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Thursday, 30 January 2025

PV bloopers by the "professionals" - Part 2

Having installed an Economy 7 (2 import and one export tariff) meter I arranged for an additional 3.6kWh Dyness battery to be added to my existing two battery array. Here's the day of the install:


The irregular State Of Charge % trace bothered me but I thought it might take some time for the batteries to "balance". Anyway, I got up in the middle of the night when the inverter was due to draw cheap electricity from the grid and this is what I found:


At around 1AM, when the inverter started its battery charging cycle, the load changed from around 0.2kW to around 1.4kW.  Something was very wrong. After researching the configuration of the battery stack, I discovered that the installer had configured them as 2 Master units and 1 Slave unit instead of 1 Master and 2 Slave units. This I fixed.

I dread to think of the consequences if this error had gone unchecked. Could the inverter or batteries have been irreparably damaged? Would there have been a significant financial penalty? I've resolved to always check what the "professionals" have done to the best of my ability. 0 for 2 (in American parlance) isn't very reassuring.

PV bloopers by the "professionals" - Part 1

I decided my solar panel setup could do with the help of an additional battery together with changing my tariff to Economy 7 (cheap nighttime electricity). I'd been drawing from the grid at night for a short time to get a feel for how it would all work. A meter change was required and an appointment was booked for the installation. 

Some time around 6 PM on the day of installation I went to my SolisCloud app. To my horror this is what I found:



Massive movements, something wasn't right. When I checked the meter I found that a clamp on one of the leads that reports import/export volumes to the system had been replaced the wrong way round! Put the clamp back the way it should be and, voila, back to normal:
Very disappointing. I dread to think of the consequences if I hadn't spotted the issue fairly quickly.