Settings for EG4 LIFEPO4 + Growatt 5000ES Inverter (Grid backed up self consumption configuration)

okay guys we're going to go over the standard configuration for a stack inverter and lithium battery setting uh we've got a lot of users that are starting to realize you know really to achieve whole house backup and you know cut your power bills much as possible and also if you don't want to interconnect with the grid sell back to the grid maybe they've made that process hard for you um just creating a whole house system that can interface with the grid we want to walk through really what we think are the optimum ways to set that up and just give you a background on some of the logic behind these settings there's a bunch of settings we you know everyone has a reason for it we're going to try to explain that here and tell you what we're really recommending you can deviate but we really tend to support this being the structure for people trying to do what's called self-consumption you want to basically run off grid and have the grid as a backup generator so if you if you run out of power on your off grid system it'll just pass the grid through and let you run off the grid like you were before until the sun comes back up and recharges your battery bag so this all comes down to the settings screen over here and if we move in on the settings screen and we hold down on enter we're going to have different settings here and i've already gone ahead and changed my settings so i'm going to walk through what i've done setting one i've set to sbu okay to change the setting you hold down enter and then it starts flashing so it's normally set to utl now utl is not what i think we want here because that basically always puts the utility first on ac input we don't want to be going to utility first we want to basically run off our solar our batteries and then our utility last and that's really what you need to achieve your target here if you're trying to build a self-consumption system so the next setting is your charge limit this charge limit becomes irrelevant with the lithium setting on the batteries so it can be changed up and down if you have a uh if you have a lead battery bank that we don't sell but uh if if you're running off a communication which full disclosure we're using this in the communication mode here with the eg4 batteries so uh we would just leave that alone the setting 03 is your ups it determines your quality of power that the inverter will accept now if you're using the grid and you want to shift back to the grid's going to be a relatively high quality source of power a generator would not quite be so high so that's why there's an option for a generator input i don't like giving a generator a wider berth voltage-wise because you are passing through dirty power to your house and ruining your electronics and it's just not that's just not an acceptable strategy for most anybody that i work with so we're going to leave that at ups keep our standards high now um 04 on the setting we're going to determine a power saving mode now that is if you have if you want the inverter basically go to sleep if there's no loads now if you're running a house or a cabin or anything that has a refrigerator this is a garbage feature and i leave it disabled now if you find that it just makes your world work great then by all means but it's irrelevant don't put it in that mode because if you ever stop using power and you're running a house the inverse will essentially boot down and be like pulsing 37 volts to look for a load and that's not good for anything really so i would leave that off now your battery type being set this is where we're setting it for lithium we did a video uh previously you can see in our links uh how to set lithium features we have gone ahead and set this lithium communication up between our batteries so that's been configured now that's going to govern some other settings we're coming across and we'll get to those later the next settings are your two over current and over temperature overrides so basically with setting six if you overload the inverter and you were to set this to enabled instead of disabled it would restart immediately after the inverse been overloaded now i don't like that because of i think typically things overload for a reason and it's very likely what you're going to end up with is a cycle where something's overloaded 50 times in an hour period and kept turning itself on and off and it's just going to damage your inverter you're asking for it there i always try to tell people to set this to disabled it's just not worth it unless you have an absolute reason that you think it's important please disable that we got a temperature override here it's the same story dear really think the temperature is going to change 10 degrees in the next 30 seconds probably not so let's leave that one alone as well if your situation is overheating it needs attention so i tend to say leave this both disabled restarting automatically sounds cool but in practice it's a bad idea all right now 08 your voltage there's a lot of different voltages look at the manual right here we have 230 220 240 208 obviously most people are using this for 240. it's gonna so setting that to 240 is a good idea and then if we move on we have our output frequency we should obviously set that to 60 hertz let's just head back to that setting 60 hertz i mean unless you've got 50 hertz appliances which nobody has the united states so um number 10 doesn't matter to lithium batteries it's about lead and we don't have that problem uh number 11 is actually irrelevant to lithium program can't be set up number 11 is your ac input current max it does not set itself up with that it's designed for utility charging at that point and utility charging limits uh with lithium batteries uh they're not enabled so this now the goal here is to never charge from the utility we don't want the utility to charge the batteries we want the utility to pass through the inverters and power the house okay so with setting 12 we're going to set when the battery goes back to ac now the lowest number allowed here is 30 percent this lets you discharge the batteries by 70 percent and then shift back to the grid so that's probably the hardest you could run them um i tend to recommend doing actually because the battery life should still be towards 20 years of cycle life you know 7 000 cycles even if you down go down to 20 so 30 is perfectly fine with me and the next thing is the 95 percent that is set on your ac to battery uh we can set that back any level we want the base this determines when you go back from the grid to your off-grid system again now i wouldn't wait till it's 95 i think that's counterproductive i think that when you're starting to come back up from 30 percent and you go to uh let's just say 45 i mean obviously your battery's on the climb at that point you may as well just get back off the grid so i would do this 30 to 45 percent because it's already gone up 15 so we're headed the right direction now our next setting which is 14 is your charger source priority this is important so i would go ahead and say only solar we don't want it to charge from the grid we want to transfer to the grid and from the grid that's your ac source for pass-through this is your charging don't ever charge from the grid it's a waste of money it's it's not a good idea and so you can set it that way if you want but at the end of the day you're buying power from the grid so that way the next day when the solar comes up you won't be able to buy you you won't be able to charge the batteries at all because you're already recharging with the grid so it's counter productive and we've got uh setting 15 all these annoying buzzers you've been hearing you can turn those off of setting 15. setting 16 is your backlight control you can determine when it turns on or off that's you guys call it's aesthetics uh 17 is about if you want to beep when the primary source is interrupted 18 again is an overload bypass meaning when you overload it the system if you were off grid it would transfer to to the the ac input from the power grid that may be a useful setting if you wanted to be able to leave the house and have this if the system overloaded for some reason you haven't thought about some heavy load that was going to start it could charge it could transfer back to the grid when the inverse overload so that's i think the right way to do a bypass to do a reboot don't do a reboot just off the on just off the inverter because scientifically it's very likely that the inverter just has a problem and so you're just repeating that so i would go ahead and enable 18 honestly uh 19 you're bulk charging voltage is irrelevant this inverter will not run on voltage anymore so there's no point changing this your float charging voltage is irrelevant your next point is your cut this is your cut out voltage now notice it's a percentage not a voltage now one of these things technically we said we could go back to the grid at 30 percent as our minimum if you drive this 20 down you in theory could actually change your go back to grid voltage back to grid percentage to be even lower you just cannot this is a dependent setting you cannot set this shutoff voltage shutoff percentage higher than the other you know back to grid setup so 21 and 12 are related and 21 always must be lower than 12 that's why we couldn't go below 30 on 12 because of 21 at the time was set at 20 by default so if you wanted to do 12 at 10 we could cut this down to 5 [Music] and we'll demonstrate this it took that let's go back to 12 we'll come back to 21 a second and what do you know we dropped this to 10 and it took it because it's dependent on 21 so if you if you want to if you want to push the limits down on 12 you have to set 21 lower first that's important there now 28 is your address now we just skipped over 23. 23 didn't appear the reason why 23 didn't appear is we're not in standby mode that sets up your paralleling which is going to be a separate video and you have to do that when the inverse in standby mode the address for setting the inverter is irrelevant you can change your time if you want to set a clock okay 7 15 20 21 when we're doing this video if you wanted to have modes chains over time which is something we don't provide technical support for you in theory can uh it's just not something that we have set up you could change all your clock and base a lot of programs off of that now battery equalization is a setting on 43 it's utterly irrelevant because if there's no equalization on lithium so even if you tried to enable it it wouldn't do anything battery equalization voltage is irrelevant because equalization is disabled and then if you head down to setting 49 this is where you can get all science fiction if you want and that is your utility charging time this is if you want to have like time amounts where the utility can charge and uh again that's this kind of going a little too complicated for the standard user it's not typically relevant people just want to be able to pass through to the grid uh the whole time structure is not something we've really gotten into support at this point and then um your ac output time is also a limit that is set based on time-based logic it's not something that we're going to walk you guys through and that's really it that's all the settings so that should give you guys a good basis to go with for setting up one of these to do what most people are trying to do which is just get the inverters to run off grid and have the grid as a backup power source

Channel: Signature Solar

Views: 113,948

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Id: vUWxTbaWbS0

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021