FoxESS Community - Owners & Installers Forum

Good evening all, i have plans to buy a KH 10.5 and 1 x master 2.9kw and 4 x slave 2.9kw. My EPS on my solis supplies the whole house. That means during the winter, i dont produce enough power to keep 1 of my lv5200s topped up, let alone 2. In winter, i am practically on grid all the time. So, i unplug one completely when it is full, to save for emergency power cuts. No smart meter so i do not sell back or charge from grid and my kw price from my electric company is a flat rate. Is it possible to set 1 slave to not discharge, i am assuming done in the inverter. So the batteries will only discharge from the master and 3 slaves. I have looked at the manuals for both battery and inverter and cant see anything that says this can be done. But i am hoping there is way apart from physically uninstalling it and putting it in a corner until spring! Thanks.

Hi there

I don't think disconnecting the battery as you describe is a very good plan. Batteries are not like fuel tanks that we simply empty and fill with liquid, they're more like muscles that work together to form a certain amount of output. If you disconnect one battery, you are making the remaining one work harder, because it's the only one in the system. Additionally, removing one of your batteries would mean that the one that remained would wear faster, so when you reconnected it the batteries would be mismatched, which isn't good for the system as a whole.

If you wish to maintain a level of charge in the batteries for potential outages, you generally want to look for a "minimum SOC on grid" or similar parameter in the inverter settings, which will prevent the SOC of the batteries (taken all together) from going below a certain level that you specify, while the system is connected to the grid. This would be different from the general "min SOC" parameter which specifies the minimum SOC the battery can hit under any circumstances.

Hi Calum, I didnt think it was a particularly good idea when i first did it but lack of knowledge meant i didnt want to start changing things in the settings! I have only had it for 15 months and last winter i just shut everything down and took solely from grid. Hopefully by next winter, i will have the new setup. So, if i understand your comment correctly, there are 2 ways of achieving what i want to do with the cube, but it will affect the cube as a whole and not just individual batteries? Ok, thats great. Many thanks for the reply.

Assuming you end up with the KH inverter and a certain amount of battery storage, you could set the "MinSOC on Grid" parameter to say, 70%, but the "minSOC" parameter to say, 15%.

When connected to the grid, your batteries would not discharge below 70% SOC, but in the event of a power cut, they would discharge until they reached 15%.

Clearly, you'd want to size the batteries and the values of the parameters according to the likely duration of an outage and the power consumption you'd expect to have to maintain.

I understand, thank you. The 6kw solis and 2 lv5200s turned out to be a mistake, but neither the seller nor I could have predicted it. I now need to make sure that the KH and a cube is exactly what we need for how we want to use solar. Dave Foster has helped me a lot and actually stopped me buying the wrong batteries! I wish i had thought of looking at forums in the first place! The people on here have been immeasurably helpful to me and i appreciate it. Now i know that keeping some charge as an emergency backup can be done, one more post concerning the versions of batteries and i think i can make plans on where i am going to get the money from for the new system! lol! And working out where to sell the old one, that will be the real challenge! Thanks Calum.

Yep, Dave is a legend and has helped me a lot in getting my system (especially batteries) into good order and talking nicely to my Home Assistant setup. Best of luck for your system changeover.

Thanks. I will need all the luck i can get! lol! Is it alright to just highjack this thread for something else? Just need a yes or no, really, to a question. A thought struck me about the fox cloud. This might be a dealbreaker, on whether i go back to getting a sunsynk or not! We dont do wifi here and only use smartphones when we have to. I know the dongle for the inverter has a LAN connection. My plan was to use a powerline box (we use a few of those already) to connect the inverter to the internet. My solis has a very detailed screen on the inverter which allows me to see exactly what is happening with production etc, the fox has not. Although there is a text screen. I can also log in to solis on my PC and see more details of my system. My concern is that there isnt that possibility with fox. It seems to be all on a phone with wifi. I watched a vid of Wills about home assistant. That isnt going to happen. I am nowhere near techy enough for that. So, am i able to see my system on my PC, in which case, its the fox, or is it solely on phones and wifi (not including home assistant) in which case its the sunsynk! It may seem ridiculous to not have the inverter we want, but there are very good reasons why we wont have anything wifi connected. Thanks.

You can’t connect directly between your pc to the inverter, but you don’t need to rely on apps, you can view everything from your inverter on the foxcloud website at your pc. The inverter usually comes with a wifi data logger but you can get a LAN version of it as you mentioned, and if the cable run is too long, powerlines would do the job. The datalogger updates the cloud every 5 minutes so whilst the data isn’t real time, it’s pretty good for most things.

there are very good reasons why we wont have anything wifi connected.

I am...curious. Care to expand?

Dave Foster wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 9:28 pm You can’t connect directly between your pc to the inverter, but you don’t need to rely on apps, you can view everything from your inverter on the foxcloud website at your pc. The inverter usually comes with a wifi data logger but you can get a LAN version of it as you mentioned, and if the cable run is too long, powerlines would do the job. The datalogger updates the cloud every 5 minutes so whilst the data isn’t real time, it’s pretty good for most things.

Morning Dave, sorry, i should have been clearer with what i wanted to do. Yes, a powerline box by the inverter, connected into the LAN dongle. That will connect the inverter to my router and allow me access on my PC. Assuming the fox cloud exists the same as the solis cloud. Which, apparently, it does! Hooray! I have read all sorts of things about fox cloud, including that it is (or has been, depending on the age of the comment i read) being shut down in favour of the phone app. The LAN dongles are difficult to find. I found 2 places selling them. 1 is the dreaded battery factory, so leaves just 1! The sunsynk dongle is wifi and LAN all in 1, which is better. Ok, so fox it is then! lol! I cant think of anything else that was concerning me about buying the KH and a cube. I measured up the space i have and surprisingly, i can fit the max number of cubes into the space i was struggling to get 3 lv5200s. So i have the room to fit another 2 slaves when the money allows. Yes, very keen on this set up now. Thanks for all the info, Dave. Cheers.

calum wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 11:32 pm

there are very good reasons why we wont have anything wifi connected.

I am...curious. Care to expand?

Hi Calum, mainly health reasons. The man made frequencies are highly destructive. To all life, including plant life. Natural frequencies are everything. Its how nature works. Without going too deep, my diabetic readings halved overnight when i switched the wifi off. My partners fluoride poisoning ( they call it rheumatoid arthritis!) is affected by wifi. Her joint pain noticeably worsens around wifi. There are a lot of class action suits going on in America by people coming down with all sorts of cancer after a mast has been erected. One of them is by attendants of a primary school. They erected a mast within feet of this school. Within 5 years, 80% of everyone at that school, children, teachers, maintenance, had come down with some sort of cancer. Its a huge, very public class action but you wont hear about it on mainstream news. Soon after, president clinton signed into law that you cannot refuse to have a mast erected anywhere the companies want to put one. And also, you cant sue the communication company for any ill health side effects! They know its dangerous. A petition has been going on for a very long time in the UK. 100s of very high, very respected, top of their field scientists and doctors, have been trying to stop the roll-out of 5G until more research has been done. Of course, government went ahead anyway. The reason they want 5G implemented, really isn't a rabbit hole you want to go down! And it isnt so you can download films faster! If you want to scare yourself, look into how they got to the "safe" amount of radiation permitted by smartphones. It involved a crash test dummies head filled with chemicals that soak up radiation. A smartphone was taped to its head. After 10 minutes!! they tested to see how much radiation was inside the dummies head. And that amount is bandied about by phone manufacturers, saying their phones do not leak as much radiation as the governments "official maximum safety levels"! It was done just once, for 10 minutes decades ago. In fact it may have been 5 minutes, thinking about it. The fact that everyones head is different, should point to this as ridiculous. But when you consider it was only 2g they tested and a comparatively low power phone, you realise how out of date this number is, even if it was an acceptable test. So, wifi is just bad for your health and dont even get me started on smart meters! lol!