Solar PV battery options

Good job! What will be your total kWh capacity when all the batteries are installed? Are you willing to part with that Puredrive battery yet?

Also, what monitoring app are your using? I've a Solis inverter as well, but the app I was given is nowhere near as fancy as that.

That app is the Solis app. There are 2 Solis apps available Solus Cloud and Solis Home. That one is the Solis Cloud app.

Virtually all the inverters have an app of some description to show you the telemetry of what's happening in the system.

All of what you say is possible, without having to write sophisticated custom automation. You can set charge/discharge times on your battery so that it only discharges during day time rates, where it's needed of course. meaning that you can charge it via the solar panels from say 8am to 7pm, and then when it's dark, the battery will keep you going until night time rates kick in (midnight in the summer)

@THE ALM You really should use the default option to specify the battery type. This is really for Lead Acid's, for the inverter to "guesstimate" the SOC%. You really want the inverter being dumb and learning everything from the BMS of the battery modules.

No default option selectable, with the Solis manual and battery manufacturer both stating to select 'User Defined' and input battery parameters.

I'll chase up when the battery will be added to the Solis firmware but all seems to be working well with both the battery and inverter displaying the same readings.

My apologies, I meant User Defined. That is generally for Lead Acid's when you don't have a BMS. The power curve of Lead Acid's is quite different to LiFePO4's.

I expect you have connected the BMS to the inverter, but it will be doing absolutely nothing.

The BMS should tell the inverter about the voltages and the cell capacities.

Did you try various battery types on the inverter, to see if one worked ?

I'm only saying all of this because I started with a HEYO / DALY BMS. The inverter was all over the place with guessing the SOC%. I was really only getting to use about 70% of the batteries capacity. The Seplos changed everything

I'll keep an eye on it and check the readings on the inverter and the battery bms to see how they tally and see what battery capacity we are seeing with the charging and discharging.

Sent a request to Solis to see what they say.

Just ordered 4 of these Seplos kits but the BMS is on back order so hopefully not too much of a delay.

Got fed up waiting on supplies of off the shelf batteries so decided to go down this route after watching Andy's experiences on the Off-Grid Garage YouTube channel.

Actually I just watched his video of assembling the 48V kit

https://youtu.be/igO3Q8lK7H0

Looks like a well made kit, but I really hope they've improved the packaging.

The kit he got didn't have any manual or documents and the bag of screws wasn't properly held in place and ripped open, spilling all over the inside of the kit

I need to watch the follow up video to see how he got past the BMS communication issues

Good to hear, let us know how you get on with the kits, I'm considering getting a couple myself

Seplos are a bit of a weird company it seems. They seem to be trying to act something like a parts manufacturer, and get local distributors to handle the customer support side of things

They seem to get dragged into being a consumer focused company though, and I think they're still building up the support side of things to match

In general their stuff does seem good, I like how they're trying to build in some features for DIY users that you'd only see on the expensive batteries

How big is the battery you're building if you need four of these?

Jaysis, you going off grid?

That better be paired with at least 30kw of panels 🤣

Okay, time to start an argument 😁

PWOD store vs OYE store, what's your opinion?

They each seem to have people saying they're great and folks saying they're scam artists

From what I can tell PWOD is more expensive generally, so maybe that's a sign that they're ripping people off or a sign that OYE is selling second rate garbage.

Kind of hard to tell when both their stores look mostly the same and they're selling generic looking blue lithium cells

What has your experience been?