that we have the fuse holder mounted in the ceiling I need a jumper to go from the fuse holder down to this positive bus bar so let's put our Square on here I'm going to go a little bit long to start with because I can always cut it a little bit shorter later so I'll go eight inches at the top and then down the side let's snag two of those screws so maybe uh that'll be five inches let's go five inches on the side so we've got a total then of 13 inches I bought this nice big copper bar on eBay and it is one inch by quarter inch so this should be plenty all right so here's our bar this is eight inches that's the middle of where we want our Bend and then an additional five inches and we'll get our cut right here so let's uh see what we can do to bend this so I've never tried this before but I have a two inch galvanized pipe taped on my Vise and a wood block let's give this a shot and see if we can make a nice gradual Bend [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] I went just a hair too far with it but overall I actually think that worked out a lot better than I thought it's sitting flush so we haven't given it a twist so that yeah I'd say that was a pretty good success I just need to bend it out a little bit more and then I can Mark and drill awesome [Music] well I've got my holes drilled and I sanded down the bus bar here's one of the screws that came with the server rack cabinet and it fits in but I noticed that it's just not long enough it's not going to get a good bite on the threads so I need to find another bolt that's a little bit longer and I always use this little thread gauge and it's an M8 by 1.25 and in my collection of things I was able to find a couple of M8 by 1.25 these ones so these bolts have a serrated flange head on them which means they don't require an additional lock washer and when I fit through that should be plenty of thread bite into my into the back so let's go over and try that out [Music] foreign so if you can see there we've got threads coming out the back of the nut all right so now that we know that this works I'm going to take it off again and we'll put some heat shrink on this [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] foreign is to wire these batteries over to the bus bars each battery came with a positive and negative wire we don't want to block the circuit breaker with it so I'm going to bring each wire in from the side these screws are a Phillips 3 and this is a Phillips number two right now this is still kind of loose in here so that I can adjust the position of the wire we want to make sure that the wire is not stressed and there's no real sharp bends to it I'm going to go back and tighten all of these with a ratchet and socket after I get all of them in place so we're running this jumper wire and when it comes down over to this spot I'm going to remove this tab right here to make room so we just bend that over oh and it broke off there it is so they just break off now when I bring this in it'll land right there on that spot foreign all these are wired and torqued down and I covered the terminals so we're ready to put a charge on this so I'm going to turn these on one at a time and check that they're all like two lights on the state of charge yep so we got two lights there we'll turn that off so foreign there we go all of them except for this one which was probably on the workbench and I've got the charger rolling and when these ones get a little bit higher then I'll turn on the last one foreign right here is where I'm going to mount the main positive fuse for this entire battery cabinet and this is the class T fuse that I'll be using this is model jjn-400 so it's a class T fuse and over here are the rating on it you can see 160 volts DC direct current and 20ka so that is 20 000 amps short circuit Interruption rating now why is that important basically when you're working with lithium batteries like this they're capable of discharging thousands of amps in a short circuit situation so that'd be a short circuit between the positive and the negative side so for example if I have the four wires running out of the cable and something catastrophic happened and they had a main short then thousands of amps could be traveling well some fuses just aren't capable of quilting that and this one is foreign I think I finally figured out how to update the firmware on the batteries now signature solar does have some good videos on how to do it but I'm not very good with computers so it took me a while to figure out first thing this yellow cable that I'm using well this is not the original cable that comes with the batteries the cable that comes with the batteries can only read the information I needed to add signature solar for this cable which can read and write information onto the batteries we'll check that all the switches are down and plug it in it doesn't matter which port and then we'll turn on the circuit breaker this is called BMS test and this is the free software download on signature solar's website and this is when it first opens up now right here it says com5 I've already configured that so once you have the right com Port we can move on to the next screen we'll go to battery info now here's another thing that was confusing to me at first clear the sequence press zero and then add address to the sequence and now just wait now as you can see it populated but the first time that I was trying to do this it took like 10 minutes so I don't know why it's doing it so much faster now but that originally took a long time to populate so now we've got all our info and now at the very top we'll move over to program upgrade first thing you to do is get boot info oh actually I screwed that up so right now it's still on address one we need to actually change that to address zero and then get boot info so right there we have two zero seven that tells us which firmware to use over here on the right says load upgrade program now I've already selected this but this is uh the zip files that you'll have to download and unzip so it says here 48 volt 48 24 and 24. well we have a 48 volt so which one of these do we use well we use the one that says 207 not 205 that's why we had to check it with that boot info earlier and then we click open so now we'll upgrade start and this takes a few minutes but there's going to be a little bar here that tells us how it's doing there we go starting to go so we have to do this one at a time the batteries are all with the dip switches down so every address on each battery is zero which is why we have to keep retelling the computer zero for the address none of the batteries are connected with the Communication cable that was something else I was screwing up at first I had them interconnected we have to update the firmware with each one individually then we'll be able to reset the addresses and connect them with the uh the little data cables so I screwed all this up it took me like a week to figure out all these details but hopefully between this video and the ones that signature solar puts out you guys can do it very quickly and when this software is done upgrading the green bar is all the way across and down at the bottom of the screen it says upgrade successful now we can move on to the next one again I had to I had to take off all these interconnecting data cables so we'll shut this off we move this wire down to the next battery turn on the next one and again all these dip switches have to be down to do the firmware update now all of these batteries have updated firmware so before I connect up these communication wires I have to reset the dip switches the top one is going to be all down and then the next one I believe is down down up down and what I'm doing is I'm following the manual which you can download on signature solar's website and it's showing us on on on on now the the confusing part is that on is actually down so off up and on is down Okay so we've got uh module one is down down down down it says address one is reserved for inverter so we'll skip that then down down up down the next one down down up up so let's do that so top second third go I'm just using a little screwdriver which makes that easier up and up okay the important thing is that the top one is all down and then there's no repeats beyond that connect up our cables now when connecting these cables the uh the actual connection here doesn't matter like I could jump from this one to this one I just do it in a pattern because I think it looks better all of our batteries are in we've got as many screws in as we can holding it to the rail we've got our communication wires we've got our addresses we've updated the firmware I've got to get this cover on but I am waiting until we connect it up to the bat to the inverter and we've also got our fuse in place it has been a long process to figure out all of this firmware updating and dip switches but I think we got there in the end uh we will find out in some future videos when I try to get communication between the battery and the inverter and then we'll actually know if I did all this correctly or if I screwed something up well products are always getting updated over time and unfortunately this particular project of getting all the batteries in and updating the firmware and everything has taken so long in fact over a month to do this project that in the meantime signature solar has come out with a brand new battery that has a new firmware it's a version with a screen and a new firmware that can communicate with a lot of different inverters so if you want to save yourself some hassle get that one instead I'll leave a link in the description below to both of them this one is still cheaper and still available but if you're willing to spend a little bit more money you can save yourself a headache and not have to update the firmware thanks a lot for watching Everybody if you enjoy these videos please like subscribe comment and share

Channel: DavidPoz

Views: 94,481

Keywords: EG4, signature solar, firmware, battery bank, battery, lithium, lifepo4, class-t fuse, fuse, home, back up, off grid, off-grid, solar, diy, how to, how-to, rack, cabinet, 30kwh, kwh, capacity, cheap, guide, lifepower4, safety, build, assembly

Id: A0bqClj5urg

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 08 2022