Hi All, I have inherited and done some work on an off-grid system with a Sol-Ark 8k inverter and now has a new set of 16 Rolls S6 L16-HC batteries (only about a month old). There is only 3.9kw of solar, and there is a 12kw generator.
First of all, thanks to Steve for putting out that webinar a little while ago on how to program a Sol-Ark with lead acid batteries! I followed that for the programming of this inverter. Recently, the generator kicked on when it should. But it never turned itself off. I had to go into the battery settings and turn off grid and gen charging to get the generator to turn off. From looking at the monitoring, even once the batteries were full, they were still accepting over 40A of current. A few hours later, the batteries were accepting almost 50A of current. The battery bank has a capacity of 890AH, but based on the FLA recommendations I set the capacity to 70% of that, or 650AH so that it absorbs longer. Based on the Sol-Ark programming, it will run the generator until the batteries are accepting 5% of that, or 32.5A. It seems that since the system never got down to that little amount of current, it never turned off the generator and never stopped charging. I had the customer check the water level and they said it was low, but not below the level of the plates. Does anyone know why the batteries might have been accepting so much current even when fully charged? And in order to get the final amps that the inverter is looking for to turn off the generator, I would need to set the capacity up to about 780AH or about 90% of the rated capacity. Is upping the capacity the recommended action to prevent this from happening in the future? I also have a follow up question. Being that there is not a ton of solar here, the recommendation for a full absorb every few days ends up being about 7 hours of absorb time. I am wondering if there is a way to force the inverter to do an EQ cycle (although we are really just using the EQ function on the inverter to get a full absorb cycle every few days) when we know it will be a sunny day? I would also like to be able to start an EQ cycle and also start the generator to give a good top off. It seems that you can choose the EQ frequency, but you don't know exactly when it will try to EQ. Thanks in advance! Cheers, Dave -- [image: Logo] <https://www.sungineersolar.com/> Dave Tedeyan, P.E. Owner | Sungineer Solar p: he | him | his a: 1653 Slaterville Rd. | Ithaca, NY 14850 w: www.sungineersolar.com <http://www.sungineersolar.com/> c: (607) 270-0370
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