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Good question.
The setup is:
Victron 75/10 Solar Charge Controller £80
Victron Smart Battery Protect 65 Amp £47.50
Victron Smart Battery Sense £33.99
Victron Phoenix 12/250 Inverter £97.34
Victron Globallink 520 £195
Renogy 50aH LiFePo4 battery £260
Photonic Universe 120w panel £165
Renogy PV stand £40
DC distribution panel, bus bars, cable, fuses, cable lugs etc, £200Which stands me at just over £1,100.
A bunch of those items are "nice to have", you could do without:
- Smart battery protect
- Smart battery sense
- Globallink 520
Which would knock almost £300 off, I wanted that lot for system performance and monitoring, and to give me some flexibility (if I understand it correctly, I can operate the switch on the smart battery protect via the Globallink 520 using the Victron App, which will kill all power to the distribution side of the setup, for example).
- Smart battery protect
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This is very cool, wouldn't mind copying this for my garage.
Forgive me if you've already said this, but does the system allow for pass-through? So if the battery was full, could you potentially run the inverter and whatever was connected to the inverter without using the battery? If the panel was generating enough power at that point in time.
And with avg W generated so far, how long would it take you to charge the battery?
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Honestly I don't know - I'm learning as I go and both of those excellent questions are beyond my current understanding.
The Charge Controller has a pair of load output terminals, I don't know whether it would output panel derived power to them directly if the battery was full.
I'm not using them - I have the battery terminals going to the Smart Battery Protect and then onto the power distribution, as the load output is <10 Amps, and the inverter IIRC can pull up to 60.
I have a smart battery sense arriving today which will hopefully answer your second question - currently I don't know how close to full it is, I'm waiting for the charger to go into "float" to tell me that it's full!
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My follow up question is, did you end up doing any calculations on battery size and how much power you need for your usual power consuming activities/tools?
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I did, but I ended up going in circles - I decided to try to make a small system from modular parts that I could upgrade individually or en-masse as required.
The battery is small - 50ah, but because it's LiFePo4 it's (theoretically) equivalent to a 100ah lead-acid/AGM battery as you can use almost all of the energy in a Lithium-Iron battery.
I can add panels to the array, all that would be required would be to upgrade the charge controller - adding two panels would give me 360w total, and I'd need the 100/30 charge controller, but the rest could stay the same.
And of course I could have started there, but decided to make a system that I considered "minimum viable" and work from there.
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Ok fixed that, fitted the Global link 520, created a Victron Remote Management account, connected to the Global Link 520.
Super-annoyingly I cannot for the life of me find out how to enable Bluetooth for the Global Link, which it uses to network with the other units.
The manual says:
"If you don't see your device in VictronConnect, it is possible that Bluetooth is disabled. You can enable Bluetooth from the device overview in VRM. After enabling this, it can take up to 15 minutes for the change to go into effect."
But, when I go into device overview, there's no such option. Maybe I'm in the wrong device overview, but I can't find another one.
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A wiring question:
Having read the manual and discovered that my initial setup was "strictly forbidden" I have corrected it, and the inverter is now wired direct from the battery rather than via the smart battery protect.
The wiring diagram I posted upthread shows this configuration as the correct one.
What it also shows is taking a circuit from the "out" pole of the smart battery protect and connecting it to one of the pair of contacts on the inverter that can have a switch connected to them.
These two contacts are bridged with a short length of wire, as supplied by Victron.
My assumption is that there's a low voltage present on the right hand terminal, which is supplied to the left hand terminal via the loop of wire, and the presence of +ve on the left hand terminal indicates to the Inverter that it should run.
Which, therefore, means that when a circuit that carries a live signal from the battery is supplied to the left hand terminal (even though it's not coming from the right hand terminal) the inverter sees a positive current on the left hand terminal and is operational.
If and when the smart battery protect shuts off the live feed (the "out" pole that the circuit to the switch on the inverter is connected to) then the inverter stops seeing a positive current on the left hand terminal, and turns off.
Does that sound accurate so far?
If so, I'm intending on interrupting that circuit from the smart battery protect to the input terminal on the inverter with a Shelly1 WiFi switch, which will give me the ability to turn the inverter on and off via the Shelly app on my phone.
If not, then I really don't understand this stuff.
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That's the wifi access point - it's just plugged into a short tail to see if it would work, it's not going to stay there. The AP comes with an AC to DC adapter plug, which would mean running it off the inverter, so this was a test to see if I could feed it direct from the DC side - which did work.
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Solar power for your shed/garage/cabin (smaller than a house, basically)
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@Dammit
Fucking lol. Would rep.