15kWh AERL LFP Home Storage Battery - First Analysis
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.ย. 2024
- This is a first anlysis after the first 2 weeks of having the AERL 15kWh LFP battery installed.
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This is the analysis part of video AERL battery install video #1634 that didn't make the final edit for longevity reasons.
Install video: • EEVblog 1634 - 15kWh A...
Data comes from using Solar Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi connected to the Deye inverter
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I think people tend to want to oversize to avoid paying for grid electricity but if you do the maths it never pays for itself, you are better off with a smaller system and really sweating/cycling it to get a good return. Often people make the same mistake with inverter capacity.
if you think so.
@@John-gm8ty I think an undersized system has a shorter payback period but also a smaller overall ROI.
For my home I wanted to start with 5kWh connected to a 3.7kWp Solar system.
Wanted to upgrade later up to 15kWh. The 16kWh Battery was cheap and got it for 3500€ delivered.
Our consumption is not that crazy than yours. We don't have an EV only Ebikes.
If you get a Battery. The first thing you will notice... it is never enough storage ;)
The "AC coupling" I think comes from that batteries can be called to be "AC coupled" if they have their own inverter (as opposed to "DC coupling" where it's on a DC input on the inverter itself), so turning on "AC coupling" means the Deye inverter knows there are other entities in the home that can generate AC power. But this is good to know that Deye uses this term!
Not only deye uses these therms
DC coupled feeds in to the batteries. Either via a seperate charge controller making 48-ish volts (without the battery inverter necessarily knowing about) or directly into the inverter (I think of some kind of common DC bus at ~400V or so were the power goes in/out to AC, battery and solar)
AC coupled PV means you have an inverter from DC solar to AC grid
The benefit of DC solar is the better efficiency when charging the battery, since you spare one conversion from DC to AC and than another from AC to DC into the battery. Also you can charge the battery (in most cases) when there is no grid, in a blackout for example.
The benefit of AC coupled solar is a better efficiency when powering loads that need AC. Like Air con, heat pumps, washing machine, EV charging ..
So what you want to do is basically consume all your AC PV power the moment it is generated and let the DC PV charge your battery (so your deye inverter would do nothing on the AC side the whole day) That saves wear on the battery and gives the best efficiency
I've built my battery from LFP cells and total cost is 4000USD for 30kWh. It's mainly for power backup and for utilization of the night tariff which in my country is 50% of day rate. Night tariff is active from 23:00 till 7:00. My house is fully electric and in winter space heating is very hungry, but with the battery 95% of my grid import is during night, so my electricity bills are small. In addtion to that I sell excess energy during summer months, so my yearly bottom line is actually positive.
Bonus points for anyone who can tell what she was baking from the graph.
I like the in depth analysis of what is going on under the charts: activity around the house, local weather, human factors like when the car should be charged etc.
I'm in discovery mode and have just engaged a solar installer that is happy for me to do a lot of the work (drilling holes through concrete walls etc)to keep the price affordable. So finding Dave's journey really interesting.
Sometimes at night the electricity price is slightly in the negative here. It varies depending on how full the hydro magazines are and if the nuclear reactors are all running or not, how windy it is etc, very unpredictable.
I'd like to see Dave build one of the Seplos Kits (or similar DIY battery kits) and go over the BMS board. The DIY kits offer a much better cost per kWh value. He could sync up with his fellow Aussie (?) from the Off Grid Garage channel. I mean Australia isn't that big so he could just pop over for an afternoon to calibrate a S.P.A.T.
I have an entirely "second hand" system, which uses a gen1 nissan leaf battery(approx 15kWh useable) bought at salvage auction (bough the whole car!) and i bough a "broken" 5kW inverter and repaired that. My Solar panels and mounts are also second hand. I have a smart meter and flex tarrif in the UK, payback was approx 1.5 years!
AC coupling is a standard term used in PV systems. It means that you use AC current to charge the battery. In contrast DC coupling uses DC current to charge the battery. It obviously requires different hardware to do so.
I would add battery modules about a year apart, that way when they're starting to degrade you aren't losing all the capacity at once.
In your AERL install video, the expected 10 year warranty was based on 15.3MWh (battery capacity * charge cycles) . Doing the maths on an additional 5.1KWh battery, Your savings would be $4437 Aussie bucks for the life of the warranty (assuming $290 / MWh) from a battery cost of $3,000. Chi-Ching.
You can connect a second smart meter (RS485) to measure the Grid tied system. Then deye will show the string inverter output
power on its PV icon. The second Smartmeter can be enabled in Advanced Function page 3 "Grid Side INV Meter2".
You need an actual firmware. This option only exist for single phase inverters. You will find this feature only in the latest documentation V2.2 on page 37.
I really wish solar and batteries were economically viable where I live, it seems so fun to optimize with automations and play with. I might have to get a single tracking solar panel and charge a smaller battery just to scratch that itch a little bit for fun :D
I think the day you got to 100% proves the 15kWh battery is sufficient (just). The battery only sat at 100% for a very short time So you collected 15kWh during the day and used just less than that at night.
If you had a bigger battery you'd still only have gathered 15kWh out of e.g. 20kWh - which should still theoretically be enough to get you through the night.
It's not big enough. He is currently in winter in Australia so his solar input is rather low. When summer comes he could probably fully charge 2 more batteries every day.
@@mikesradiorepair Indeed he could fill a larger battery in the summer. But even in the winter the solar collection is sufficient as his overnight usage is at most 15kWh.
@@IJMacD I would think his power usage is higher in the summer. He probably uses a lot more power for AC in the summer than he does for heat in the winter. Plus, people tend to travel around more in the sunny months. More traveling = more power usage in the EV vehicle.
@@mikesradiorepair that's a fair point about the AC in summer, but don't forget they charge the EV during the day so it's effectively a battery expansion itself.
Be careful of those smart meters, as Big Clive said, they are rarely for the benefit of the consumer and that is my personal experience. :D I hope to be able to get a battery solution and also be able not to send anything back to the grid so I don't have to pay to get rid of my solar power.
My provider has a 40% discount cheap rate night time import tariff 2am to 5am, but also a 80% increase export rate 4pm to 7pm........so with some software I am working on I can enable the export automatically if my battery has more charge than I'll need through the following night. It's great fun mucking about with this stuff.
My 10.6kWh LFP battery system with it's own inverter was £6k to install 6 months ago.
This is what is comon with Octerpus alonge with 1 or 2 others, but at times they have even payed for you to use it, and they will pay silly sums at time to buy it from you, I have seen it as high as £7 a unit we sell them, But 40% that sounds more like E7 or E10.
Looks like you need more solar than batteries since your battery only once fully charged..?
Realistically from what I have calculated is 100kw is a good safe number for my needs. I have seen similar 5kw banks for about 1k USD. So 20k for batteries.
Seems like in winter time at least simply adding more battery modules isn’t going to work, as you were struggling to get your existing modules charged to 100% each day? You’d need to add more solar panels to increase your charging ability?
Hey dave, informative video as always.
I'd be interested if you did some deeper diving into DoD vs life expectancy for LFP batteries - there are papers, but they seem like they're largely inconclusive.
(the graph you kept showing is for 80% DoD only, and only shows effect of varying temperature)
Supposedly what little effect DoD has on life expectancy you make back due cycling deeper.
eg. 10k cycles at 80% DoD = 8k "full cycles" = 8900 cycles at at 90% DoD etc - so you're not really getting more effective life out of limiting discharge (don't know if I believe it yet).
Our solar company set our LFP+solar system to discharge all the way down to 10% as per recommendation from OEM (Alpha ESS)
For now, I've increased it to 14% just to be a bit more on the safer side
Hey Dave, I have 2 solar sources also with a telsla battery, and to get accurate generation,I was able to run the active from both systems through the one CT... hope that helps
You need to take the battery charger/inverter losses into account. Hybrid inverters quote great efficiencies in their data sheets but that is only solar->AC and at one specific power. They keep very quiet about AC->battery and battery->AC efficiency. The inverters also have a very high idle power consumption. I ran some tests on my Solis inverter and as far as I can tell the AC->battery->AC round trip is around 70-75% efficient. Add the approximately 100W idle (~2.4kWh/day) and battery starts to lose it's appeal. My tariff has off peak import at 13.26p and peak export at 22.39p. It looks like a no-brainer to fill the batteries on cheap power and sell it back at peak rate. Nope - due to inverter and battery losses it actually costs me money to do that.
Amazing price on that AERL LFP battery! as that's around half the price to simmler ones here in the UK, you need to ask them if and when are they planning to sell overseas lol. Also my system remained me how good of an investment it really was last week when the grid went down for 16 hours after a lightning strike, which happend to be the third time in the last 4 years.
Wow, really, double the price in UK equivalent to 5kWh?
@@EEVblog2 With the same spec and LFP yes, we have the SolaX Triple Power HV 5.8kWh LFP for £2,160 ($4,182 AU) which is called 5.8kwh but it has a usable of 4kwh, and you can only add 2x slaves, You can get much cheaper but they use li-ion type cells like the ones made by Pylon (I think they have LFP now as well), and even their 4.8kwh cost £1300 ($2,517 AU)
But I just noticed prices have come down loads since I last looked, as there is not much of a saving for going DIY like I did.
if you have the old spinner meter... you can make it spin backward ( at the same cost 😉 )
that's why they want you to "upgrade"...
Greetings from new zealand. Night rates we get here at the moment are anywhere from 10 to 15ct. My use (including EV) is 90% off-peak.
Solar is about 2x more to install than oz. Add interest rates we pay for mortgage and that's easily 20+ year payback.
We are victims of cheap power lol.
My victron inverter does allmost all that.
The only thing that's external is direct DC to battery solar charging.
Most consumers with existing PV or long distance between PV and battery don't use that.
beautiful ;O) greetings from Denmark
Would love to see the analytics comparing the use of an oven to cook vs an air fryer in a typical home like yours. I think the numbers may not be as simple as it might first appear just looking at the power spect of both items.
How big is the oven? 3.6kw vs 2.4kw for mine on startup. Overall oven is much larger consumption due to the amount of power to get to operating temp
Dave, consider a DIY battery: 30.7kWh LiFePo4 cells from china - only 3200$, BMS with active balancing like JK - 100-200 more, some wires, tapes, cheap spotter, circuit breakers and used cabinet to store it all. I am pretty sure all above will cost like 4k$. It's much cheaper than what you've got and twice more capacity. Prebuilt stuff looks cool but it's way too expensive and has no particular advantages
The advantage is likely to be home insurance wouldn't cover a home-made system if there happened to be an issue.
@@sdgelectronics There is no such exclusion in insurance policies. If you set your house on fire yourself while cooking, would the insurance not pay? Of course they would. Insurance is for accidents and mistakes which this would fall into.
Not to mention the pride of having done it yourself!
I did my own build and I am very happy with the outcome let alone all the new tools I have acquired!
Interesting stuff. Just curious as to how the Deye goes about portioning up the incoming power and sending it out accurately divied up.
I guess they imagined this use case to be coupled with hydropower... The Deye really does everything!
The flexability is very impressive. I think they mention hydro in the manual.
You are definitely being hard on those batteries with high discharge current, I think you need to fill the rack up.
They are rated for 100A discharge. But yeah, more will help spread. Obviously limited to 5kW max by the Deye.
Not really. 5kW at 48V nominal is about 105A shared between all 3 batteries in the rack, so each battery is only seeing a load of about 35A, so well under the 100A maximum rating. Adding another battery will reduce the maximum load on each battery to about 25A, which will help battery longevity, as well as providing additional power.
Getting charged to put back into the grid is bleeding a bull, know some that are still on the $0.60c, plans that were first introduced, but are stuck with the older system... but they are still making money overall.
Seems like you need another current clamp or something going to the batteries, and work back wards on the graph.
In Vic 19c Kw.
Given the Batteries are charged from Solar, it is technically your solar, just as stored energy. I think I could live with that sort of thing. It still shows grid versus local production. At least there are other ways to break it down more.
I think if you can get through that period 5pm to 7 or 8pm, you manage to skip the main peak time and it would help the bill a lot.
Free Energy overnight.. Is that still a thing? The old "off peak" time is still quite expensive on wholesale rates compared to middle of the day when renewables are high.
If you have a solar clamp for solar analytics - for solar gen
Maybe move it on the wires from the enphase - that should then see the IO directly from it - rather than from the internal grid wire ...
So that should show actual data on solar analytics for solar correctly
There is no point in adding more batteries for winter use. If you can not charge the batteries you have fully adding more batteries will do diddly squat.
What you need to do is add more generation capability for winter use. Either more solar or wind, depending on your situation.
How about testing home assistant?
So, sounds like you need more solar to me. Not more battery. If you can't charge your current one to 100% most days, whats the extra battery going to do if you can't charge it?
He's in the peak of winter.
@@hardergamer Unless i'm missing something, how is a extra 5kWh battery going to fix that if solar isn't producing enough to charge it?
@@micky82019 As this time of year there is much less day light, shorter days so you get less time to charge with less energy from the sun, and more rainy days. Meaning in the summer his solar will be producing 2-3 times as much energy to charge his batteries.
@@hardergamer So during summer, the system probably be fine then. Adding a extra battery won't fix the winter problem because there needs to be more solar to charge it.
@micky82019 that is basically the gist of it!
And working out how much battery vs how much panels you actually need is pretty hard...
I have a 30kwh battery but I only got 15kwh out of solar today here in Melbourne, the system has only begun to climb up in solar energy this month and I'm watching the output grow every day.
I know that I need more panels but for my usage I also need another 30kwh worth of storage on top of what I have already....
During the summer months! The battery will be fully charged by midday and then I'm running everything that I can plug in to use whatever the day has to offer! Yeah I have run space heaters during a 40°c day!
I know that is insane but I couldn't do that before when I had to rely on the grid only!
So in order to have a system that is enough during winter, you essentially end up with a system that will be able to provide you with so much energy during the summer months that you are not going to know what to do with all of it! The sense of energy freedom is truly a wonderful thing! Until someone works out that it's making people happy and will put a happy tax on it.... Everything that makes you happy has a higher level of tax on it.... Everything!
Would be curious to know what kind of RFI your entire system puts out. I'm lucky, I live out in the country so no RFI to speak of. However, I know a lot of people that live in towns and as people in the neighborhood have installed solar systems over the years their noise floor has picked up significantly, all but destroying the possibility for them to operate amateur radio. Just curious how much RFI the newer systems put out into the environment.
16:28 Where the battery dropped below 20%, could you have had a grid outage at the time? If the grid was down, perhaps the battery will continue discharging until it reaches the Shutdown percentage on the Battery Settings > Discharge tab (I'm assuming you'd have that number below your 20% normal limit).
Wouldn't the Deye always need the clamp to figure out how much surplus energy it can put into the battery?
Dave, you coined the term Audiophoolery for spending excessive amounts of money with diminishing returns on audio equipment. Have to be very careful not fall into the SOLARPHOOLERY trap by spending crazy amounts of money - and time, on solar energy projects with diminishing returns.
15kw - 20% :)
Use a battery to charge a battery. Cool.
@offgridgarge has a new convert :-P
shouldnt you be able to put a current clamp on the enphase output/input to AC.. ..to show what the enphase is putting in?
I don't think that the cost of that battery is reasonable....
For what you would pay for 15kwh without the cost of the rack from AERL, I got 30kwh!
Plus the sense of pride that I did it myself!
if barely charged to full, from solar, what is the need of extra battery? maybe i missed something.
2900 AUD for a 100Ah is quite a lot
nowadays you can get for 1600 AUD anywhere from 230 to 280Ah cells, throw in some reasonable BMS. Sure you are paying premium for "a finished box" here and everybody's gotta feed the family :)
For the record I have two 134Ah and one 230Ah battery packs :D and at 5PM the batteries are full (I do not run the whole house on solar though, only the biggest and stable loads)
It's actually very well priced for a complete polished plug'n'play system. Cheaper than all the biggies like Tesla, Enphase, LG, BYD etc.
@@EEVblog2 yeah for a finished branded box in Australia sure :) my batteries are DIY in a rack without a box, just BMS strapped to the side of them, which means quite a lot of money saved and way quicker RoI
There's always the myth of keeping SOC between 20% and 80% to extend battery life. But like every tenth cycle should be full 100% charge. You'd get almost 2X of full cycles out of LFP batteries and I was told that on LiPo it's closer to 5X?
Since you're not using raw LFP cells it's most probably already been taken care of
It's not a myth. Google OER and ORR, these are the regions where the cell is oxidizing or reducing, and is where the 20% and 80% comes from. The best way to increase cycle life is low discharge rates between the cells OER and ORR knees as high discharge rates, especially pulsed that may only exceed the cells C-rating briefly but often, permanently immobilise lithium ions over time, reducing cell capacity.
Are Solar Analytics developing something for battery integration? They have some hints on their site about it on their site. Might be worth asking them if you want to trial it?
It is called "Deyy--Yee"
Is the payback spreadsheet available to DL?
I have a DC and AC battery and they don't talk with each other properly and they end up cross charging each other which is silly.
My setup is 2 LG resu a sungrow hybrid and an alpha b3.
About 18kw of storage but restricted to 12kw for longevity.
These shorter days have me dead by 2am
The warmer months s seem to last until Sun up.
I use my resistive hot water to speak up after 12pm. The alpha thinks there's solar when the DC is supplying the house overnight
In AC coupling mode, what happens to the generated power if the batteries are full and there is no load? Does it still go to the grid or does the system turn off?
You can normally set the export limit. It's certainly required for G99/G100 in the UK
How many KwHs does Mrs. EEV Blog use charging the Hyundai every day?
We have 3 Powerwalls (bought before I knew what Elon was) that we got solely for the convenience of not losing power, so we never expected payback. However, we have a program where the grid buys energy from us during peak times up to 60 times a year. Most events they take ~28 KwH. I think they are paying us close to $4.00 KwH (hard to tell since they are pretty opaque about this). Last year's check was $4200
We mostly charge the EV with excess solar energy, not from the battery. Been doing this for 4 years now.
Any guess/info what's total efficiency charge/discharge cycle? batterypack + deye
Probably 75-80%
Are you with Amber? Paying to send to the grid made me wonder. Or is this a NSW thing (I’m in Qld).
Never heard of them. I'm with AGL on a fixed rate tarrif because I don't have a smart meter yet.
@@EEVblog2 I’ve seen people get real sweaty on the Whirlpool Forums with Amber, they have scripts running so they export when the feed in tarrif spikes in time of use. IIRC the wholesale price changes in 5 minute windows, don’t know if I can paste links but google “AEMO NEM data”.
The demand charges can really suck so it’s probably not worth the stress haha.
Its a Grid provider thing - AusGrid, but all the networks are going the same way. They punish feed in during the peak period by a bit - however with amber I gobble it up & charge my car/battery as much as possible!
Is not having a smart meter on purpose? This country (.nl) has those for a decade now, for gas too, strangely not for water though..... Getting a bunch of data every second from the one here :)
loading your car from the battery makes absoltely no sense
Still cheaper than from grid, huh? Of course direct PV is preferable
@@EngineersFear only if you don’t count the cost of the batteries.
Lol. Paying for giving them energy. It's like with sorted garbage - you sort it, you pay for company to take it, and then they burn and sell it as electricity to you.
I think you can just say dai not d eye
There is literally an "i" coloured in the "D" in the name. So it's obviously supposed to be "D-Eye"
Its pronounced "doo-ya" - th-cam.com/video/rEJoL3ipUt4/w-d-xo.html
@@nateb3105 seems you’re right.
@@EEVblog2 whatever it is, it’s not d eye
@@nateb3105 Sounds like it's "dough yo" at 0m27s in that video link.
5:57 "die ya"
0:34 "doo ya"
with various variations in other spots of the video.
Further analysis is touched upon in the following video:
th-cam.com/video/6r3CY7oakeY/w-d-xo.html
What happen's when these batteries go into thermal runaway in your house like all these EV's that are burning down! The half state charge situation where they blow up is what would scare me about having these anywhere near your home!
I'm curious as to your Total cost of your Home Energy System from the 1st Solar Panel you installed way back to the new 15KW Battery Backup Dave.
This seems awfully complicated. A lot of shared responsibilities between components... Can't there be better division of concern? A system would have the panels passing through inverters, the grid, the house, an EV charger, an optional generator, and batteries all connecting to a master control unit which would be aware of all subsystems and be responsible for switching. Not like this deye that tries to be both an inverter and a master controller as I envision it but fails at it.