Hi from 'Up North'.

[sandvika]

Hi folks. I've had my hybrid PV & battery system installed since February 2021 and in May this year a close friend followed suit, and is getting a heat pump too. He's non-technical and wants me to help him out by configuring it for him. That turns out to be more easily said than done.

Ostensibly we both have FoxESS H1 inverters and batteries but that's where the similarities appear to end. His system is a lot more configurable than mine and in different ways. That is what brought me in search of more information and how I discovered this forum. My system has been falling short of expectations on yield and with my self-education I am coming to the conclusion that it may have been installed by a bunch of cowboys and I need to hold them to account rather than shell out more cash to have the problems they created fixed. My battery has been behaving strangely, not according to how it has been configured, and I am under the impression that it is going into some sort of low temperature self-preservation mode, even though the temperature remains well within its operating range. If "SOH" on the web interface means battery state of health, then mine is reporting 0% and my friend's is 100%. I'm seeing red flags everywhere!

[Dave Foster]

The Fox kit has gone though several iterations since you had yours installed, you will likely have an H1 (Gen1) whereas he will be most likely to have a Gen 2 - they are principally the same, where the big differences will come is if you haven’t had your firmware updated as the Gen1 can do esxsentially everything the Gen2 is able to.

Your batteries will be V1 batteries and they don’t report the SoH measurement which in all honesty is not a bad thing as it’s not the best metric - equivalent to sticking your head out of the window to see if it’s raining. Fox themselves specify battery cycles on their literature to gauge lifetime but they use the energy throughput to warranty the batteries as that is the most accurate measure of how much power has gone through the batteries.

PV generation is difficult to quantify as there are so many variables, my friend has a similar sized system to me (6kWp) but on a very sunny day he can produce over 40kW, whereas i’ll be lucky to get 32kW - however from November to February my system outperforms his - so it all depends on how many panels, what elevations, any shadows, do you have optimisers fitted - as you say a good installer should have recommended the right system.

Which batteries do you have HV2600?, Mira, ECS (V1) ?

If you can check your firmware versions, you can do that at the inverter panel in the menu , click ‘About’, then ‘Inv Ver’ and it will show Master, Slave & Manager for your inverter firmware.

Also if you can repeat that operation ‘About’, ‘Bat Ver’ it will show Master & Slave for your batteries.

I can then check you are running the latest versions