We recently had a customer swap from lead to lithium to power their Sunny Island 6048s. They are grid connected and are no longer able to export to the grid, though they were able with lead.
We advise customers to reduce charge voltage to 3.5v/cell to extend battery life, and we set end charge voltage to 3.5v in the BMS. I believe we missed that with this pack, so we're having the customer check/change if necessary.
Aside from that, does anyone have experience with grid export using SMAs?
We have quite a few customers with SMA grid tied systems so hoping they might be able to help here.
One issue that came up recently was some firmware bugs in the SMA where it has problems communicating with the BMS. It turned out he thought he had the latest update, but the SMA did not show it properly and after updating his BMS problems went away.
@Michael Gillispie
@Fred Egelston
The sun island capability for grid feeding is very limited. The system has to be setup as a battery backup ups rather than an off grid system.
Rick is correct re firmware causing issues too. Try updating to 7.304 firmware on the master.
Also ensure the inverters are set to 232.08 grid feed and you can manually try to connect to the grid using setting 560 - start. You may need to disable 232.41 too
Thanks all, will keep you updated.
Since we're talking SMA, I'm going to follow this up with some comms issues with another system.
2Q BMS, 1.4 and 1.6.3 FW. We verified the battery communicated with our shop system (2x 6048-US-10, 7.304 FW, 10/2016 manufacture) using CANS = 2.
We can't get the battery to communicate with the "new" system, also 2x 6048-US-10 (10/2017 manuf). They're on 7.304 FW that I just updated. We've tried CANS of 1, 2 and 3 with no luck. This was a prebuilt system so we only updated the battery. I've flashed the inverter firmware twice with no luck. It's not connected to grid, PV only. Any ideas?
Hi Trevor,
Did you go through the quick start guide when you setup and select the Li-bms-ext setting on the Sunny Islands? Also have you adjusted the parameters on the BMS to match to the SMA bin file.
Hey Fred, yes we set it to Li-bmx-ext. I erased and reflashed the update.bin file on the master and it's working now.
Haven't heard back regarding the grid export but I did forward the above recommendations to the customer.
