After my original inverter went pop in January after a brief power cut, and a replacement was fitted 17th April this year just after GE went under.
Another brief power cut tonight and the new one has gone pop the same way...
Slight burning smell and battery click of death.
Resistance between the battery pins on the inverter is 0 ohms.
Had another thought this morning, continuity testing is also diode testing.
Checked across the inverter battery pins in the opposite direction and get 17 Mohms vs 0 ohms depending which way leads are switched.
Old inverter was 0 ohms both ways.
Maybe this is Battery / Battery BMS startup failure.
Seems somewhat suspect that this has happened twice in a few months with a power cut as the failure cause?
Is that some sort of installation mis configuration that makes your system susceptible to damage post a power cut ?
No, system is installed as required/specified.
I've emailed Predsupport, and my installer.
When my system was installed in 2021, I asked the installer to demonstrate the manual EPS (Emergency power supply) so I would know what to do if we had a power cut. So he switched off the mains and manually started the EPS circuit (CH plus some lights etc). This was fine but when he switched the mains back on, the inverter failed. It took a bit of convincing (and 2 weeks) to get GE to come out and replace it. The engineer said it was a power MOSFET that had failed, if I recall correctly. So they must let the customer do the quality control on those items...
'Also cross posted to FB'
Did some more poking and prodding today, battery pins on inverter are open circuit if you leave the meter connected for a few seconds,
Also, the pins without battery connected show about 4.9V, so I think the inverter is fine.
I may attempt to remove the battery BMS board this afternoon and have a look at the bits around the ceramic resistor.
We've been away, but got back Monday...
Took the BMS board out and had a poke around with a meter, all looked fine except I was getting open circuit across the 5W20ohm resistor (the soft start bit).
Resoldered it, but it was still open circuit, so have ordered some new ones.
Have put it all back together for now.
Tested our manual switch over to island operation at the weekend . Ran off solar mainly for about 20mins. All switched back ok and didn't have any issues with wifi connection.
A bag of 5W 20ohm resistors arrived this morning, but I've run out of tiome to attempt to fit before I go off on Holiday in 12 hrs..
Looks like that will be an early August fix attempt now.
wrighar just chuck the BMS, resistors and soldering iron in your luggage, I'm sure it won't look suspicious if your going through an airport scanner...
Bomb Handling Mode: Careful!
Battery fixed!
USB on Gen 2
BMS ready to come out
Dead bit confirmed:
Working:
Messy work station:
And a pleasing sight:
It's been 5 weeks without
Cue end of 'never ending' sunshine...
Amusingly I also have old maplins solder - just not the lead-free type 😃 Came in huge reels back then rather than dinky little tubes.
Good result. Hopefully no more mini power cuts for you....
Hehe, Maplin, Bi Pre-pak, even Amstrad before they went to the darkside
Good effort there wrighar.