Getting a meter opens up a whole new world. If you place your grid tied inverter between the meter and the MultiPlus, then you'll be charging batteries with energy from the grid tied inverter via the MultiPlus. Once the batteries are full, then your feed in with then grid tied inverter AND the MPPT energy :) Set the system to not feed in at all beyond the meter if you wish, yet supply grid connected loads sitting between the meter and the AC INPUT of the MultiPlus with solar energy. The meter puts the system onto a whole new league. WARNING, you'll find yourself in the market for a MultiPlus 3000 in a short space of time (this is the model which is certified with G83 UK grid codes).
Hi did you informe to local connections provider As i have got 1200 watts panell connected to micro inverter and did tryed pluck in to one socket i had over 900 watts 240v Amp clamp meter say 4 to 5.5 Amps AC had for 1 hr do i need to let them know
Can u not wire up the victron solar charge controller to the battery and the victron battery charger to the battery and have both on at same time ?? Thanks a lot
Andy just putting a 590w system in/on my shed with a 2PDT insulated knife switch to between a 600w grid tie and 8S Li-ion 40 amp stack via a solar charger- now toying with the idea of bleeding off the stack via a 380w grid tie as often there's not enough load in the little house - its addictive getting something for nothing - last year i put 100w with mppt on the camper and got the bug
Yeah it’s addictive! It’s better to use the least amount of power from the batteries as you can unless it’s completely off grid. Batteries wear out after a while and the cost of replacing them outstrips the money you’ve saved using solar. It’s a tricky one! I’m mostly using grid tie inverters now and only when there’s a power outage the batteries will get used. (Once a month maybe)
Hi, I have seen some of your videos and great stuff. I am interested in this set up of having grid tie as I am building a shed soon and would like to have something similar. Problem is I have a smart meter and not sure if is compatible. I do not want ending up paying for electricity produced as I understand it can be an issue! Any ideas how to go around that?
Alot to learn from in one video😛 Switching the Source for Charging automatically and keeping the batteries topped off sounds hassle free. I'm Shocked how good Solar Panels seem to be too, if you're missing out on what sounds like about half of what they're able to generate on a Sunny day👀. I'm still learning man!, Nice Update!👍
Thanks Raul, yeah it’s a real eye opener. I’m shocked too at how much power you can get from such a simple setup. You can see why solar has become so popular now, the efficiency is improving each year. They are now even putting solar roofs on top of some new electric cars to give them a few more miles extra range!
Great video Andy! You said you were disappointed by the level of power you’re getting out of the panels but for perspective what you said you’re getting would be enough to power my Twizy to work and back each day (short trip)
I might have said that based on the weather at that particular time...But check the latest video when it is sunny I am getting in about 2kWh. What you are saying about the twizy is correct. I’m basically charging mine for free at the moment because I only take about 25% out per day (or every other day) just nipping to the shops and stuff. That equates to about 1.5kWh which I can easily get in on a good day with just 400W of panels (2x200).
Lucky man, I've been charging at home and have worked it out roughly and also based off using public chargers here in Suffolk (that don't seem to be charging me yet :-P)
Yes, the Multiplus is a very useful piece of equipment, brilliant at maintaining the batteries over many years. I think your meter is not correct, given that you have 400watts of panel minus the power factor there is no way you could produce 400watts. Unless I misheard you.
Hi Andy. This solar malarkey really interests me. If you stripped your system down to the bare bones, with just enough to get power to your house grid, what would the approx cost be? There's a company locally to me (pluginsolar.co.uk) that does a diy plug in system but it's still expensive.
I was interested too so I just worked it out:2 x Solar Panels - amzn.to/2ILJnmt 1 x 600W Grid Tie - amzn.to/2GOcsjL Comes to about £534 for 400W. If you had two of these setups would give you 800W. Remember you would also need some more electrical bits to wire it all in properly.
When I lived in Wales I had a fuel tank for my heating and my level gauge was attached to my router and when it got down to 1/4 it would reorder even if I was working they would just come fill it and invoice me
I’m not sure why you’re using a solar charger and a mains charger. If you are on net metering (and I figure you must be because why else a grid tie inverter?) then the solar will power the mains charger anyway when its producing power before sending excess watts back to the grid. Mind you with an under powered inverter and only two panels, baseline consumption in the house will probably use all the energy being produced by the panels. Using a relay will get around the fact that if the grid fails you’ll still have solar to your battery bank but your batteries must also isolate from the grid so you don’t electrocute the line workers (I think from memory your battery bank is just powering a few things in the shed and is not hooked into the mains so it’s safe enough.) But in a normal panels -grid tie inverter - battery system the transfer swith must completely isolate the house from the grid in a loss of grid power event.
Connect the GTI to the battery or use a Victron Distributor (smart bus bar) to share the load. Everything needs to be in a similar voltage range though. You probably figured this out by now being a 4yr old video.
Andy I just need to Mark your card for next Saturday morning 14,4,18. TV channel 5Spike formula e racing. Not massive on car racing myself but just caught an interview with Vernon Kay who's hosting it enthusing about the whole electric vehicle revolution, and indeed all the lightning fast evolution of electric cars/bikes ect. And more importantly (Battery tech) it's happening Mate! Cheers Andy
Cool! Thanks for the heads up, that sound like it would be definitely worth a watch. I think when electric racing really comes into the mainstream there is going to be serious problems with cars destroying the track with the amount of power they would run. I mean just imagine what the F1 boys could do with their budgets!
Just to latch onto this, Andy you really should watch Formula E. The onboard camera has an overlay where you get to see where the power is going, regenerative braking all sorts. Right up your alley.
yeah you are right, although 15-20m has not made as big a difference as I would have thought really. Perhaps it's the higher voltage and lower current.
hmm interesting concept. I like the idea of power generation generating mains and then using a mains charger to charge your battery. yes there are losses but your power generation does not need to be near your batteries now
Could you do a video about the settings you inputed for your Victron charge controller and BMV battery monitor for charging and monitoring Li-ion? That would be awesome!
Very interesting you clips could you make a grid tie solar system for the our house the if there's no demand on the system it switches to charging batteries?
You can do that with the Victron system. You'll need the meter he mentioned at the end of the vid, the ET112 and hook that up to a RPi with the Venus OS or The Victron CCGX with a Victron charger compatible with ESS (Energy Storage System) www.victronenergy.com/live/ess:start
Hi Andy, I wondered if you could give me a bit of advice about my ebike please? I bought the same same battery as you from Insat ( 84v 30ah ). I got the Adappto Midi-e and set the normal and boost modes to maximum . When in Boost mode I can get a couple of minutes of high performance and then at cuts back on the power, also not great on range either about 20 miles and then battery is dead . Put it on charge and only charged to 82.4v as opposed to 84v fully charged? Any advice? Can you send me your parrmiters for eco, normal and boost please? Cheers..
Hi Gary, the power reduction you are seeing will be thermal roll back. On the right hand side of the display are the vertical bars climbing? When they reach about mid way the controller reduces power to protect itself. It could be a motor calibration issue. Try to do a factory reset on the controller and then redo the motor calibration, this helped me. With your battery it sounds like it’s gone out of balance, I would give Jimmy a call. My controller settings are experimental at the moment as I’m testing stuff but basically for max power on the midi-e it’s going to be battery current around 90A and phase about 3 times higher, regen current you could set somewhere around 40A. Use that for boost and reduce it for Normal and I usually set it up for 250W on eco so it’s like a “road legal” mode
Hi Andy, sorry to be a pain again but i've just set up another enduro e-bike with another Adappto mid-e controller. My problem is when i put it in autodetect mode and turn the throttle the rear wheel makes a clunk and power is cut to the display for a couple of seconds and then comes back to life. If i repeat the procedure the same thing happens. Any ideas?Also i don't know if this is related but in the top left corner of the display its only reading 55v as opposed to the 84v it should be? Thanks again Gary..
you should probably be using a contactor not a relay for stuff like that (higher power), but not too shabby... also id recommend the rx100v5 (solid camera)
You may have a point there about the relay. I love the rx100v5 but she wanted something with interchangeable lenses, she also doesn’t really care about 4K. Personally I’m holding out for an update to my main camera (the A6500)
Since you run a pi, you may like to look at buying a SDR dongle for 10-15 quid (ebay search for "software defined radio USB Dongle RTL2832 +R820T RTL-SDR" and you should find them). You can then run github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 and it will probably read your Oil meter (and a few other 433 MHz sensors like weather stations etc) you could then send the oil meter reading via mqtt to node-red on the pi, and have it remind you (or fire off an email to your oil supplier to fill up your tank) when the oil level reached a certain value. I run one of these, and have a node-red dashboard displaying my solar charging data other home sensor data including my oil tank level - works well
This really is awesome! Thanks for the heads up... it's been a while since I looked at SDR Telemetry decoding and it's exciting to see such developments. I'm impressed the open source community has made it their mission to try add as many protocols as they can, its awesome. I have all the bits here necessary to play with this so will definately take a look!
If you've got the bits already you should have no problems, and as you can see there are 100+ protocols understood so far, including 4 oil tank monitor types - there's a few tutorials on how to do it but tech.sid3windr.be/2017/03/getting-your-currentcost-433mhz-data-into-openhab-using-an-rtl-sdr-dongle-and-mqtt/ should give you a few clues. My oil tank transmits every 20 minutes or so, so you may have to leave the script running a while before you see it but you'll probably pick up lots of other sensors so will know it's working.
I’ve been playing with this today. It’s really awesome seeing all my devices pop up. I’m getting quite a few numbers from my Apollo oil tank sensor, I’ll see if I can make some sense of them. The data from my energy meter and weather station all shows perfectly. Ive been doing some reading on MQTT as I want to work out how to get all this data online,This is where node-red comes in right?
Getting a meter opens up a whole new world. If you place your grid tied inverter between the meter and the MultiPlus, then you'll be charging batteries with energy from the grid tied inverter via the MultiPlus. Once the batteries are full, then your feed in with then grid tied inverter AND the MPPT energy :)
Set the system to not feed in at all beyond the meter if you wish, yet supply grid connected loads sitting between the meter and the AC INPUT of the MultiPlus with solar energy.
The meter puts the system onto a whole new league. WARNING, you'll find yourself in the market for a MultiPlus 3000 in a short space of time (this is the model which is certified with G83 UK grid codes).
Hi did you informe to local connections provider
As i have got 1200 watts panell connected to micro inverter and did tryed pluck in to one socket i had over 900 watts 240v Amp clamp meter say 4 to 5.5 Amps AC had for 1 hr do i need to let them know
Can u not wire up the victron solar charge controller to the battery and the victron battery charger to the battery and have both on at same time ?? Thanks a lot
You should add more solar panels. Yea you really need more solar panels.
don't tempt me!
@@andykirby have you done it yet
Andy just putting a 590w system in/on my shed with a 2PDT insulated knife switch to between a 600w grid tie and 8S Li-ion 40 amp stack via a solar charger- now toying with the idea of bleeding off the stack via a 380w grid tie as often there's not enough load in the little house - its addictive getting something for nothing - last year i put 100w with mppt on the camper and got the bug
Yeah it’s addictive! It’s better to use the least amount of power from the batteries as you can unless it’s completely off grid. Batteries wear out after a while and the cost of replacing them outstrips the money you’ve saved using solar. It’s a tricky one! I’m mostly using grid tie inverters now and only when there’s a power outage the batteries will get used. (Once a month maybe)
How's the grid tie inverter working today?
Very well, I’ve got two now connected to 750Wp of solar, I’m getting on average 4-5Kwh per day.
Hi,
I have seen some of your videos and great stuff.
I am interested in this set up of having grid tie as I am building a shed soon and would like to have something similar.
Problem is I have a smart meter and not sure if is compatible. I do not want ending up paying for electricity produced as I understand it can be an issue!
Any ideas how to go around that?
Alot to learn from in one video😛 Switching the Source for Charging automatically and keeping the batteries topped off sounds hassle free. I'm Shocked how good Solar Panels seem to be too, if you're missing out on what sounds like about half of what they're able to generate on a Sunny day👀. I'm still learning man!, Nice Update!👍
Thanks Raul, yeah it’s a real eye opener. I’m shocked too at how much power you can get from such a simple setup. You can see why solar has become so popular now, the efficiency is improving each year. They are now even putting solar roofs on top of some new electric cars to give them a few more miles extra range!
Where did you get that wattmeter🤔 most of those I seen is 120v but you seem to have 220v, right?
Without Doubts Victron is one of the best but DAMN they sure are proud of they're stuff. Flipping Pricey ! I myself can't afford any of it.
Great video Andy! You said you were disappointed by the level of power you’re getting out of the panels but for perspective what you said you’re getting would be enough to power my Twizy to work and back each day (short trip)
I might have said that based on the weather at that particular time...But check the latest video when it is sunny I am getting in about 2kWh. What you are saying about the twizy is correct. I’m basically charging mine for free at the moment because I only take about 25% out per day (or every other day) just nipping to the shops and stuff. That equates to about 1.5kWh which I can easily get in on a good day with just 400W of panels (2x200).
Lucky man, I've been charging at home and have worked it out roughly and also based off using public chargers here in Suffolk (that don't seem to be charging me yet :-P)
Yes, the Multiplus is a very useful piece of equipment, brilliant at maintaining the batteries over many years. I think your meter is not correct, given that you have 400watts of panel minus the power factor there is no way you could produce 400watts. Unless I misheard you.
Hi Andy. This solar malarkey really interests me. If you stripped your system down to the bare bones, with just enough to get power to your house grid, what would the approx cost be?
There's a company locally to me (pluginsolar.co.uk) that does a diy plug in system but it's still expensive.
I was interested too so I just worked it out:2 x Solar Panels - amzn.to/2ILJnmt
1 x 600W Grid Tie - amzn.to/2GOcsjL
Comes to about £534 for 400W. If you had two of these setups would give you 800W.
Remember you would also need some more electrical bits to wire it all in properly.
Does a smart
Meter affect the grid tie ?
When I lived in Wales I had a fuel tank for my heating and my level gauge was attached to my router and when it got down to 1/4 it would reorder even if I was working they would just come fill it and invoice me
I was thinking about my suggestion about the DPDT relay, and boom there you go, you mention it! :)
I’m not sure why you’re using a solar charger and a mains charger. If you are on net metering (and I figure you must be because why else a grid tie inverter?) then the solar will power the mains charger anyway when its producing power before sending excess watts back to the grid. Mind you with an under powered inverter and only two panels, baseline consumption in the house will probably use all the energy being produced by the panels. Using a relay will get around the fact that if the grid fails you’ll still have solar to your battery bank but your batteries must also isolate from the grid so you don’t electrocute the line workers (I think from memory your battery bank is just powering a few things in the shed and is not hooked into the mains so it’s safe enough.) But in a normal panels -grid tie inverter - battery system the transfer swith must completely isolate the house from the grid in a loss of grid power event.
Connect the GTI to the battery or use a Victron Distributor (smart bus bar) to share the load. Everything needs to be in a similar voltage range though. You probably figured this out by now being a 4yr old video.
Andy I just need to Mark your card for next Saturday morning 14,4,18. TV channel 5Spike formula e racing. Not massive on car racing myself but just caught an interview with Vernon Kay who's hosting it enthusing about the whole electric vehicle revolution, and indeed all the lightning fast evolution of electric cars/bikes ect. And more importantly (Battery tech) it's happening Mate!
Cheers Andy
Cool! Thanks for the heads up, that sound like it would be definitely worth a watch. I think when electric racing really comes into the mainstream there is going to be serious problems with cars destroying the track with the amount of power they would run. I mean just imagine what the F1 boys could do with their budgets!
Just to latch onto this, Andy you really should watch Formula E. The onboard camera has an overlay where you get to see where the power is going, regenerative braking all sorts. Right up your alley.
Excellent video as usual. Following your journey.
Long dc cables are not very efficient, I think it would be best to have the inverter as close as possible to the panels.
yeah you are right, although 15-20m has not made as big a difference as I would have thought really. Perhaps it's the higher voltage and lower current.
hmm interesting concept. I like the idea of power generation generating mains and then using a mains charger to charge your battery. yes there are losses but your power generation does not need to be near your batteries now
Could you do a video about the settings you inputed for your Victron charge controller and BMV battery monitor for charging and monitoring Li-ion? That would be awesome!
Very interesting you clips could you make a grid tie solar system for the our house the if there's no demand on the system it switches to charging batteries?
You can do that with the Victron system. You'll need the meter he mentioned at the end of the vid, the ET112 and hook that up to a RPi with the Venus OS or The Victron CCGX with a Victron charger compatible with ESS (Energy Storage System) www.victronenergy.com/live/ess:start
Hi Andy, I wondered if you could give me a bit of advice about my ebike please? I bought the same same battery as you from Insat ( 84v 30ah ). I got the Adappto Midi-e and set the normal and boost modes to maximum . When in Boost mode I can get a couple of minutes of high performance and then at cuts back on the power, also not great on range either about 20 miles and then battery is dead . Put it on charge and only charged to 82.4v as opposed to 84v fully charged? Any advice? Can you send me your parrmiters for eco, normal and boost please? Cheers..
Hi Gary, the power reduction you are seeing will be thermal roll back. On the right hand side of the display are the vertical bars climbing? When they reach about mid way the controller reduces power to protect itself.
It could be a motor calibration issue. Try to do a factory reset on the controller and then redo the motor calibration, this helped me.
With your battery it sounds like it’s gone out of balance, I would give Jimmy a call.
My controller settings are experimental at the moment as I’m testing stuff but basically for max power on the midi-e it’s going to be battery current around 90A and phase about 3 times higher, regen current you could set somewhere around 40A. Use that for boost and reduce it for Normal and I usually set it up for 250W on eco so it’s like a “road legal” mode
Hi Andy, sorry to be a pain again but i've just set up another enduro e-bike with another Adappto mid-e controller. My problem is when i put it in autodetect mode and turn the throttle the rear wheel makes a clunk and power is cut to the display for a couple of seconds and then comes back to life. If i repeat the procedure the same thing happens. Any ideas?Also i don't know if this is related but in the top left corner of the display its only reading 55v as opposed to the 84v it should be? Thanks again Gary..
you should probably be using a contactor not a relay for stuff like that (higher power), but not too shabby... also id recommend the rx100v5 (solid camera)
You may have a point there about the relay. I love the rx100v5 but she wanted something with interchangeable lenses, she also doesn’t really care about 4K. Personally I’m holding out for an update to my main camera (the A6500)
You say you only got 400w panels,,, why not get more of them?
Yeah but where do you stop! The investment is basically paying for your electricity upfront. I may end up moving house in 4 years.
Doesn't Andy get an m50 too?
Haha! Unfortunately not but I did get my Sony A6500 not long ago so I can’t complain really 😅
Since you run a pi, you may like to look at buying a SDR dongle for 10-15 quid (ebay search for "software defined radio USB Dongle RTL2832 +R820T RTL-SDR" and you should find them). You can then run github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 and it will probably read your Oil meter (and a few other 433 MHz sensors like weather stations etc) you could then send the oil meter reading via mqtt to node-red on the pi, and have it remind you (or fire off an email to your oil supplier to fill up your tank) when the oil level reached a certain value. I run one of these, and have a node-red dashboard displaying my solar charging data other home sensor data including my oil tank level - works well
This really is awesome! Thanks for the heads up... it's been a while since I looked at SDR Telemetry decoding and it's exciting to see such developments. I'm impressed the open source community has made it their mission to try add as many protocols as they can, its awesome. I have all the bits here necessary to play with this so will definately take a look!
If you've got the bits already you should have no problems, and as you can see there are 100+ protocols understood so far, including 4 oil tank monitor types - there's a few tutorials on how to do it but tech.sid3windr.be/2017/03/getting-your-currentcost-433mhz-data-into-openhab-using-an-rtl-sdr-dongle-and-mqtt/ should give you a few clues. My oil tank transmits every 20 minutes or so, so you may have to leave the script running a while before you see it but you'll probably pick up lots of other sensors so will know it's working.
I’ve been playing with this today. It’s really awesome seeing all my devices pop up. I’m getting quite a few numbers from my Apollo oil tank sensor, I’ll see if I can make some sense of them. The data from my energy meter and weather station all shows perfectly. Ive been doing some reading on MQTT as I want to work out how to get all this data online,This is where node-red comes in right?
After all that interesting talk my question from the U.S. is... Why does your front door have 2 hinges at the top?
Probably because it’s bloody heavy! Seriously though Its quite a big door so it’s probably to reduce the strain on the hinges.
Watching again 👍😂
6:45 😄👍👏
You shoud add more wood, wood is source od C and C + O2 means CO2, and we call it fire, do U know what is VDE, ČSN, ISO ? No ? Try to educate.
Wait.. was she mad or not?? haha
Boy but you can talk