EP11 with heater

[MaterialBarracuda48]

Suggest it is not heating, since the temperature keeps dropping. My battery is outside, and currently it's around 0 degrees, looks like my charging kicked in around 16:08 today and it took 30 minutes to get BMS Cell Temp Low from 9 to 14 degrees

I agree, the logs are showing a lack of heating.

I am still on v1.009, yesterday temp was 6C for many hours, my heater min is 9C. The odd thing was, my phone was showing the heater animation, refreshing the screen, opening and closing the app it was same... perfect you would have thought.

Reality was, the battery didn't heat at all for me, flatlined at 6C. This was why I asked for the new v1.011, hoping it fixes the flakey heating. I know now that the new version is still broken, maybe there is a 1.012+ in pipeline as I suspect there are loads of tickets hitting them.

Your heater taking 30 mins was really fast, mine takes approx 55 mins from starting to end point in garage 9C to 15C. You probably have a very good battery heater, maybe the contact pad is making better contact.

[maccoylton]

Bottom line is battery charging algorithm is flakey, BTW I am on 1.09

For me, my Issue is sometime when it needs to heat, the inverter goes into a reboot loop and doesn't recover until I manually power down and power back up my battery/inverter and solar. I believe this happens when it needs to move from using the solar/battery to using the grid,

Workarounds mentioned elsewhere are turn off PV or only heat during a force charge schedule, both of which kind of defeat the purpose.

Waiting to hear back from Fox...been a few days now.

[danielk]

I'm still waiting on an upgrade too.

While I wait, I've been on 1.009 for a while and haven't got it to work.

I've just noticed, when the heater has tried to activate, I'm getting hit with this error:

Error Code: 45
Description: The isolation resistance of the PV (photovoltaic) plant is abnormal.

This only appears when the heater is activated and does not come back when it's deactivated.

Anyone else seen this?

[Starshots]

I've posted much of this on FB today but then found this topic on the forum.

So in Nov 25 I upgraded from 2 x EP11 to 4 x EP11 batteries. All good. Didn't actually check what charge performance was as assumed would be OK.

Noticed a couple of days back I was only charging overnight (00.00 to 07.00) to 60%. Spoke to installer and they contacted Fox who did a Firmware update to bring the old (6 months old) and new ones to the same level.

Didn't make any difference except to make my over charge go only to 28%. Spoke to installer again who turned on battery heating but did half a job as didn't set the parameters for heating. Been chasing all day as battery stuck on 28% and all power coming from grid. Next they set the battery parameters temps and ask me to set the schedule. Battery was at 5.4 degrees and with heating on slowly dropped to 5 degrees. Still no battery discharge.

To save me going bankrupt I've turned of the heating and now discharging the 28% I have. I hope the batteries charge overnight as set to force charge. Have copied the link to this post to the installer for them to speak to Fox again. I'm told it will be fixed but I'm ready to invoke Sale of Goods and have the extra batteries removed and get a refund.

[philt1808]

Just to add to the number of issues currently with the heating...

My firmware was updated yesterday to 1.11. My 2 EP11s discharged yesterday from around 60% to 10%. I've always had the mode scheduler set to charge at cheap rate from 11.30pm to 5.30am so this was left as normal. I added in the battery warm up timings to match this and set 2 slots as suggested: 11:31 to 11:59 and 00:01 to 05:30. When I got up this morning, the battery was at 20% charge but around 10C when it was 1C outside.

From this point, until there's better firmware, I'm not going to schedule any heating times and just turn off the heating function prior to the overnight charge. If it looks like it's going to be particularly cold then I'll heat the batteries for the hour or so before the charging period and when they drop too low through the day.

[jonathanb48]

Would love to know where I can find those lovely temperature graphs in the fox app or do I need to go to the desk top version ?

[albie999]

Would love to know where I can find those lovely temperature graphs in the fox app or do I need to go to the desk top version ?

Which temperature graphs are you talking about?

[maccoylton]

You can see these in HomeAssistant if you have it and a modbus connected to your inverter or you can also now see them online in latest version of the foxcloud.

Will did a video recently here:-

[jonathanb48]

I see don’t have home assistant and have not ventured beyond the app so far - much tech investigation to do !

[albie999]

I see don’t have home assistant and have not ventured beyond the app so far - much tech investigation to do !

Home Assistant is powerful ... but needs a lot of care and attention ...... and to get the most potential out of it .. need to be a bit of a geek

[MaterialBarracuda48]

You can see these in HomeAssistant if you have it and a modbus connected to your inverter or you can also now see them online in latest version of the foxcloud.

Hat's off to you in "Today I Learned" I was just taking a look at the latest v2 site a moment ago, and see your post.

[maccoylton]

I had another occurrence of the reboot loop today with the Over-current Fault. Using the new graphing on FOX Cloud here is what I see.

The issue happened when:-

• I am in self use mode
  The battery temp has reached the trigger temperature, its' set to heat for 9 to 13
  The SOC is at 40% or lower and therefore heating from battery power is no longer possible
  Heating is enabled 7x24 - 00:00-23:59

The heating cycle can be seen in the morning when the SOC is >40%, then around 13:03 ( reported by modbus) or (13:30 in the Fox app/cloud) the issue happens

There is some PV, but possibly not enough to heat and when the fault happens the PV power drops to zero ?

And the voltage on the PV strings jumps, I assume they have gone open circuit due to the fault.

You can also see it looks like the battery starts to charge very briefly (-ve) and the stops

On days where I have good PV production it runs all day ok, it;s there is low or no solar, and it's cold i.e. heating is required I see issues.

Today to get my system back up and running I switched off PV strings using the DC isolators, waited until I saw the inverter was back on the grid and saw it heating, presumable at this stage using grid power (its difficult to tell charging vs house load) , and then I turned the PV string back on.

Interestingly another user suggested they have tested as a workaround to only heat when mode is force charge. So it really does seem like this is related to the switch of heating sources in self use mode.