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I‘ve got the same problem. I‘m guessing Solar.SOS is only for Businesses :-/ All I want is to activate the Modbus … which is „hidden“ behind the Technician account. Gonna have to ask the PV company that did the installation I guess, or does anyone know another trick?

I'm thinking of trying a password cracker like hydra. Might take forever tho

@@gregorycatellani2182 you are right... I wanted to set up digital outputs to connect the smart grid inputs of my heat pump. I asked my installer for the password. It is my right as customer to use the product I bought completely

Yes. however you have to consider whether a larger battery like 20kWh will get enough charge from a 5kW single phase solar install, especially over the winter months. Of course, with Time of Use tariffs like Midday Saver from Synergy you can supplement solar charging with off-peak grid battery charging.

@solar4ever843 that was my thought but I don't think there is any way around it in WA with 5kw inverter limit, why can't bigger inverter with export turned off be used

Yes, had an issue with the hosting company server but they fixed it, so all good now. Thanks

Glad you enjoyed it

Safety issues...? None whatsoever. Without the backup box the inverter will simply shut down under the usual 'anti-islanding' requirements. This will protect electrical workers and I can confirm that the Huawei inverters definitely do this, as do every other inverter I've ever worked with here in Australia. With the Huawei backup box installed, it 'islands' so that the selected backup circuits are provided with battery/solar power during the grid outage via a separate cable to the 'backup main switch' while the usual AC supply to/from the main switch is disconnected.

@solar4ever843 yeah that make sense and what I expected. speaking to the company that are due to do the install the state body seem to be excessively cautious. It doesn't seem to have been borne out by incidents but I haven't seen it myself. Hears hoping it gets sorted.

Just to clarify you are getting 3 x 3.68 L1 (not M1) single phase inverters, each with a 5kWh battery and backup box along with 9 x 505W panels? Strange way to do it instead of 1 x 10kW three phase inverter, 1 x 15kWh battery and so the only reason I can think of is the importance of backup to you. 3 x backup boxes 1 per phase with a 5kW potential for backup on each instead of the paltry 3.3kW on a single phase with the larger inverter. The 5kWh battery can only output max 2.5kW , so you will be getting 2.5kW (10A) from each box, per phase. Not enough to power an entire house but certainly ample for essential loads like lights, outlets, garage door etc. If you increased each battery to 10kWh then you would get 5kW (20A) power from each battery which would certainly be better, but of course, it would not backup anything in your home running on three phase. There is a new single phase backup box coming from Huawei called Smartguard. I have no experience with it yet but I don't think it will get around the battery output limit of 2.5kW that you will have.

Q2 is racing towards us without any signs of SolarEdge's DC charger's imminent arrival.

Very much old school, which I hugely appreciated, Sungrow had a substantial printed book of inverter datasheets as a give away. It included the, as yet to be released or CEC Approved, new 3 phase hybrid line-up. There was also talk of another larger battery that would work alongside the existing SBR.

Hi, thanks. Always good to hear things from the perspective of engineers. I'm sure people will appreciate your insight into the potential for inverter damage if they connect inappropriate loads (like motors) to the backup circuits. We always recommend lights and standard GPOs only with no heavy draw appliances connected.

Hi. If you Google "Solar4Ever Huawei Review" and go halfway down that webpage you'll see the Huawei B1 backup box open with the components inside. This is a little bit of a 'weird' box though as it is 3 phase going in from the inverter and out to the loads/boards whilst the grid is operating but when the grid fails this backup box only supports the backup circuits on a single phase. There are two wires connecting the backup box to the inverter for comms. (Connections are shown on a linked PDF document near the end of the review page described above).

That’s excellent information thanks very much. What I was trying to figure was, do you need communication between back up box in order to use capacity from battery if grid goes down. From what I gather it is just to control a simple relay. I have a trip board which I can switch off individual loads so I don’t need a backup box to prevent overload of Inverter. Do you think this set up would work? for some reason when I tried this first changing settings to off grid mode. The inverter stayed on but didn’t switch to outfeed any power from remaining battery.?

If there's only one battery, it is plugged into the 'Master' inverter and receives it's charge from the panels connected to the Master inverter. However, if the Slave has surplus power, the Master can use that surplus power to charge the battery. How it does that can be a little baffling to some people, but here goes... The surplus power from the Slave is detected by the consumption meter connected to the Master. This power is measured as it flows to the electricity meter. The Master simultaneously draws an equal amount of power from the grid to charge the battery. The electricity 'net' meter cancels out the export of the Slave and the import of the Master. In actual fact it is a bit more complex that that because this can still work even if the system is export limited so that in theory there would be no 'surplus' from the Slave as the Master can 'allow' the Slave to produce more power than the 'export limit' simply so it can do this power exchange. By the way, the practice of 'exchanging power with the grid' as described above is actually very mundane. Three phase inverters, with or without a battery, are doing it all the time.

The inverter will shut down. The backup box is primarily a safety device to protect line workers from being electrocuted. It's first job is to respond to the inverter detecting the frequency and voltage changes of a grid outage and shut down the normal solar supply to the house/switchboard/grid. The official term for this is 'anti-islanding'. In the video I show the solar AC cable coming from the inverter going into and then out of the backup box instead of it running directly from the inverter to the switchboard. This is so it can perform the shut-down. After it has done that shut-down, it then channels battery/solar power to the secondary backup cable that runs to the backup main switch and from there to power any loads on the backup circuits only. Without a backup box there is no safety device to protect line workers, so the inverter has to shut down. Having said that, there are inverters that can send power to an RCD protected 10A GPO usually installed by the inverter, during a blackout without any backup box. Fronius GEN24 inverters have this (called PV Point) and some of the earlier SMA inverters had this feature too. It simply means that the 'anti-islanding' hardware/firmware is built into the inverter to power whatever is plugged into that single outlet.

I'm sorry but this sounds like you need to get in touch with your supplier or the manufacturer help desk.

That depends on the inverter. Some three phase inverters provide backup across all three phases whereas others deliver backup only on one phase. Personally, for small 3 phase inverters (e.g. 5kW/6kW) I think backup delivered to one phase only makes a lot of sense, but for larger 10/15/25kW inverters full three phase backup is better. It's all to do with how three phase inverters evenly split their power output across the phases.

Yes, very common. The primary reason is to check if the system is working correctly. I have about 1,000 x Huawei, Fronius, Sungrow, Growatt, Goodwe etc systems that I can monitor but mostly I am responding to alarms that notify me when there's a problem. We can also upload firmware upgrades remotely. Recently I had a customer who had one of his strings of panels go down. The panels were all fitted with optimisers so I remotely re-booted the optimisers, and the system worked fine. So it's a lot more the accessing client data, and anyway...it's just solar data, probably the least interesting thing imaginable as it is so entirely predictable.

'Total Consumption' means exactly that. The sum of consumed power whether it comes from the grid, from the battery, the PV. Battery discharge is again, just that. If the battery is setup to discharge to loads and to the grid this line will simply show the sum of all discharge. "PV is charging battery"...why should there be a flow on to the grid? Depending on how the installation has been configured, it might say... Charge the battery with any available PV as a priority and then any surplus goes to loads in the house and grid or vice versa.

I'd be talking to the electrical distributor about meeting their legal obligations to provide power at the correct voltage. In Western Australia its 240V +/- 6% so no lower than 225.6V, but under AS3000:2018 it's 230V +10% or -6%, so 216V minimum, either way, 180V is far too low.

The inverter consumption meter, or smart meter. See this... solar4ever.com.au/Inverter_Smart_Meters.php

Hi, no idea. Comms might be an issue, but I've looked up an install manual for a Sunsynk hybrid inverter and it's got backup built-in so no external box required. I'd be checking on what happens if the inverter fails. Does it have a auto transfer switch or do you need to get your electrician to buy a manual one so the backup circuits get power if the inverter fails.

Apologies for the long delay in responding. Yes, 1 second is far to long to keep a PC alive so a UPS would be needed to bridge that gap.

Apologies for the long delay in responding. If you only have the inverter and a battery, and again, talking only with any authority about Huawei in Australia, then when the grid goes down, the inverter will shut off so you will have no power at all from panels or battery. The backup box is needed to provide power during an outage to essential loads. e.g. Max 5kW (21A) from the single phase B0 box of 3.33kW (13A) on a single phase for the existing B1 backup box for three phase hybrids.

I can't say I've noticed it.

No, or at least I've not found loads per phase. Grid voltages per phase, sure. It's a good one to ask Huawei. I'll do that next chance. Output from the panels/battery is always going to be evenly split across the 3 phases because that's how three phase inverters work, exchanging power with the grid via a bi-directional electricity meter so that high loads on one phase are netted out by exports to the meter on another phase.

@@solar4ever843 it would be interesting if we could see consumption from the house per phase, in case loads per phase could be optimized. On the other hand if grid export is netted out across phases then this is less important

Are you unable to login, or is it something else?

Judging by their daily loads over Summer I'd say probably nothing much more than a 5.5kW split, because their patterns of consumption that look like aircon use, aren't going above 1.5kW.

@@solar4ever843 Do you think you could run a ducted ac system during the day with a 10kw battery setup?

lol

Maximum self-consumption is the default setting for the battery so charge during the day and discharge at night is normal. Therefore, if that is not happening then your settings need to be adjusted by your installer or by Huawei. You have the Huawei solar support contact details for your country???

"what's to stop a person making their own changeover system, connected to the AC output." I don't know. If you do it, then please let me know how it went...assuming that you aren't breaking any electrical laws wherever you are. Fronius have a simple 'PV Point' option with their new hybrids (GEN24) that is no more than a single phase 10-12A RCD protected outlet directly wired to the inverter. It's intelligently controlled, has to be configured in firmware, so with Huawei having no such option apart from 'Off-grid mode' enabled for their backup box, I'm certainly intrigued to know if you get something like Fronius's PV Point to work with an outlet only. I'd try it myself but if it worked, then where do I stand with our status as a Huawei premium partner in Australia? Might not be a good look. Cheers Andrew

I am always careful about giving advice to people outside of Australia because manufacturers make different products for different markets and have different rules and regs to follow in each market. I think the best advice I can give you is to call Huawei support. It's free, 24x7 and the process is... (1) Call the number and explain that you want to talk to an engineer. (2) Have your inverter serial number and make sure your inverter is online on Fusionsolar so the engineer can examine it and make any changes remotely that you require. Here is the web page for Huawei Solar Support in the EU. solar.huawei.com/eu/services Cheers Andrew

Hi Simon, never heard any sound coming from a Huawei backup box that we have installed or my own, so either an installation error, perhaps cables not terminated well, or as you say a component inside failing. The contents of these boxes are really very standard electrical parts, nothing proprietary to Huawei. Leaving it turned off until it's checked seems a wise. Andrew

Thank you very much for coming back to me, really appreciate it.

Hi, Q1. STCs are limited to 133% oversize unless you connect a battery, in which case STCs are paid on whatever the manufacturer allows. e.g. Huawei, Sungrow, Growatt, say as long as the open circuit voltage of the string is under 600V d.c. then you can oversize to what you like. We've put 12kW of JinKo 475W panels on a 5kW inverter with STCs paid. It just depends on the electrical specifications of the panel. Q.2 Western Power and happy with it with a hybrid and battery, but not sure about a regular inverter with no battery. Can't see why not though if you are prepared to forgo STCs and manufacturer warranty. Q.3 The minimum battery size will be determined by the inverter. For instance Huawei say 5kWh minimum, Sungrow 9.6kWh minimum but Growatt is just 2.5kWh minimum with some of their hybrids. Q.4 DEBs is paid on inverter capacity. Over 5kW, no DEBs.

Missed your Q about AC coupling. Firstly, you don't AC Couple a battery to a standard inverter, you buy another inverter and that runs the battery. It's often quite hard to see this extra inverter because it's often inside the battery cabinet. Tesla Powerwall 2, Alpha Smile B3, Sonnen batterie, all have inverters inside the box. Alternatively there are specific battery inverters from Goodwe and Growatt that can be used to run the battery, and outside of WA people on single phase can use hybrid inverters as their battery inverter too. We can't. Anyway, you can't oversize a regular inverter beyond 133% if you want to claim any STCs. If you connect a battery, AC or DC coupled then you can, BUT, it's completely pointless doing a big oversize with an AC coupled battery because the inverter isn't charging the battery directly, so it's going to throttle what it pulls from the panels to it's maximum AC output..e.g. 5kW.

@@solar4ever843 Thanks Andrew, got it ;) Seems like oversized w DC coupled battery will work best... left of field question - can you install a hybrid inverter w battery but no solar, if you haven't already got solar, and add the solar later and claim the STCs then? Would hybrid inverters support this?

@@jonathandavis3090 Installing a hybrid with battery with no solar make sit an AC coupled battery which is fine. Adding panels later is all a matter of how quickly the Huawei inverters drop off the CEC approved list. Most manufacturers release new models every three to four years, and when the new model comes they are less inclined to pay CEC fees for ongoing registration of old models. For example, the 2018/2019 Huawei 'L' and 'M0" hybrids are no longer "approved" so no STCs are payable on extra panels on them, and I'm sure that by 2025 there will be new Huawei inverters with all sorts of new goodies and the current models will drop off within a year or two.

Hi, On our side of the World NetEco was closed some years ago and replaced by Fusionsolar. I also understand that politics have made things very tricky for USA and Huawei. There is a USA Huawei user who really knows his stuff and posts on Whirlpool Greentech forum. forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum/143?g=371 His user name there is 'basking in the sun' , forums.whirlpool.net.au/user/856152 Alternatively there is Huawei's own forum forum.huawei.com/enterprise/en/Digital-Power/forum/100027 There is also a worldwide support centre, 24x7 based in Romania which WE can access with an Australian phone number, but I don't know how you can reach them from the USA. If none of the above helps, let me know and I'll reach out to our Huawei Australian support team. Andrew

@@solar4ever843 I found him, he had the same issues so he wrote a Pi program to use modbus and I'm following in his footsteps.

@@gregalot200 That's great news.

Hi David Yes they are always live - otherwise the backup circuits would only work when the power went out which, obviously, isn't good. Basically during normal conditions the grid just flows straight to the backup circuits powering them, during an outage it changes so that the battery/inverter & panels feed them. We run a cable into the switchboard which is the ‘backup supply’. That goes into a circuit breaker labelled ‘Backup Supply main switch’. All the circuits that the client wants to back up are fed from that breaker, removing the feed from the ‘grid supply main switch’

The installer only needs to wire the backup box correctly and then activate 'Off-grid' in configuration settings.. www.solar4ever.com.au/pics/offgrid.jpg If your backup currently works from the battery when the grid goes down (you can test that by turning off your main switch) then it will also work directly from the panels if the battery is empty or off. In an off-grid scenario, yes the battery will be charged by the panels. I wouldn't refer to it as 'excess' PV power as there is never any such 'excess' in reality. The inverter entirely controls the panel output, pulling down only exactly what it needs for the battery, loads and export, subject, of course, to sunlight and available power.

@@solar4ever843 Brilliant - thanks for that Andrew

Hi Steve. 2022 has seen battery prices going in the wrong direction but hopefully next year will see things revert back at least to where they were before. Happy retirement !!

Panels don't ever produce anything more than the inverter instructs them to. So, if only 1kW is required, then 1kW is drawn down from the panels by the inverter. We are seeing this very clearly with export limiting becoming more commonplace. 10kW inverters, with 15kW of panels, in perfect solar production conditions might only be producing 2kW because house load might be 0.5kW and export limit of 1.5kW, means 2kW is all the inverter will extract from the panels.

Hi, yes you need the backup box if you want power to be supplied during a grid outage. The inverter and battery alone have no backup capability. Also, one of the points I make in this video is that the backup box works whether you have a battery or not. If you don't have a battery, but you have the backup box, then the backup circuits in the switchboard are energised from solar power alone (so long as there is enough sun).

I should have also made clear with my answer that I was referring to Huawei inverter, battery and backup box. Not all hybrid inverters need a backup box to provide backup. Sungrow, GE and Goodwe hybrids have the backup function built-in so in their case, all you need to purchase is the inverter and battery. Fronius, Growatt, Huawei, SolarEdge and most other hybrids require a backup box for backup of switchboard circuits. Fronius have an additional backup function called PV Point that runs directly from the inverter and battery without the need for a backup box. This does not go to the switchboard, it simply requires an RCD protected 10A outlet.

​@@solar4ever843 Thank you for your answer. I am confused as this Huawei spokesman has said there is an 'off grid mode'. Have you seen this? th-cam.com/video/Auyft3E6dUY/w-d-xo.html&feature=share&EJGixIgBCJiu2KjB4oSJEQ&t=2487

This answer is what I was looking for.. as the company that I hired to install my Huawei hybrid inverter said that is not possible to have the Electricy running from the panels feeding the house needs when the grid is off (outage).. even if I have the huawei backup box… I even saw some TH-cam videos from Spain customers that Huawei don’t recommend the Invetor + back box operation without the battery as Huawei will waive warranty cover of the inverter.

@@koreaca I spoke with a Huawei rep and the reason they do not recommend running the backup box without a battery is due to solar lag. For instance, say a cloud goes over the panels suddenly dropped the voltage, this will cause the voltage output of the inverter to drop and could cause damage especially if this happens over and over throughout the day. The battery provides stable voltage and amps to the backup box regardless how the solar panels are performing. So really, the backup box should only be used paired with batteries.

lol, just saw your comment one year later ! I'll reply just for the sake of it. Yes, done plenty of Leapton of various module sizes. Standard quality panel same as pretty much everything else. Nothing negative to say about them.