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I'm a power systems engineer with a bit of experience with off grid systems (used to be in a similar situation to you) If you want any advice on improving your current power system without evaporating huge amounts of cash.

The joys of competing design criteria: The high fault currents available in substations and big generator areas mean that solid busbars are necessary due to the magnetic attraction and repulsion between conductors. It's a calculation I haven't done in quite a while but the forces can be hundreds...

Living in the shaky isles (Seeing the ground rolling like the ocean is quite something) I like to use flexible conductor jumpers with crimped and heat shrunk lugs. This allows for more ground rock n roll without damage. Lug in direct contact with the post, flat and a spring washer on top. From...

Sharing knowledge is how we all learn :) Funnily enough the only traction battery experience I have is with lithium chemistries.

The discharge curves look pretty similar to me, looks as though you can just compare amp hours to amp hours there. That is 600Ah of Trojan is going to perform more or less the same as 600Ah of SBS. Peukert's law is pretty universal across all lead chemistries: Peukert's law - Wikipedia

For a full pallet I'd offer maybe 1.5x the going scrap rate, it's a quick profir for him and a cheap battery pack for you.

Do you know how old they are and what their previous application was? I'd definitely load and capacity test a few before agreeing on any price that is significantly above the scrap value of lead batts. Around here it's around $1/kg

So far just winter level rain for us, nothing major. The main grid operator has lost a 110 and a 220kV bus in one region so it's quite serious north of us. One region with zero comms.

Something like this: The autotransformer is configured as a step up transformer to take 120V in and output 120-0-120V, would connect to the generator AC input terminals on the inverter. These are good autotransformer application notes for inverter and generator systems: 2. Introduction

So the inverter can provide a "grid" for the solar city AC system to synchronise to, no charge controller needed. The other one I was thinking is that you could feed the input of the inverter using your small honda with an autotransformer to give you 120/240. Incoming cyclone generator...

I'd be interested to see a comparison using the honda inverter generator feeding the AC input to the inverter. Also your inverter supports AC coupled solar soooo in an emergency it should be possible to get your solar city panels to feed the system AC Coupling Application Note | Schneider...

What's the model number of your inverter again 90? I have two ideas :)

Nice data there, You can probably lengthen your cycle time significantly by increasing your cutoff voltage a bit. I wouldn't be worried by making the shutoff voltage as high as 29 or even 30 volts, especially in colder weather. Given that lead acid batteries don't charge that much until they...

I'd argue that the most reliable way to start a generator would be a spring starter Spring Starters - SureStart Actual battery wise, at least early on in my career while working in telecommunications (very remote sites with "has to work" levels of reliability) flooded NiCD was considered the...

Disclaimer: I live in 230/400V land so can't try myself, however I am an EE... I don't see why you couldn't make up your own 240V "parallel" unit for 2x 120V inverter generators (that support parallel operation) by using a 120/240V autotransformer or a 120:120 isolating transformer wired with...

Is the solar system DC string or micro inverter based? When my friend's DC string inverter blew up, we connected some industrial 24V power supplies to the strings using a couple of MC4 leads: Not efficient but it was way better than getting 0W out of the panels while the grid was down.

Re: Lead chemistries, I'd be comfortable with Flooded lead acid in a basement situation provided they had recombination caps like these Recombination Vent Cap for Lead Acid Batteries | SBS Battery The Yuasa AGM (20 years design life) pack in our solar system has a similar tech built in: That...

If they're 1.2v/cell then they're most likely NiCd chemistry. Definitely get some of those if you can! They have a super low internal resistance so are good for running inverters and being rapidly recharged. Feeding a little more complex than lead chemistries as they're more of a constant...

Have a read of this PDF for starters: https://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/Energy_Storage_System/ESS_design_and_installation_manual-en.pdf

I'm 90% confident I could design a battery/inverter setup that would play ball with your solar city system and keep it live during outages if you're keen.

It all comes back to using heaps of electricity... Direct air capture of CO2 needs a heap of energy: In rough numbers, there's around 420ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere presently or 0.042% So to get 1kg of CO2 out of the atmosphere you need to move around 2381kg (1977 cubic metres) of air through...

Once we started looking, ostrich was surprisingly easy to get hold of here in NZ from slightly more specialty butchers. We don't really know when the allergy started though she was around 18 or 19 when it became very apparent.

My sister has something similar though not tick related as far as we can tell: She can't eat any mammalian protein whatsoever but dairy products are ok for her. Unhelpfully she's very sensitive to a lot of the available iron supplements too, Ostrich is a good source of high iron protein :)

I have the same issue on my Massey Ferguson 40 Industrial, just ordered one of these: Power Steering Valve Seal Kit Fits for Massey Ferguson 20 30 40 135 148 158 230 | eBay I will report back when it arrives.

The battery management electronics in cordless tool packs use upper and lower cell voltages for the full while charging and empty while discharging thresholds. For the level of charge in between they use coulomb counting which gives quite an accurate state of charge. Using cell voltages...

I have the same 500A tester as GRS just locally branded, I find it really handy as an approximate assessment of battery health. Reminds me of hunting out all the dead batteries in the off grid solar system just after buying our house: Going through with a battery tester after sundown and the...

I've used a couple of different power quality analysers, favourite so far is the PQ Box series by A-Eberle Network analyzer PQ-Box 150 | A. EBERLE around $20k NZd from memory. I put it in the main switchboard during this hot changeover to generator test: the transients were in the order of 6x...

This discussion makes me miss my old job at the technical college: I had seven figures worth of electrical engineering lab and test equipment at my disposal... I could have setup some really cool demonstrations in response to the questions being asked here.

So I had an engineering hunch that a "Constant Voltage Transformer" would be the miracle fix in the case of small to medium scale generator power (Last time I covered them was in 2005, I feel old) and yes a CVT will eat a square wave supply and give you a sine wave output: What is a Constant...

Re: THD from inverter generators. They SHOULD be universally better but it depends on how well the output filtering is built. Re: Removing THD. We can go on a rabbithole of filtering, ferro resonant transformers and other voodoo if it's not too much of a thread hijack :)

You need a Double Conversion UPS for getting rid of crunchy AC like that.

Speaking from experience: I would suggest you try and avoid "glue" logic in the form of separate timers where possible. When things don't quite behave then headaches can occur. I would connect things as follows: Only needs one of the ordinary relays you posted a photo of a week or so ago, I've...

Inductance is not a factor with coiled extension cords, explained here far more clearly than I can achieve this early in the morning: Why is it dangerous use a coiled extension cord In short, as you have both conductors in the "same coil" then the net ampturns is zero.

Does your cable have aluminium conductors perchance? I'm seeing more and more "stuff" made with alloy that should not be. Also re: extension cables coiled up, it's just resistive heat build up (cable touching cable has less surface area to shed heat) and nothing to do with induction :)

Yep, I have 22kW available in a socket outlet just outside the kitchen: ~32A 400V. Even our hob is 400V, having 3 phase makes running machine tools at home a lot easier. Guessing that's due to a combination of more sites where multiple houses share the same transformer, the multiple earthed...

Thanks, ruined by me installing it temporarily 😁

Victron's Multiplus 2 inverters have the ability to play ball with something like the solar city grid tied inverters: Meaning you can AC couple your battery system to the house and solar system.

I quite like using finger trunking to keep the panels I build organised: Above is a work in progress (one of the few non commercially sensitive photos I could find 😂) capping not yet installed on the trunking. Would it be possible to duct some waste heat from the generator to the batteries in...

Agree with Fallon, you want the generator to only do the bulk charging as the grid will take care of the finer battery management. To go a bit further, I think a lot of those settings will have minimal effect anyway as I believe they're more for when the controller is talking to the schneider...

Sounds like you're 90% there now, as you say with the way it's wired now, the controller thinks the motor is running even if it isn't. Oil pressure switch will sort that issue nicely. It will also serve to shut things down if it loses oil pressure while running.

Edit: You will probably need to increase the run hold time a bit to allow for the oil pressure to come up.

OK cool, try this: Oil pressure lamp is optional, added purely for diagnostic purposes. You want relay common contact connected to 28V and the Normally Closed (NC) contact is connected to your pin 12 running input to the controller.

Ok this one won't go out of my head :) Napa have oil pressure switches with both normally open and normally closed contacts: https://www.napaonline.com/en/p/BK_7011607 One of those controlling pin 12 should 100% do what you need without any relays or anything else.

Cool this is really good progress! Does the generator have an hour meter? We can probably take a "running" feed from that if so. If it doesn't, I'll draw you up a circuit diagram to use a relay from the oil pressure switch.

Sounds good, happy to spend some time on the phone if useful.

OK I've emerged from the rabbit hole 😂 To make sure we're talking about the same things, I'll add a lot of screen shots: From my understanding 90, you have type 7 configured with a RUN and a START wire connected. Please correct me if I'm wrong but it sound like the AGS will start the gen...

Sounds like I'm going to be putting my control systems hat on for this one, will let my morning coffee take effect and get reading. I have a hunch already but won't speculate until I've read more of the manual.

Have you got a link to the unit in question? I might be able to provide an electrical engineering opinion on where to start.

This is a slight tangent from generators but I think relevant so bear with me: Interestingly for whatever reason the 12V auxiliary battery charge profile on a lot of EV systems is useless to put it politely. Our Nissan leaf only briefly pushes the battery to 14.4V after "booting" the car, it...

58Hz will be to ensure that any solar and or battery system connected shuts down. Victron use frequency shift in their inverters to shut down AC coupled solar panels. Fronius use it similarly too.