So I've shown this project has resulted in a working off-grid solar inverter system that can charge a 2012 leaf. However this idea was to be grid assisted, in other words use solar if it there, but grid or generator if its not. and if this happens automatically its the best of both worlds, selfish solar. Basically, the battery I made cannot fully charge the leaf energy wise. like I showed it has only about 7.5KWH in it, and the leaf uses ~10kwh/day from the utility on average year round, to drive 30 miles one way to work at 55mph. so it will exhaust the home-battery before the car-battery is full no matter what. but the inverter I have has settings to remedy this, and so here are the settings that make that work. the MS4448PAE and ME-RTR can be programed to connect the Edison or Generator power with the "VDC connect" settings, the trick is that the BMS will disconnect the battery if any cell gets below 2.1v, so balance is important (and i'm still understanding this in practice.) so I want to have the VDC connect voltage at 46v.
https://ibb.co/1MF5smm
Moving on from that to the system performance, I knew that these were used solar panels and for $0.30/watt I was expecting some significant power atrophy. They say silicon PV looses power at 1.5%/year. So I was pleasantly surprised to find the peak product yesterday was 4600W on panels rated new at 295w each/4720w array. Now, I’m not sure if that high number is a glitch of the measurement system or it really put that power out. Tellingly, the average production from 2-3pm was maybe 3900w.
https://ibb.co/82P9Vvy
Speaking of the measurement system the EPEVER tracer as shipped form amazon does connect to the PC with a USB wire and shows a snapshot of the current performance, with a trend line, but datalogging into excel requires a $20 box to buffer the data. Once I have that in, I can track performance with more than just pictures of the real-time chart.
The next steps for me will be continuing to understand the balance of the battery, to see if top or bottom balancing is better and if it can achieve balance by itself or if it needs to be managed externally. Also right now the only load I can connect is the Leaf, so I will run EMT and pull some wire over to my 10 circuit Xfer switch to start running household loads. This will allow me to run a window air conditioner and dehumidifier until I get the mini-split AC setup. Since this is a success and I have shown that, I don't see a need to continue documenting progress in this thread, except for issues that come up and questions. maybe I'll make a youtube video to reach more people.
https://ibb.co/Rh2HjV7
