OK,( let's install this system!

[Moxi]

Yes thats what I have for my EV6 order first quarter of 23 and I ordered mine back in April but happy to wait as the test drive was AWSOME!

Moxi

[SafetyThird]

Yesterday a pallet turned up unexpectedly. My remaining three pylontech batteries, not expected for a few more weeks, which was lovely. Sent to completely the wrong address/postcode but the driver had my number and we're on google maps and an hour later he turned up.

Now, if the brackets and cables that were supposed to be in the post would turn up, I could get them all mounted.

My electrician says he'll have a day during the second half of August to do the connection/install so we're getting closer now.

[SafetyThird]

Latest goings on. Finally, after nearly two months, I have the correct cable to connect the two pairs of batteries as the supplied short cable won't reach. I've now connected everything together on the battery side and thought I'd post a couple of pics to get someone to cast an eye over it to see if I've missed anything. It's not particularly neat, mainly because next year we're having a small extension built on the front of the house, part of which will be a storage room and the AC inverter and batteries will be going in there so I'm not cutting the inverter cables to exact length until then.

I have to say, dealing with Big Green Beard has been difficult from the start. In the beginning they shipped my order to someone else leading to a two month delay in getting my batteries. Every time I've tried to get a missing part it's taken weeks and getting a reply to emails or phone messages has been like pulling teeth. I'm still waiting for a reply to an email I sent a week ago querying if the data cable included with the inverter is equivalent to the one that didn't get sent with the long cables that go from the inverter to the battery.

I'm still a couple of weeks away from having the electrician come and connect to the mains so I'll post photos of the dip switch settings on the inverter as well to see if anyone else can confirm I've got it all set correctly.

[SafetyThird]

Exciting updates. Earlier in the week I picked up a hydraulic cable crimpe from Amazon and made up the necessary battery cables to connect via the fused disconnect. today I obtained the installer code for the Luxpower app, got that registered, powered up the batteries and the inverter came online. No sparks, no warnings other than one that says the grid is not connected. Now I just have to wait for the sparky to connect to the consumer unit.

One small step at a time.....

[Fintray]

Nearly there.

[SafetyThird]

At last. Connected yesterday and now live. Battery ran down overnight despite me telling it to charge on our E7 hours. Turns out that the Luxpower app didn't actually make the settings stick. This morning I set them from the online portal instead and that seems to have done the trick. The sun is shining and we're getting close to fully charged.

There's a bit of cable tidying to do, the installation of a separate earth from when we're on the UPS and I've got to install some extra CT clamps for the Eddi and figure out how to get the settings correct for it all to play nicely together.

What I haven't figured out, and I'm not sure there's a simple way to do it, is whether to do overnight charging vs next day using the solar. I guess I'd need to look at the weather forecast and make that decision personally then either enable or disable the overnight charging. Does anyone know of a more automated way to do this?

[Joeboy]

Congratulations! I look at forecast for the coming days and adjust my behaviour/charging. If I get caught out (charged overnight and sunny the next day) I dump the battery into the HWT & EV and let it fill up again off the PV. If it goes the other way luckily there is enough PV in place that it can catch up quite quickly in almost any conditions. Don't personally know of an automated way but would be interested to hear of any?

[SafetyThird]

Thanks Joe, looks like manually checking is the way forward at least for now. I'm looking at setting up Home Assistant to bring together the various monitoring setups into a single dashboard and that might give an opportunity to look at further automation with integrated weather forecasts.

[Joeboy]

Thanks Joe, looks like manually checking is the way forward at least for now. I'm looking at setting up Home Assistant to bring together the various monitoring setups into a single dashboard and that might give an opportunity to look at further automation with integrated weather forecasts.

I look forward to reading about that (& learning). I use Hive and smartplugs along with a switchbot to control my various home devices from wherever I am. It's handy as I can run up for 2 hours or 1 hour or just on. All still manual though...

[Oldgreybeard]

Thanks Joe, looks like manually checking is the way forward at least for now. I'm looking at setting up Home Assistant to bring together the various monitoring setups into a single dashboard and that might give an opportunity to look at further automation with integrated weather forecasts.

That's pretty much what I've done, made up a simple Home Assistant dashboard with gauges with coloured sectors (for my wife to interpret really) plus two local weather forecast panels, one for the next 12 hours, one for the next week. I use this dash to look ahead and see whether to leave the battery system in time-of-use mode, where it can charge overnight at the cheap rate if it needs to, or having it run in auto more, where it's effectively off-grid and will use the battery all night.

Not hard to set the dashboard up, but I played around a bit to try and get the colours of the gauge sectors to be meaningful. The idea was so my wife could see when it was OK to turn things on, if the gauges were all in the green, or mostly green with one or two amber:

Home Assistant.jpg (69.75 KiB) Viewed 1505 times