Tag: eg4 chargeverter

EG4 Chargeverter, Ooo, We Had A Power Failure!

I wanted to take a look at the EG4 48V Chargeverter and I finally had a chance to try it over the weekend. I got in three more EG4LL batteries last Tuesday and before they could be installed they had to be at the same voltage as the existing batteries in order to avoid problems. So that meant they had to be charged up from about 54% to 99%. So this was a good opportunity to test it.

It’s that small yellow box on the floor. Not the best picture in the world, I know.

In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I got the Chargeverter free from Signature Solar. They were running a deal where you’d get the device if you bought a package deal with two EEG6500EX inverters. Normally it sells for about $500.

So why does someone need this device? Well if you are really off grid or you are in an extended power outage, and you aren’t getting enough solar power to keep your batteries charged because of cloudy conditions, you’re going to need to recharge those batteries somehow if you want to keep your electrical devices working. And chances are good you’re going to turn to a good old fashioned gasoline powered backup generator to recharge those batteries. And that’s where this yellow box comes in.

Someone will point out that many inverters like my 6500EX already have AC powered battery chargers built into them. Just plug the 120V AC input on the inverter into the generator and let it charge the batteries. And you can, in theory, but there are some serious issues with that. There have been reports of people wrecking their inverter/chargers by trying to do just that. Apparently a lot of these inverter/chargers don’t work very well with backup generators. The problem is that a lot of these generators put out some of the nastiest, dirtiest, power imaginable with lots of voltage fluctuations. The inverter/chargers expect to see nice, clean, steady, pure 120V AC sine wave power coming in from the utility company, while the power coming out of some of these generators is so bad it can actually damage the inverter/charger.

The EG4 Chargeverter is designed specifically for these situations. It’s intended to plug directly into the 240V socket of a backup generator, convert that power to nice, steady 48V DC, and pump that into your batteries. Well actually 56V AC but I’ll come to that in a moment.

Yes, I said 240V. This thing can be rewired to work off 120V or you can get adaptors to let it do so, but you’re going to need at least a 120V, 30 Amp circuit power this thing if you’re going to try to use it off our house’s electrical system. If you have a 240V electric clothes dryer you might be able to plug it into that with the right adaptor but I don’t really care about that so I didn’t look into it. I’m interested in running this thing off a backup generator.

Since this charger can suck up at least 5KW of power to dump into the batteries, you’re going to want a fairly hefty generator to plug it into. You can use a smaller one but you’re going to need to adjust the power level of the charger to a lower amperage or you’re going to overload the generator. I’m using it with my big Generac 7.5 KW gasoline generator.

I bolted the plus and minus cables from the chargeverter to the battery. I started up the Generac….

Ah, the Generac… I have a love/hate relationship with that generator. It hasn’t been used much over the years, there are only a few hours on it and most of that is from test runs. It can be a real beast to get started. It has electric start, which generally doesn’t work because no one ever remembers to put the battery on the maintainer, so that means it either has to be jump started from an battery pack or started with the recoil starter. I will not describe the language I used trying to get that thing going with the pull starter. I finally found one of those jump starter packs used to jump start cars and used that to power the electric starter and got it going. Once it’s running, it’s fine. When the engine is warm, it’s fine. But starting it that first time…

Never mind. I got it started, plugged in the chargeverter and… And the engine immediately died. WTF?

I started it again. I plugged in the chargeverter and… And the engine immediately died again. WTF?

Oh… I forgot to turn the gas on. Sigh…

Now with the generator finally running, I plugged in the chargeverter. The display came on. I used the buttons on the front to set the voltage to 55.5V and the amperage to 50A, and flipped on the circuit breaker to start it up and, well, it just worked exactly the way it was supposed to.

It was really going to be that easy? Apparently it was. According to the display on the battery it was being charged with about 48.5 amps of current. Cool.

I kicked the amperage up to 80A which made the generator work a bit hard for the first time in its life and the battery reported it was getting 78.8 amps…

What can I say? It just worked exactly as specified.

I charged all three batteries from about 50% to 99% in about two hours total.

The only issue is that the case of that charger gets seriously hot, hot enough to be painful to touch but the manual warns of this so it wasn’t unexpected.

I like it when things just work.

EG4 6500EX and EG4LL Battery long term evaluation.

This is another rather dull report because the EG4 6500EX inverters have just plain worked. Something that was made abundantly clear when we had a power failure this morning about 8 AM that lasted for about two hours. First the power flickered out for about 10 seconds or so around 7:3o. And then at around 8 it went out completely and stayed out. So down into the basement I scurried, flipped a couple of circuit breakers and we were back to the electrical system running normally in about a minute. Furnace, sump pumps, furnace (weather changed from hot and dry to cold and wet so the sump pumps and the furnace have all been running), lights, microwave and, most important of all in the early morning, the coffee maker, all worked just fine and dandy.

The outage lasted about two hours and even the sump pumps weren’t a problem. By the time power came back on the batteries were still at about 95%. Granted we weren’t using a lot of power. The sump pumps only cycled once and the furnace only ran for a few minutes.

Anyway I’m quite pleased with the system. It’s nice to be able to just switch over like that with just a couple of circuit breakers and get back to normal.

Flocks of Phlox, Irises, and Stuff.

I managed to injure my left leg when I was wrestling around with those massive batteries for the solar power system so my physical activity was seriously limited for a couple of weeks. Yesterday was the first day I felt comfortable enough to get out on the bike for an extended ride, and it was a great day to start. Was absolutely beautiful out with temps in the high 70s and a gentle breeze.

Phlox everywhere. They’re pretty but they’re an invasive species that spreads very aggressively in this area.

I injured my left calf pretty seriously back in the 1990s in a farm accident. Took me 6 weeks to recover from that one and ever since I’ve had to be cautious with that leg. Lugging 100 lb batteries down the basement stairs and into the battery cabinet didn’t do the leg any good. Neither did repeatedly kneeling down on the floor to work on wiring.

Out in the gardens the irises are coming into full bloom. They don’t bloom for very long but when they do that whole area is covered with these amazing flowers in brilliant blue, purple and yellow. When the sun hits them the colors are so brilliant they almost glow.

Alas the flowers don’t last long but by the time they fade away others will have blossomed to take their place.

More solar stuff: I really need to do some meaningful testing of the EG4 system to get some basic data about run times and things like that. I can guess how long the batteries will last when running the house off the EG4 system but I don’t have any actual operational data giving me actual run times under particular sets of circumstances and things like that. Two days ago I started it up, took the house off-grid and ran entirely from the EG4 system starting at 7 AM and ending at 3 PM, a total of 8 hours. At the end of that time the batteries were still at about 78% capacity because we had a pretty good day for solar production. While that was interesting I really need to see how long I can run the house just off the batteries, with no solar power at all.

The string of Newpowa panels have been peaking at around 1,000 watts, and the HQST panels at around 600 watts. That’s less their rated peak output which should be around 1,320 and 800 respectively. The HQST panels were putting out close to 700W earlier this year so I know they can do better than what I’m seeing. And the weather was clear with bright sunshine…

Or was it? The sky looked clear when looking straight up, but if you’d look towards the horizon it was a different story. The wind shifted again and we’re back to getting air quality alerts because of the forest fires in Canada. It looks clear and sunny but it really isn’t. There is a significant amount of fine particulate material floating around in the atmosphere that is cutting back on the amount of solar radiation that is reaching the ground. What it boils down to is that I theoretically have enough solar out there to take my batteries from about 50% to near 100% in one day of full sun. In reality, with variable cloud conditions and the smoke from the fires, I’m lucky if I get half of that.

(And I can sure tell there are air quality problems with my allergies, too. I was up at 3 AM this morning with my head so stuffed up I could hardly breathe. I gave up trying to get back to sleep. Since all of this air quality stuff started I’ve been having problems sleeping, stuffed up sinuses, etc. Makes it very hard for me to stay asleep. I’ve generally been waking up around 3 or 4 AM and find it almost impossible to get back to sleep again. Running on four or five hours of sleep is unpleasant. Sigh…)

This thing started out at around $500 but is currently selling for $399 over at Signature Solar. In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I got this thing free from Signature Solar.

Speaking of battery charging I got one of these in earlier this week from Signature Solar, the EG4 Chargeverter, a 48V battery charger that plugs into a 240V AC power source to rapidly recharge LiFePo batteries. This thing can put out up to 100 Amps which means it could fully recharge my 15 KWh of batteries in just 3 hours. It’s only been on the market for a few months and I’m curious to see how well it works so when I get a chance to check it out I’ll talk about it in the future.

Now why would someone need one of these? After all a lot of modern inverters like my EG4 6500EX already have built in AC battery chargers. I could wire my EG4s directly to the house’s AC power and they would automatically keep the batteries topped up even when there is no solar. But a lot of these systems are sold to people who are entirely off the grid. They have no connection to the grid at all. (And my system has no grid connection.) If they don’t get enough solar power to keep their batteries topped up, they have to resort to using a gasoline powered generator to charge them up. And that’s where the problems come in. These cheap, gasoline generators often produce very dirty power that isn’t even close to a pure sine wave and which can damage electronics. This chargeverter apparently doesn’t care how dirty the AC power coming into it may be. So if you’re living entirely off the grid, or if you’re going through an extended blackout and there isn’t enough solar to keep the batteries charged, you could plug this thing into a cheap Harbor Freight generator to charge your batteries and not have to worry about damaging anything.

I have a 7,500W Generac gasoline generator sitting out in the garage and this thing should plug right into it so I’ll be testing this out in the near future. If it works as advertised it will probably be kept permanently wired up to the bus bars in the battery cabinet. I doubt if it will get much use but it could come in very handy if we have an extended power outage.

What I’ll probably do is run my batteries down to about 25% and then try charging them with the chargeverter connected to the Generac and see what happens.

And that’s about it for now