Paul Camilli
19th September 2016, 11:53
I'm running a 3.2kW 'grid tied' wind turbine on an 'off grid' system and on the whole it's worked very well. My system uses and SMA SI 6.0H inverter/charger but with the frequency shifting function disabled. For the first year I used an SMA WB6000 GTI in my own 'mini grid'. This worked really well, apart from the SMA's inability to harvest any energy below 240VDC and it's 'long winded' reconnection procedure.
For the last six months or so I've been using an Aurora PowerOne 3.6TL and it's 'streets ahead' of the SMA, easy to program and capable of sapping energy from the gentlest of breezes. Now, I never expected this inverter to 'sit well' with my Lister generator as it was never designed for doing so. However, when I tried it, it did!!! and it was quite happy feeding into my 'island' with the generator running.
Having said that, I only ever tried it for a few minutes at a time as we've plenty of energy from our solar, wind an hydro. Well the days are getting shorter now and yesterday the batteries were only at 75% at the end of the day. So, as wifey still needed to do some washing, ironing and showering I fired up the generator for 2 hours.
The house is 'all electric' so that requires quite a few kWh and I didn't want to take the batteries any lower. Sure enough, when I fired up the Lister I kept an eye on the Aurora until the transfer switched closed and sure enough it continued to keep feeding the wind energy into my grid. Two hours later with the batteries at 93% I went to shut the genny down and still the Aurora was connected, having produced a couple of kWh in the meantime.
Unfortunately once the transfer switch opened it 'dropped the grid' and would not reconnect. Error message saying Frequency out of range 50.99Hz and it just would not reconnect.
Out came the laptop and I connected up using the Administrator password and sure enough it tells me that the frequency upper limit is 50.49Hz. Now, I'm sure I'd altered this in the past to widen the parameters. However last night it would not let me alter anything other than the 'island' enable or disable setting.
After a few hours the frequency on the SMA SI dropped to 49.99Hz and the Aurora connected. I'm just wondering if there is some kind of time limit on the Admin password and puzzled why the parameters appeared to have returned to the default settings.
Cheers, Paul
For the last six months or so I've been using an Aurora PowerOne 3.6TL and it's 'streets ahead' of the SMA, easy to program and capable of sapping energy from the gentlest of breezes. Now, I never expected this inverter to 'sit well' with my Lister generator as it was never designed for doing so. However, when I tried it, it did!!! and it was quite happy feeding into my 'island' with the generator running.
Having said that, I only ever tried it for a few minutes at a time as we've plenty of energy from our solar, wind an hydro. Well the days are getting shorter now and yesterday the batteries were only at 75% at the end of the day. So, as wifey still needed to do some washing, ironing and showering I fired up the generator for 2 hours.
The house is 'all electric' so that requires quite a few kWh and I didn't want to take the batteries any lower. Sure enough, when I fired up the Lister I kept an eye on the Aurora until the transfer switched closed and sure enough it continued to keep feeding the wind energy into my grid. Two hours later with the batteries at 93% I went to shut the genny down and still the Aurora was connected, having produced a couple of kWh in the meantime.
Unfortunately once the transfer switch opened it 'dropped the grid' and would not reconnect. Error message saying Frequency out of range 50.99Hz and it just would not reconnect.
Out came the laptop and I connected up using the Administrator password and sure enough it tells me that the frequency upper limit is 50.49Hz. Now, I'm sure I'd altered this in the past to widen the parameters. However last night it would not let me alter anything other than the 'island' enable or disable setting.
After a few hours the frequency on the SMA SI dropped to 49.99Hz and the Aurora connected. I'm just wondering if there is some kind of time limit on the Admin password and puzzled why the parameters appeared to have returned to the default settings.
Cheers, Paul