Great critical review Andy. Not only is it valuable to Seplos, but also to other manufacturers. They get to see what the competition have, and they get to see the good and bad. The things you have mentioned are generally universal amongst other customers. In an age of too many "reviews" being sponsored and censored before release, it's great to see genuine stuff coming out.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia We are discussing feeding and housing Communists? Our ancestors, fought and died so we could be members of the Christian Race (pure-blood) and free of Tyranny? Making a better Commie, one affiliate link at a time.
The seplos doesn't stop at 95%. It keeps charging until pack voltage is above the set limit. But it does request the charger to lower the charge current (if possible, charger does not need to answer to it) at around that point. First it steps down to max 10A and further on it request only 2A. This allows a slow steep to the max voltage. As you know, a higher current results in a higher overal voltage so high current can easily cause one cell to go overvoltage. This is the MAIN reason why you need communcation to the charger. Even a high current balancer couldn't keep this up. And yes, 2A is still too much for the 150mA passive balancer but my experience is that the BMS keeps the cells perfectly in balance. And what is your problem with connecting the two BMS-es? They should just work togegher. And no, if one BMS shuts down his pack (for any reason) it will not cause the other BMS to shut down. This is not true.
Andy has different BMS submodels 10D and 10C I belive, those are different on a comm side. You need to match them but it doesn't say upfront anywhere so many fall into this trap. JK is even more fun, they sell different BMSes under the same part number... Dealing with china is a pain in you know what and with the tripping shipping costs may not even be feasible soon. Too bad we don't have an open source platform for this... BTW, these bms are made and branded for seplos. Seplos is just a reseller.
Thanks a lot, Igor. That is great information. Glad you shared this here. So from my understanding, the BMS just gives the signal to slow charging but does not itself limit the current. This would mean though, that all other banks will receive this current as well. So not just this one bank will be charged slower but the whole battery system as such. With the standard settings of the BMS, mine stopped charging at 95% so I thought this is a default setting. I could not see it slowing down at this point but as you said, it may just send the signal for that via CAN. More testing coming to fully understand this system. Thanks again, much appreciated.
Thanks for posting this. This is the main reason for comms (charge and discharge current control). Andy’s testing won’t work as he has a raspberry pi and will either need to get a can hat and program that (that video would be hilarious), or get a cerbo.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia yes the other banks will receive the lower charge current also. But due to the automatic balance in parallel packs they are also at or nearly at the high voltage high soc point. All packs have the same charge voltage. As soon as one pack reaches high soc it will first receive less current just due too how parallel packs work
Effectivement ton constat est honnête et mérite que SEPLOS ce penche sur ces améliorations techniques ... toutefois je reste convaincu par la qualité de ton choix sur ce KIT SEPLOS et je le trouve superbe pour construire soit même sa batterie, surtout pour tout ceux qui aime ta chaîne UA-cam et qui aime l'aventure technique. Merci encore pour toutes ces remarques et bonne continuation.
I have 3 Selpos Mason 206Ah 10.5kWh battery packs, which uses the 3.2v 206Ah Prismatic Battery Cell modules, and just like yours the the battery packs came disassembled, so the BMS setup procedure is necessary because you are acting as the assembly line in a factory. These packs are design for this in mind. In fact the Mason Battery Pack I have, which has those click on/off connectors you pointed out are design for vehicles, not home storage hence the lack of a cut off switch. I am now about to order their Pusung 135Ah 7kWh 51.2v Battery Pack which is designed for home storage and comes with a cut off switch. Your review is very honest and I can agree with most all of the findings you've made. To answer your question on joining to packs together and the master BMS having autonomy over the 2 packs is correct. The lowest cell module will determine the cut off procedure for the entire bank.
Here in USA 🇺🇸 EG4 battery 🔋 is a much cheaper and better salutation for me at $ 1,400 bucks. There well made and work really nice when paired with EG4 6,500 watt converter at $1,200. But I really enjoyed watching your videos and that was a great honest review of this battery system thanks.
Tangential: It seems that there is a specification of Seplos RS485 protocol available on the internet. If it is accurate, it means that a custom monitoring and management software for such a BMS could be built fairly quickly. It might be running on a small computer like a Raspberry Pi which could then have a web interface. It could effectively serve as an alternative to native mobile application connected over Bluetooth. And it should be simpler to integrate into home automation systems like Home Assistant.
I use ICM Pi software. Connects to seplos bms and the inverter and I can import all the data into home assistant using mqtt. Then I use home assistant automations to control everything.
there are already support for home assistant, and other python script to monitor. the only thing not available is settings documentation, but anything readonly is implemented already
It’s always a GOOD day when there’s another video to watch from Andy! As always…… Thanks Andy 👍, love your work, (and always love your sense of humour too!) Great summary - I totally concur with your summation. There is much to like about the Seplos, BUT I do think the Seplos BMS is a fail though, simply because of ultra low balance current, and lack of BT access. They desperately need to improve that. I also agree- a cooling fan for the battery box would definitely be desirable for warm climates. Personally: I’d buy the box, but not the electronic components that come with it.
I agree about buying the case at this stage, but it will be interesting to see what Andy’s high amp/load tests reveal on the temperature side of things too, within the individual cases themselves would be good to see how different batteries may vary, or if they even do get very hot, Im sure Andy will do his best to find out. Cheers
Thank you, Dave. We will do a high amp discharge test once it gets warmer down here. Really want to see what is going on inside this box at high temperatures.
Andy has a video setting his Victron SCC to 27.60V (if I remember correctly). I wonder, if internal Battery Source resistance is say 20 milli Ohm per cell, does his Voltage limit setting , which sets when the SCC will switch from constant current charging mode to constant voltage absorption (which has a corresponding high but declining current charge) effectively amount to 'clamping' (I don't know the more usual technical term here) the Charging Source of the MPPT controller, so reflected to the Battery as a "load" the internal resistance of the battery is the series connection with say 16S cells plus the 'apparent internal resistance of the charging source as if it were a load'. I have a Daly 4S, and recently reviewed Andy's video on the Daly which didn't see it as being made great again, and the Daly switches of charge MOSFET at 14V, which would be 28V for 8S bank. Balancing also switches off. So Andy's recommendation to set Victron gear to charge at 27.6V means charging and balancing continues in 'absorption mode', at a relatively high 50Amps for my setup. The Daly cannot balance the cells as the highest cell reaches 3.65V whilst the lowest is 200mV below that when the battery reaches 14V, and the balancer and charger is switched off by the Daly, but as it floats the cell differential voltage drops yet no absorption is permitted by charger if I were to set Absorption at Manufacturers 14.6V recommendation. It's a brand new battery. So I'm wondering if Seplos is a better option if I want to connect to my Victron GX and run DVCC. Does Andy have a review on this Seplos connecting to Raspberry Pi? Does a low absorption voltage setting of 27.6V clamp any high cell runaway voltage due to internal relatively high cell resistance and because the cells internal resistance is in series with the solar charger, the SCC looks from the battery to be a much higher impedance/resistance that forces any runaway voltage rise to stay set at 27.6V whilst current amps are still permitted to flow into the battery, even into the high cell which is also 'clamped' whilst the Daly or Seplos could still 'balance' with low balance current limits?? Hmm I really wonder about this stuff.
I am truly considering buying two of the big cases, but the shipping cost needs to go down! And I really like your videos! You have both knowledge, charisma and you have a really cool accent 👍🏻😁 Greetings from Norway 🇳🇴
Be very carefull cause one point has not been mentioned but had happened in germany several times. If you order such big Mason Diy Kit you will pay the bill incl. shipping and norwegian import duty and sales taxes upfront. So far so good. One morning a courier driver will ring on your door and give you a parcel but first asking you for handing over taxes and in case of bad luck you will pay the import stuff again for the small BMS they had shipped later but arrives earlier incl. a bill of the full diy package about 800 and more €. The norwegian customs then will do the math and ask maybe for 20% on top of the 800€ bill and therefore you would have to pay 160€. You will pay that believing you will get it back but SEPLOS does not care at all, even in cases where you would only have a bill of 230€ for the BMS and the then 46€ duties on top. You will be lost in these cases and Norways finance agency will benefit and SEPLOS. So you need to make sure that youi pay with paypal and nothing else to fight against Seplos mismanagement.
Good day to you dear Andy, The need for balancing could be determined by expressing that when one cell is “behind” this will be the “king” of the total pack (battery). When all cells are within specs, it is most important to top-balance the pack. Otherwise the one cell is demanding his/her SOC to the whole package. Although this has being covered by you very well, some of us are does not being aware of the importance to first top-balance the pack in order to reach the top SOC of the whole pack. I am still learning and I greet you with most friendly regards. Please keep your channel alive….. Beste groet, Peter
Hi Andy I have 2 seplos BMS’s connected and communicating to my PC. The main benefit for me is they display both pack information on the seplos Home Screen, cycling automatically between packs on a loop. To answer another question from your vid tonight. (Excellent as always). Changing one perimeter does not change both bms’s only the one your working on. Why connect to your inverter? Well for me I’m connected to a so far inverter (pylon protocol). And the seplos communicates correct soc to the inverter, this inverter communicates this info to the cloud (then to my phone). As you rightly say seplos has no Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection, this way for me is an easy solution for my present inverter (I know I have to upgrade the inverter. Hope this helps Tony
Cheers mate, good info to know, i have been wondering about some of these functionalities you have mentioned here, as I have 3 x Seplos “Suntorque” 5kw batteries connected to a all-in-one PowerMr 5kw MPPT with B/T, but I have Iphone so it doesn’t work (Dammit!). Plus, been having issue with communications to BMS’s too. Im getting there slowly.
Thanks for sharing, Tony. That's a valid point. I think if your inverter is far away it gets the real benefit from the actual battery voltage over this distance rather than using its own measurement. I guess you meant voltage rather than SOC. That should be the same regardless the distance.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia Hi Andy I did mean. Soc, If I use my inverters ‘standard settings’ to utilise my lifepo4 system and set high/low voltage as running limits, then the inverter assumes volt drop as constant when calculating soc. This of course is not accurate enough (lifepo4 charge curve) this leaves me in the dark as to remaining capacity.
Hi Andy. If my inverter doesn’t have an accurate soc. I can’t efficiently set my ‘time of use mode’. This allows me to use my off peak rate hearse in the Uk to charge my system via the grid. During the summer my photovoltaic system charges the cells enough to supply the house, during spring, autumn and winter I use a 50-80%. Time of use target as an off peak cheep rate charge. If I didn’t have an accurate soc I would be blind. Power cost in the uk are absurd and getting worse, luckily I managed to get an ev tariff with 4.5ppkw off peak. (45ppkw peak) rate.. Tony
Really looking forward building my 280AH Kit after testing the last 3 Cells. Have some concers about the communication to the SMA Sunny Island Charger but lets see how it will work. Thank you for your quality content 👍
Excellent review Andy, I think you smashed it out of the park. I have 3 x Seplos “Suntorque” 100A? 5kw batteries, 2 of which I got around 3/3/2022 a 2nd battery 2weeks later & the third was not delivered till May for some reason, anyhow I still have not been able to communicate with the batteries as yet as the serial cable I ordered doesn’t seem to work. The 1st 2 batteries were connected to an all-in-one system (PowerMr 5kw) charging from 8am-4pm and then running a few appliances through the night as I have 10kw of PV on roof I just slow charge the 2 batteries (20-30A) by day from GPO inside house (temporary trolley mounted setup for testing purposes at this stage). These first 2 batteries continued to lose capacity from the 1st few charges and over 2 months had come down to 54% & 64% SOC respectively. I contacted the supplier several times but did not get much of an answer except that I needed to get communication happening with the BMS, well it is, was, has all been toooo much with computer issues & cable issues & downloads & everything, F**K ME! Anyhow, thanks to you Andy and your recent Seplos series, I have learnt & figured out some of the issues (still ongoing) & are slowly moving forward, but it is all very frustrating. Anyhow, the 3rd battery arrived and I was hesitant to hook it into my system because of the issues I was having, but I did anyhow and have found that last battery has been able to mostly fully charge each day still while the other two did not, so this could be a reason to want to individually set BMS parameters of newly added batteries to a system and NOT have a primary battery set all packs parameters to one set of settings. I have discharged all 3 batteries individually & then recharged as far as possible to get the first 2 batteries to come up to 88%-94% again thanks to you & your great video’s. Some Comments/Suggestions to/for SEPLOS:- 1. Listen to ANDY. 2. Active Balancing, 2A minimum, built into Bluetooth App for IOS & Android a must, this could have simple and advanced modes for configurations so more people can understand and use at least basic parameters via mobile Bluetooth App and for long distance communications as I have a bus up north I am not often at, so being able to get warnings and change parameters from afar without complicated computer setups would be very beneficial for these situations, boats, vans, etc. maybe consider a proprietary Dolly, or a strategically placed set of wheels/casters and a pop up handle for manoeuvring these monolithic batteries (Im getting too old to be humping these weights). I see you do have a castor base set already, that’s probably a plus! Terminals: just do something better and more user/DIY friendly for the love of God, & I am atheist. Isolator Switch; is probably a must & a nice convenience at least on these batterie’s. These cases and engineering seem very nice indeed & Im sure it would take little to upgrade the earthing system throughout & get another FROG from Andy, & ME! I really want at least one of your beautiful cases full of batteries to grace & compliment my setup soonish, but I am very hesitant at this stage because it means a fair bit of modifying I would have to do to meet some of these requirements I feel should already be in these pack units and would also add a lot more cost to do the install of such modifications, but then they would truly be great. COST; of shipping does seem rather excessive, cant you do something A LOT BETTER than that, us Aussies do enjoy paying far tooo much for most things on a Global scale, EVERYONE knows that, but this shipping cost is a bit much for many. I love Andy’s, honest, analytical, logical, funny & fair take on things, he works really hard to do all he does, and generally tries to make everything great (Again!), and he also calls a spade a spade, as he sees it through extensive testing, which is fair and scientific, SEPLOS, you are lucky to have Andy on your side because I know he just wants to make you GREAT AGAIN, and I would soon like one of your improved kits. Ill rap it up, your packaging is atrocious to say the least, get your act together, this is delicate, sensitive, supposedly precise electronic equipment, (temp sensors are suspect if not damaged in transit from shit flying everywhere),,,, did I mention expensive equipment? That should arrive in a professional package (How much are your packing & shipping costs again?) in a 1st class state! Because this is a real F**K YOU to Australian customers from SEPLOS, (thankyou for that, us Aussies dont get reemed properly every day!). One last thing: maybe get ur programmers and an ENGLISH teacher together so your programming software is a bit more comprehensible, there are some very odd terminology used throughout your system, maybe we need an Australian version, LOL. Anyhow, after such a lengthy caning ( and I dont like being a Troll or an asshole generally), please do take my criticisms (and everyone else’s) constructively, and implement some (at least) changes here as I do believe this mostly good, but could be a really great product with a few modifications. Thanks for listening
Thanks, Evan. Great comment and it's sometimes good to just let it all out 😁 I'm working with Seplos to fully understand this BMS and how it is supposed to work. It's a lot though and will take time.
best video ever thank you for let them know the shipping cost and other negatives of the box all true is a grate box but need some modifications y will get them wean they fix some of the problems.. you the man Andy keep it up
Dont forget the pre-aged batteries it came with, and don't expect a firmware upgrade to correct hardware deficiencies of an inactive BMS. Also the better BMS like the JK only prevents over charging of a battery with a high cell, the battery is still able to provide power output.
@@Foxfried - I had 8S (10-24S) DYKB that also blew 3 of 21 FETs. Now with a 8S JK, 40 FETs but connecting inverter direct to battery, with a separate LVD. BMS reports wrong SOC, most of the time. The complex load of inverters produces waveforms on the DC which FETs don’t like. I also tried a 300A contactor, but it used 0.3 to 0.5A.
Hello Andy I agree about Seplos having a robust strong structure but no way to turn off the battery pack in case of emergency or for service or other that is what made me design my own battery pack based on the seplos and adding the breaker to make it suitable
There is enough room behind the front panel for a breaker, so adding one should not be too big of a problem. I would just have one next to it as Tito said.
Thanks for the detailed comment, I would like to bring my experience with Seplos, I ordered 2 Mason boxes for the 280 amp kit on 12 August, punctually paid after the adjustments to the order on 18 August 1455 Euros of which 330 of guaranteed punctual shipping , and up to that day contacts have been courteous and quick. After the 8 days of the Alibaba terms for timely shipping I contacted Blake Xu of Seplos, who informed me that the shipment will take place in the first days of September for various reasons holidays and bad weather ... ok, I wait for September and after another contact I come informed that my item is in high demand and shipping will take place later ... today is September 10th and there is no shipping track, I have been under a lot of pressure to make the payment quickly, but the same cannot say about the shipping and the answers that seem to me to take time by making imaginative excuses each time different. I am very disappointed I just hope that the dialectic gives way to facts. A cordial greeting and thanks again for your time.
I Was Thinking About Buying The 24 Volt Version!!! All The Problems You Are Having!!! HUMMMMMMMMMM!!!!! I Will Wait for All The BUGS To Be Ironed Out Thanks for All The Info. You Are Saying About These Batteries!!! GREAT CHANNEL MT FRIEND!!!
I think the review is very good . You seemed to calm down a bit from the previous Seplos problems . And you did the scientific review as you do normally. So good job there. Greetings from a small town close to Prague. And today my adventure with cells starts. I just received EBD-A-20H. 1-30V,0-20A.200w load. Good price too. Maybe somebody could modd it to 40A. I'm pretty sure the limit 20A is software... With 1 cell.
Thank you. I have the feeling this Seplos BMS will provide a lot more content then I originally thought. It has definitely some interesting features I want to explore and learn about. Good luck with your cells and your build.
I have 4 of the 6.9KW Mason kits, and 3 of the 280AH kits. I also purchased JASSN busbar to connect them in parallel. I plan on keeping each battery isolated from a comms perspective, so no worries there. I LOVE their cases, and the BMS on battery status screen. All they need to do is add access to all functions via the screen, and the PC issue goes away.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia don't let the "split thing" confuse you. it has 6 inputs, and 3 outputs for up to 3 inverters. NOproblem to use it for 1 or 2 inverter.
How much was the 6.9kwh kits cost? The website says $1000 but in skeptical that's the price. Unless the kit doesn't come with the cells in that case that price is far too high.
@@randybobandy9828 It was like A$2100 at the time including the cells. Seplos said, they will reduce the price. $1k seems to be a pretty good price considering the BMS is already ~$200.
Hi Andy. Re. Seplos shutdown/standby Toggle switches stop the shutdown. Go to ‘Upload parameter’ Left hand window ‘fiction switch’ Scroll down to the bottom of the list ‘Switch off function’ And Standby function Toggle switches as needed 👍
Thank you. I have the full list of all function switches now rom Seplos. I quite like this sleep function actually. It turns off the BMS after 48h of inactivity.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia That’s great. Have you noticed ‘heating’. (I think it was heating.). I contacted seplos to get a breakdown thinking it was for a cell heating switch, all I had back from them was ‘this was for other applications ‘Be nice to have this active. Tony
I ordered 2 of the Mason 280 DIY Units around 08 August, price was aprox. 1250 USD icl. Shipping & DDP to Austria, shipping by train (!) to Poland, then via UPS to Austria. It should arrive around 20 September. Comunication via Alibaba with Semplos is quite good and quite fast.
Hi Andy, the communication is absolutely essential for some hybrid inverter. My brother has a Solis Hybrid inverter and it require canbus communication for any lithium battery to get the battery setting, you cannot set any parameter at all beside basic setting for lead-acid battery like voltage, charge/discharge current and capacity, on top of that can only charge current up to 0.2c of the capacity setting. It doesn't really work with his inverter at all I mean high voltage alarm daily, as soon as that happend he has to restart the inverter to clear it. as far as I can find only Seplos BMS can properly communicate with his inverter via canbus. We verified this with Seplos before making the purchase. my brother doesn't have computer at home, so I program bms for him once and done. Bluetooth option is convention but not necessary. About the 95% SOC BMS turn off charging be default, it is not true in my case it only limit charge via resistance. And your comment about this kind of contradict yourself in this video ua-cam.com/video/OsvPYw6hoHc/v-deo.html in a way. limited charging above 95% soc is just another way to manage your battery cycle life and you can always turn it off if you wanted to, it is not like they take that option away from you like some company does.
Not yet, I had to find a laptop computer, download the software, get an rs485/usb adapter etc. I hop to try hooking the bms up to the computer today. Will let you know.
Love this video! After watching this video I would buy them. To me the pros outweigh the cons. The case would be the reason I would buy. I would consider the BMS a free gift. I don't care if you can connect to an inverter or charge controller. I actually don't like anything connecting to anything in my solar system wirelessly. If anything connects, do it with wires.
Rain? What's rain? Here in Northern Germany we've haven't had proper Rain for months. A few drizzles one or two weeks ago and lately the wind's been picking up but overall it's extremely dry :D I don't have one (yet*) but I reccomended them to my boss and he got two 280ah cases which I will install for him. So we'll see how it works out, worst case I'll throw a JK in there and call it a day :) *I've got a DIY case for my LF280Ks with a JK 200A
I'm about to sell my suburban home and plan on taking what I get from it to reinvest in an off-grid property I'm slowly working on. Besides earthworks, one of the first major investments I'm planning on is building out a total solar-based power system, and placing it in a well-insulated, enclosed trailer, so that I can move it wherever I need on the 6.5 acre property as it is developed, and/or even take it to my parent's house in an emergency, or even move it completely with me should I decide to move to one of the farms we own and lease out, going from a 6.5-acre off-grid homestead to 140ish acres. Thus mobility is key. That being said, I want this system to be able to power a full homestead cabin, complete with a mini-split heat/air system, ham radio, etc, as well as a nicely appointed shop, complete with air compressor, welders etc. So It's going to be rather large. I'm planning on full Victron other than the batteries. For those, part of me who wants to DIY, I've built a couple of small batteries, but nothing this large. Since however, I want at least a good portion of the system to be pretty much foolproof (me being the fool), and dead reliable, with excellent, quick support should there be a problem, I'll likely go SOK, EG4 or the like, with the option of adding DIY capacity in the future. So for me, given the options and this criterion, the Seplos's would be out of the running. * Non-standard terminals * Bad packaging, which I could see leading to a support call should something become damaged in shipment * Questionable offshore support (especially as tensions seem to be rising between the U.S. and China) * BMS Communication problems Yeah, for something that's not a hobby, but I would be completely relying on.. it's a pass for me.
Then I would suggest you look at either building your battery with a REC BMS to communicate to your Victron system or maybe buy Pylontech US3000C packs. EG4 does not support communicating to Victron, but I think SOK does. You can read all the comments above about why this is recommended in large systems. Good luck with this project! I'm going to build a prototype energy trailer like this to promote my business and loan it out to various events like mountain bike races and municipal events to promote the use of clean energy and stop relying on loud, smelly generators. I have several commercial customers interested in buying small-scale mobile systems like these for running air and water monitoring equipment so I'm thinking the investment would be worth it.
I've been watching these for a while now and they looked pretty good overall, and your review gives a better insight. I would like to see how the 200A version goes in real life to compare against the trusty 200A JK.
Re the shipping cost - I think weight is not the issue - it’s volumetric size. Shipping they will take up about 2/3 the volume of batteries with padding. Can they do better on cost - it probably depends on how many they sell and how fast you want the case. As others have pointed out communicating correct SOC to the inverter is critical if you’re running cloud based software that supplies loads based on how much energy is left in the battery, or controls charging based on solar output. Plus I think it’s mandatory if you want to add a battery to a grid connected inverter.
Yeah, they said it wouldn't matter if flat pack or boxy shape as the weight is what they pay for. I don't think the SOC is a fair point or an argument for communication. Even if the inverter is far away from the batteries and the voltage drop is relatively high on large loads (bad system design?), the inverter needs to shut down on a low voltage regardless what the actual voltage or SOC at the battery is.
Andy, I've heard your gripe a few times about canbus and your perception of a waste that it is. Here are a couple things my system can do with canbus it couldn't otherwise. First is charge rate control when the pack is stressed. Too hot, too cold, cell peaking, etc. Canbus can gracefully command the inverter/mppts to slow down or stop. Your 150ma of balancing can actually be plenty in a system where charge rate can be reduced to a trickle. You can do 3.6ah on 24hrs, surely your cells aren't so awful they are that far off? Though you tend to go weeks between full charges so it likely is more pronounced. I'm grid backed but do not feed in. I can top up each weekend on low tariffs. The other feature that is of great use with canbus is to have significantly out of proportion charging capability to battery bank size. To run Aircon from solar I have an array that is significantly too big for the battery bank. Canbus allows the mppts, inverter and battery to have a combined understanding of where the power is. I can set a charge rate of say, 50 amps to the battery, and have 220 amps incoming from the mppts when the inverter is consuming the other 170 amps. If the inverter load drops, rather than the bms going into protect, it keeps the canbus informed of its ingested amps and the mppts ramp down their charging current. I can also commission completely out of whack banks and canbus keeps the charge rate under control automatically. It turns a binary on and off into a ramped charging profile that passive balancing is capable of resolving. Someone else mentiomed this, but huge systems often need all the battery banks operating as one. My two 15kva inverters can operate 500amps continuous draw and peak 800amps. That would blow the guts right out of a lone mosfet bms if the rest are shutdown on low cell. Canbus can also provide a discharge ramp, it can tell the inverters that the batteries can no longer operate in their state and the inverter can stop even before a true low voltage disconnect occurs. Canbus really shines though in a hybrid offgrid/grid backed setup where the goal is to self consume as much as possible. You can achieve some of this with the victron shunt, but I don't use one in my home build, I use the bms shunt and canbus. My bms happily controls the charging. It holds absorption at a slow trickle until its done its configured share of passive balancing and then tells the chargers to all shutdown. I don't have to rely on an overall pack voltage to be right for the final phase of charging, the bms can regulate it dynamically. Anywho, just wanted to share! Have a great day!
Andy, Regan just gave you five or six video ideas. You can test some of these without having a second or third identical Seplos pack, but some will require two or more packs communicating together. If you're willing to do these tests, I will donate a Cerbo GX to The Off-Grid Garage so you have native VE.CAN ports without cobbling together adapters for your RasPi. I will send you an email and see if you're interested.
In diy fashion Andy could also make yet another video using a usb to can interface on the raspi! See how it compares to the Cerbo. I love my Cerbo, I don't super love the price tag but it sure looks clean with its native can and bus ports!
Thanks a lot for the inspiration and thoughts, Regan. Some of your points make indeed sense. I knew about the temperature throttling as an advantage 👍 I'm still not sure about he 150mA balancer. As I tested it, it won't do well with 280Ah cells and didn't really lower the voltage in these specific cells and most people will face this problem during winter and not being able to fully charge their battery. The spread across the cells will increase during this time and I doubt 150mA will be enough. Even if the BMS could slow down charging, it would need to slow down to almost 0A for that small balance current to be efficient. To limit the charge current for the battery but still be able to directly feed large loads form the SCC is another good point. Not sure how many people would have that though as they would also want to run the AC during the night. This is per system design and not a standard set up where we have a certain oversized solar generation combined with a load running only from this solar. So I would call this some sort of special set up for a daytime load only. Again, if you control charging current to match your balance current, that would mean to stay way under 150mA per battery bank in charging to have any effect from that balancer. I cannot see this working with 280Ah cells though. Or it takes a loooong time to balance and to be effective. So with your large system and 2x 15kVA inverters, if one battery gets low, it will shut down all the other banks as well, effectively turning off your power? I don't quite understand the discharge ramp option you were talking about. The inverter can only turn off and on but not really ramp down in case of a low cell. I can understand it could be a problem for a single battery bank to supply power if all others have shutdown already. But this is more a system design. With a hybrid inverter, it should have switched to grid long before any batteries get that low. I will definitely dive into this whole communication world soon. I have access to one of Seplos tech/engineer, so that should help. I also have the CAN hats for the Raspi here and started installing them. What a nightmare! I should really consider a Cerbo and the Victron A cable for that to be plug'n play. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, that was really great information and something to think about. I would be interested what sort of devices you're using, BMS, inverters, SCC, batteries...
Hello Andy, thanks for this info, is a good video. Seplos now make up the cost, for the 135Ah with battery (Allibaba 1.450usd) now 2.160,-usd and plus shipping cost of 450,-usd. Jehh is nice.
Definitely the communication has to be improved right now! Actually I like the Mason like you, it is very solid, it is well designed and if the bms is not doing what I want, I kick it out and use an jk or a daly or another one 😉 but the case is top of the pop! That's the reason why I bought a second one. Best regards from sunny hot Germany 🤣👍🤘. Danke Andy.....Marko
Andy, I'm using 3 bms from Seplos and when 1 pack is fully charged, the other is still charging. Same thing with discharge process, if there is 1 pack discharged the other is keep discharging until low voltage disconnect occurred.
As I said in your other video, I ordered 8 of the DIY 280Ah/200A BMS kits and all kits came packaged VERY well - no damage or issues. As for grounding, if you buy ready-made batteries (e.g. Battle Born) they do not need grounding and these cases are powder coated. I think your negatives are very opinionated. The terminals could be a positive from a beginner aspect. As for the BMS parameter settings/BT access, I think you are not considering these BMS' are meant to be enterprise grade. You would not find BT access to anything within a data center. That would be a HUGE security hole - "What do you do if you don't have a computer at home?" This comment baffles me. How did you order the dang things in the first place??? Sure I understand the Mac scenario. I use 99% Linux at my house, but the market share for home computers is still majority Windows. I'm working on an open source app to communicate with these BMS'. Hopefully I can bridge the non-Windows gap for others and I'm hoping to setup a Raspberry Pi image to monitor these. As well though, you should only need to change parameters when you first set them up. These batteries should be "set and forget" appliances. For balancing, you should only have to top balance them when you put them into production (as long as you new Grade A cells,) and again - "set it and forget it!" You SHOULD only be charging to 90% and discharging to 10% in order to preserve your cell investment. I look at it as a feature that I don't have to worry about doing any calculations to setup the 90/10 rules. If you have to balance your cells often, then I think you have other issues. I can also say that they DO NOT shut off other batteries if one is turned off. They do however, all turn on when the master (#1) is turned on and they are all connected to RS485 and addressing is set. I agree there is room for improvement. Though in my opinion, every battery has room for improvement. I'll be putting out my video on these soon. For those who have Schneider equipment, I also have a python app that I wrote to query the Schneider equipment using the Conext Gateway. I also have a Home Assistant add-on for it as well along with the instructions for creating a Docker image on my Github page. github.com/shorawitz/conext-api
i agree to everything you said, albeit my negative experience with the 280AH version, which i eventually had to return. communication with my Growatt SPF was a swift, & it showed battery percentage down to the decimal. However, it acted up on the charging side where i would be draining the battery with a constant load of 1kw for 4 hours, & battery percentage would drop respectively to 71% from 100% ; however, when i start re-charging, it jumps within a minute to 100% again at which point it would stop charging. then draining back at the same pace yields the same results albeit for just 2 more times (4kWH X 3 ~ fully discharged) until eventually it drops from 100 to 6% in a sec & automatically shuts down with an "undervolgate fault".....At which point it would then charge normally to 66% for hours & hours, then hits 100 from 66 in a sec........& repeat! customer support wasn't able to pinpoint the problem & agreed to return it.
@@michaelkaine345 My experience ordering is better than average with Chinese companies, but not 100%. Support 50/50. Actually 50/50 is probably too high. I just reread my original post and I didn't mean to come off as combative towards Andy. I really appreciate all of his time and effort producing this content for our benefit. And now that I've had mine in production for a while, I appreciate his opinion even more.
Very informative. I figured out that a 52 V 280 Ah pack would be way too heavy. So I was considering making two 26 V packs and put the in series. According Seplos that is not possible. It would be a bit more expensive, but I was willing to pay for that to be flexible.
Hello from Germany. (Heute mal auf Englisch) I'm now starting to build my seplos battery! But without this case, only the eve lf280k cells and the seplos 16s 150 amp bms! My thought was, to save the money for the case and built an own one. I've loaded my cells all to 3,65V separately and put them in parallel together for passive balancing. In a view days I might be able to report how the system works! But, after viewing this video, I think I need an active balancer for top balancing! 😅🙈 I will report!! Greetings from Germany Grüße aus Deutschland! 🤙😎
Yes was also keen to find out how this was resolved. A few people in the comments suggested the dip switches could be in the wrong position as they were mirroring the 6.9 Mason and the settings were different on the 280. I wonder if that was it?
One thing I forgot about was if your whole system is communicating and you put in the wrong parameters that are system wide and they fail, they are going to fail when you have the least ability to repair it. Or worse yet doesn't shut down the the system but damages the battery thru fat fingering 3.95 instead of 3.65. I like setting each part independently.
I think power plus use genuine Amphenol connectors. They look great! Also as stated in other comments, these "drawers" are more or less one component from a full racked battery system which uses bus bars. The little quirks like this make more sense when considered as part of the whole system. I guess the "DIY" label is maybe the point of confusion. If you're selling battery systems, installing them etc, building the battery drawers with your own, separately sourced cells would probably make good business sense. Ditto on lack of wireless management. If this is installed in a shopping center, a school, a military facility, a high rise building, you don't need each drawer to have that. It's DIY for the business selling a large parallel bank, multi-rack system, configured initially, then monitored by another part of the system (like the inverter they communicate with)
@@OffGridGarageAustralia I came across these some time ago while making plans for a battery. YAFA Store seems to stock these connectors on the ally express acquisition place.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia Maybe you can look at swapping out connectors on both batteries and getting something mechanically identical and have the terminals you want? Power Plus use Amphenol SurLok connectors, according to a video they have on YT about how to crimp them.
Be very carefull ording the DIY kit or even the 6,9 battery cell edition cause one point has not been mentioned but had happened in germany several times in 2022 already. If you order such Mason Diy Kit you will pay the bill incl. shipping, import duties and sales taxes upfront. So far so good. One morning a courier driver will ring on your door and give you a parcel but first asking you for handing over taxes and in case of bad luck you will pay the import stuff again for the small BMS they had shipped later but arrives earlier incl. a bill of the full diy package about 800 and more €. The customs then will do the math and ask maybe for 20% on top of the 800€ bill and therefore you would have to pay 160€ again which you had already paid just due to the mess that has happened in germany in 2022 quite often without solving the core issue right. You will pay the amount to the driver still believing that you will get it back but SEPLOS does not care at all, even in cases where you would only have a bill of 230€ for the BMS and the then 46€ duties on top. You will be lost in these cases and your finance agency and SEPLOS will benefit. So you need to make sure that you pay with paypal and nothing else to be able to fight against Seplos mismanagement later on.
That totally depends on how you negotiate the price with Seplos and what tax regulations you have in your specific country. Something to consider with everything you buy from abroad.
As I own 2 of the 135's I think your spot on on both the positives and negatives. I have not experienced the shutdowns as you stated. But I run both as dumb not using the CAN connection. The BMS does need work and does need a better balancer. I do need to buy a few of the 280 boxes and DIY them myself. But this also makes me wonder if I really even want to use their BMS. Just connect the NEEEEEY and an active balancer and I have the perfect box. Then again A few Custom PCB's to allow the connection of an active balancer would be sweet indeed. Again the batteries have performed flawlessly. So A bit of heartburn over balance at 95% is not a big thing. But how far down the rabbit hole can we go to make a perfect functional battery? I think very far. New terminals, New PCB's, New BMS's, New active balancers, the list can go on for awhile. Oh Oh the cable that runs to the BMS can we get a Y there and connect the Active balancer? Either at the cable or at the connector itself. I really like the boxes, I have had NO issues, and I would like more. I have not purchased the 280 boxes myself as The total cost is still a bit to high. Great Videos and thanks for your time.
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience. I think in terms of the balancing, the question is, how far up you will charge your battery. If you keep it at the 95%SOC level and charging will slow down above that, I guess it will somehow work. I need more of these batteries to do more testing. One each is just not good enough.
put a small switch on the negative pole of the balancer cable and cut it, if you need balanve, use small switch to conect the cable break and turn it on whenever you need the balancer.
After years of building serves you learn very quickly remove the HDDs before moving , and replace when racked .. The same principle applies here build in situ .
Is a good system for beginners and for the ones to start to dive into potential full DYI. Prefer these one's to all the others that include 3D printed parts and other stuff. The connectors terminals on the big one should be using the standard most common out there at least... ...
I ordered the SEPLOS BMS 200A 11 days ago after they said it would take about 10 days to get to the UK not the 60 days stated on the Alibaba contract but it hasn't left their warehouse yet, so I am starting to think maybe their promises to customers are not reliable, having said that they are fairly responsive to emails. I will chase them again after next and update my experiences here.
Maybe 10 days is possible when they are actually in stock but they haven't had any 200A BMSs available for about a month now. I think they are supposed to be arriving any day now.
They offered me air freight as an option but it took around 60 days for it to arrive here (sitting for almost 3 weeks at AU custom because paperwork was missing).
Being an attractive package, I can see why looks and some upfront simplicity would be the clincher to buy these. At the end of the day, you pretty much indicated that you will be doing some significant mods to the workings. Too many for me to say yes at this point. Convinces me even more to up my own game for a better looking finish though.
My dad has 2 seplos battery banks connected in parallel to his inverter with canbus, the BMS is configured as master and slave and they communicate via RS485, in this setup the master BMS would relay any warning to the inverter so the inverter can react according what it's program to, it does not turn off the battery as a whole. If you have communication from all bms to inverter/charger then inverter/charger will decide what to do when there are warning occurred not the master BMS. if your inverter/charger support RS485 communication, in that case your inverter/charger will act as master BMS and relay the message internally. and the max parallel unit would reduces by 1, from 16 to 15 max.
Thank you. That is good information here. What would happen if only one battery goes into an overvoltage situation? Would the charger turn off/slow down charging to all batteries or would only the single BMS of that battery react and slow charging down for this one specific bank?
@@OffGridGarageAustralia Since all batteries are connected in parallel Seplos have a formula that they shared with me as follow “ 1: Charging current limiting algorithm 1.1. A device triggers a charging alarm of voltage, temperature, current and capacity or any charging protection, and is judged as no charging current; 1.2. When zero devices can be charged, the charging current is fixed at 10.0A；; 1.3. When a single device can be charged, the charging current shall be ["Charging Overcurrent Alarm Value"-10.0A]; If the charging overcurrent alarm value is greater than 20.0A, it will be reduced by 10.0A, and it will be fixed by 10.0A when it is less than 20.0A; 1.4. When more than two sets can be charged, the charging current shall be ["Charging Overcurrent Alarm Value" * number of sets/2]; 1.5. When the voltage of any single cell in all parallel battery packs exceeds "set value of monomer overvoltage protection" +30mV, clear the charging current and set the charging capacity to 0A; 2: Discharge current limiting algorithm 2.1. A device triggers the voltage, temperature, current, capacity discharge alarm or any discharge protection, and is judged as no discharge current; 2.2. When zero devices can discharge, the discharge current is fixed at 0.0A；; 2.3. When a single device can discharge, the discharge current shall be ["Discharge Overcurrent Alarm Value"-10.0A]; If the over-current alarm value is greater than 20.0A, it will be reduced by 10.0A; if it is less than 20.0 A, it will be fixed at 10.0A 2.4; if more than two units can discharge, the discharge current will be as per "Discharge over-current alarm value" * number of units/2; ” (the original text is in Chinese) Inverter will regulate charge/discharge current accordingly which sent by the master BMS. I have verified this on my inverter's LCD
@@Pey5531 You're the man. Fantastic information. Thanks so much for sharing this here. How can the inverter regulate the discharge current though? If it is a hybrid inverter, I can see that it can regulate the charge current as per above formula but discharge? That's hardly possible, I guess. It depends on the load....
@@OffGridGarageAustralia It can limit discharge in ongrid mode and the extra from the grid to supply the load but in offgrid mode can't regulate but the inverter will gracefully shutdown itself down once it hit the low voltage protection communicated from the bms
Some requirements need an isolator at the battery not at a junction point. Yeah, it's not ideal in my eyes. The TUV PUSUNG they have has one in the front panel, so, the design is there. They just need to be more consistent.
Oh and yes the comms need to interface to our mppt chargers and maybe home automation via mqtt or Or something. The only thing about going to the inverter is say the frequency shifting option so that ac coupled charging could be controlled via soc.
Hmmm, I don't see the point still... Having the BMS on the MQTT is fine but the charge controller throttles charging anyway when we hit absorption. It does not need to know the SOC of the battery. Neither does the inverter 🤷♂️ SOC is just displayed for my pleasure.
I see a need for when the amount of solar panels deliver amps from the solar charge controllers that exceed the Battery charger current. Eg I desire to run 50 Amp 48V 2400W, but may need 4800W at times, so I install 4800 W of solar panels. To adjust the charger controller current limit between 50A and 100A requires Victron DVCC. Or else I double my battery bank to handle 100A charge. So far I have used the MPPT current limits by themself to limit battery charge current. If I add more solar panels I could run large loads diverting excess charge away from battery charge current limit. So is it economical to have reserve solar panel capacity with no desire to store it in a battery, it is only used directly from the solar panel to the house/shed load.
For me, the primary benefit of battery to inverter/charger communication is backing down charge current when one cell approaches overvoltage shutdown to give more leverage for BMS balancing current to fix the situation without a BMS shutdown. Seplos terminating charge when a cell just approaches overvoltage cutout, leaving cell balancing incomplete, is not a good option as highest cell will quickly drop below 3.4v stopping its bleed balancing prematurely. You lose the charge current overpotential terminal voltage rise when you stop charge current which is the best cell comparison indicator of cell SOC balance. Guess they feel having battery shutdown is worse than having imbalanced cells. That logic will just create a continuing downward spiral of degrading SOC balance of cells. From their perspective, they may turn charging back on after highest cell drops, so the balancing will eventually be done. However, many chargers will interpret the drop off in charge current as absorb complete and go to float voltage therefore preventing further balancing of cells by BMS. I do believe in having 1% to 2% of cell capacity rating in balancing current capability, particularly when you do not bring battery to full state of charge often, limiting balancing time opportunity. Only having 150 mA balancing on 280 AH cell requires a lot of time holding cells at higher absorb voltage to achieve balancing which is not great treatment of battery. The more time spent balancing above 3.4v, the more cell electrolyte damage is done.
Hi Andy, thank your for your well made review! I enjoyed it very much, especially your demonstration on top of the box "...I will show you something...hops, hops hops..." 😂 At video position 22:50 you said, you've paid only 600 bucks vor 16 battery cells... That can't be true?! If I'm wrong, please provide the sellers store 😉
In a system that uses say, 600 amps, it's essential that all batteries shut down at the same time to prevent overloading of a single 100ah battery bank. If you look deeper I bet this is a programable feature. If it's not, it should be.
Is that a must or a nice to have? Lets say you have 3x 270AH battery units, with a bms, shutting down at 250A. If a single bms or battery fails, with that 600A, nr2 and 3 have a 300A load. Because of the overload (Lets say) nr2 stops first. Then nr3 has a 600A load and also stops within the next (few?) seconds. The build in bms protection kicks in. Maybe not that elegant, but it does the job?
@@gubbernl the build in protection won't necessarily kick in. There was an overload test on the channel, and one mosfet burned before the bms turned off.
Yeah, interesting thoughts. I guess, I never look at this communication stuff from a large scale system design. In my little garage it might be OK and I have designed my three batteries so that they can handle any current. But as the system gets bigger over time, it could actually benefit having a comms from the battery to give other components a better understanding about the status.
Hello Andy, I also bought such a bms 150a without a box. This should work together with my Sma System Sunny Island 8.0h 13. This also worked. What bothers me is that the seplos BMS continues to allow a charging capacity of 6kw just before 100% and then suddenly shuts it off. This throws my system completely off track and produces battery errors via can. This should be improved so that from 95% it can only be loaded slowly, e.g. with the Pylontech bms. Of these I also have 5x us3000b. This works wonderfully.
150ma should be sufficient for real grade A/EV grade cells that are top balanced. A lot of people use non-A grade cells that aren't even the same age though. In that case I could see needing more.
Why is the charger not already throttling down in your system (aka absorption voltage and current tapering off)? As I said, the BMS should not be charging your battery.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia at sma unfortunately already because the Sunny Island leaves the charging process to the bms. Lithium batteries cannot be set on the inverter. Sma can only be configured for the lead-acid battery. With lithium batteries, it no longer accepts the target voltage. With the pylontech us3000 series, for example, the charge from the bms is throttled from 90%. unfortunately seplos doesn't do that. even at 99%, it still charges with 6kw if these are available and then it is switched off abruptly and the inverter goes into overvoltage. all not true.
@@Black86Panther the Seplos should throttle charging with the right settings. It would only turn off completely of there is an OVP or something like this. Are all the settings correct?
Could the front terminals be sidestepped and instead drill two holes and run cables through glands in front panel directly to Battery cell or busbar terminal bolts? If Andy has successfully built his own rack shelving unit for Battery 1,2 and 3, couldn't a battery box, or tray, not shelf, be made using square hollow tubing and corner joints that can be bolted. Then insert a BMS that is known to support comms with inverter and chargers, and actually . So do you reckon it is cheaper to modify this with a breaker and terminals, or, build a custom box, rather than shelves?
My experience of Seplos has been disappointing; they appear to be having supply chain problems (nothing fails like success). I ordered 3x 280Ah boxes at the very end of July, but the 200A BMS have been out of stock since then, so the estimated shipping date has been slipping and is now mid-September. I've also got concerns about the fuse provided (Zeeman ANMH) which might not handle the dead-short currents. That combined with 'DDP not being DDP' rumours makes me concerned. I am starting to wonder whether 100Ah server-rack batteries will take over this part of the market; 48v x 100Ah batteries are under 1,000 USD (plus shipping and taxes) on Alibaba.
Server-rack do appear to be cheaper than this kind of ready made DIY. The only downside is that you don't know which battery or hardware they put in, and can also not replace cell or repair it as easily if something goes wrong.
Andy I like your battery 2.0 better, I have built something similar (just a lot smaller) and have now gone the homeassistant route towards optimising and using the sun's energy to supply 95-100% of my needs. Communication is a big thing when it comes to evaluating data and making sensible choices. Manually turning on the pool pump when there is excess sun feels like you are babysitting your power usage
Thanks Heinz. The Home Assistant route is certainly very interesting and would integrate nicely with my system. I just feel this is almost a UA-cam channel on its own though. But I will go down this path at some stage. Sooner rather than later, I guess.
Any pointers to what type of Home Assistant you are using? I have the option of using Victron Multiplus II AC2-out to switch on hot water around Midday. I also use smart power plugs to schedule hot water and pool pumps so am also approaching 95% sun/battery power (if not overcast for more than a day or so). Andy has in the past said that he used a Victron assistant, but has he reviewed Victron DVCC or ESS compared to the PV inverter assistant I think I recall he used? I have tried ESS and the older manual voltage conditional limit setups. I have grid backup. Because Victron really request the use of DVCC only with a BMS in communication with the GX. Now the Andy had RaspPi and Seplos support Victron, isn't a DVCC review of its pro cons a natural next point of investigation?
@@aidendeem903 I do no run a victron system but my Deye has similar functionality with AUX out (but I am not using it). In my case I use node red to fetch all inverter values and publish the on MQTT so that they are available on HomeAssistant. From there I am busy trying to wrap my head around the built-in automations/blueprints/scripts available. There is also another option of just using node-red to action the usage of power (since all entities in homeassistant is also available on node-red, so smart switches can be triggered on/off). I use smart switches to switch on usage of power (for things like my heatpump), and in the case of a water heater element that uses large currents I use a smart switch paired with a high current relay.
Good review, and pros/cons for my decision. Personally I see the availability of a PC interface as a pro - as I hate to walk always with my mobile to the battery room, or drive to the beehouse to get access to the JK's. Ok I placed now a old mobile there to do a remote access. Best would be to do a mobile app for the mobile junkee's which live in the battery room *smile*. I totally agree with the shipping cost, I think their Idee is to have local dealer, which would solve this. Thank you for the work, and constructive feedback. Hmm what will I now do with all my 310AH cells ...
read my mind....especially on that "living in the battery room". Can't understand why enthusiast DIY'ers would be keen on using a mobile via bluetooth in proximity vs the comfortable PC from afar!
I was keen on them initially but thanks for your investigation I feel there are too many quite serious issues with them. Now I am not so keen and looking for alternatives
From my point of view it looks ok.. shipping cost is too much, 150mA is not good..that needs to change. There should be option to get(order) bms that support higher balanc. current..lets say 1A .. Also that carton box inside the box is good idea..they should implement it .. terminals are not good..not sure why they went with not traditional terminals..if they included cables then it would be ok..otherwise ..change terminals.. I would add also about 60% score for now..if they will listen to us then they might get to 80%-90%..but who knows.. lets wait and see how they will respond ..
I have 6 of the 200a versions No disconnect if one reports an error . Just that bms blocks charge/discharge Negative . The frigging weight.. 2x3 stacked up
Another consideration, for the big seplos is that the shipping can be divided by 2.8 to 3 because just 1 of those is equal to 3 of the 100ah server rack batteries.
That's not how shipping companies work, unfortunately. Usually shipping is based on actual weight OR volumetric weight, whichever is higher. If you shipped the cardboard box the Mason comes in, empty, you probably pay the same shipping fee because of the volume it takes. If you filled it with lead, you'd be charged more because actual weight is higher. At the moment, everything shipping from China is over the top. The stated reason is that shipping is over burdened (not back up to pre-COVID levels yet) or just costing more (oil prices?). It's insane.
I think the recommendation hinges on the question of if the cost of Seplos is substantially cheaper than Jaikper. I know they are kind of different products, Seplos being much more DIY, but DIY for the sake of DIY when Jaikper could be just as good, if not better? Remembering the Jaikper has a circuit breaker and arguably better terminal connectors. Total cost of ownership being the critical point.
you have many option for 100Ah battery on the market for around 1500 $ . seplos is not one of them. however I still go with seplos since, I have access to their technical staff and they are helpful when there is a need to investigate or to modify the firmware.
I really like the half DIY style they provide as you exactly know what's inside the box and how it was put together. Sure, just looking from a pure financial or convenient perspective, other solution could be more suitable for some but that is not the point here. The BMS could have actually more potential as I realise at the moment. I'm in discussions with their tech staff to find out more.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia I get the desire for DIY, but if the quality isn't there, it makes less sense. The main positive is that you can more freely buy those storage grade cells and add your own 4A balancer.
hi andy it actually makes sense that this different Battery packs talk to each other or to the inverter/charge controller. imagine you have a really big PV - so big that in full sunshine you have all the parallel batteries on max charge current. so when you than have a problem/fault with one BMS and it disconnects ->all the other Packs will also disconnect because of OverChargeCurrent. than it would be nice if your inverter/mpptcharger lowers the charge current so the rest of the packs can still continue to charge on their individual max charge current. otherwise you have all the batteries disconnected because of a single fault in a single Pack and a lot of Energy that could charge your batteries is lost until you manually clear the issue. Best regards form Upper Austria
If one pack of many in parallel disconnects while charging, the other batteries will continue to charge normally. No communication between batteries is necessary.
Why if there are already plenty of these and it is a quite expensive solution ? They, Batrium, would need to provide them to Andy for free otherwise I would not even think about cause they are really expensive. Rather than the expensive ones I would suggest to check the open BMS by Stewart Pittaway which you can build on your own and expand later. Looks far more promising for a diy community than the Batrium one.
I am in contact with Batrium for a while but never got the hang on it. It's not a straight forward BMS and I'm sure it will just work. Where is the fun... I also looked at the Open BMS but didn't have time to order all the parts and solder this all together. The ready built version was not available for a while and some parts are still hard to get. And the flashing and programming probably turns away a lot of people.
I don't think the lid is a problem from a grounding perspective. On Large Synchronus generators with 400V AC I have never seen a ground wire between the housing and the lid and the bolted on side panels, there are just some nuts like in a server rack in the housing and the painted lid and side panels just bolt on with short bolts in to the nuts. but none the less it is a good thing to do.
There’s a port on the bms that you can connect to a switch. You’ll find its description in the manual, chapter 8: connections. They call it inner switch.
Yes, but it's not a mechanical switch as most electrical installations and regulations require it in terms of an isolator. It is still electrical connected event he FETs are turned off.
loving the videos and content ....quick question from a beginner ....how about having a seplos system and adding a extra jk bms in paralel with the current seplos one ? ( it would help with holding up at the top balance)
but that is good to know that SMA is working now - or at least for your edition cause I am not sure if these are all the same regardless the Ampere they can handle.
17:45 The need for a computer to change the settings is a huge 5 thumbs down for me. The battery pack will be located NOT where my computer is. In case I need to change settings, I have to bring down my laptop, desktop! It is a big pain!
Yeah, it's a bit of a pain but as I said, once setup, it's not as bad any more. However you would need to connect from time to time to just view the status, I guess. I do this all the time with BMSes via BT.
You can "turn off" the BMS by simply pressing the Reset button for 2 or 3 Seconds. The BMS will turn off and disconnects the positive terminal. As far as I know theres a "Switch" pinheader on the board to connect a additional switch for this purpose (normal used to remote control). And about the configuration software: I love this solution. I havely dislike all this BT bullshit in the market. Most of the time I even have no smartphone on hand.
Most people have a smart phone to hand that they can quickly and conveniently pull out to change settings, view stats. How many people have a Windows laptop tucked under their arm? Also how many people are technical enough to mess around with baud rates, knock up RS485 cables etc? Not many. Seplos really missed a trick by not making the configuration easier, especially after putting so much thought and energy into making the build so straight forward and simple.
@@danmc1313 How many people are able to differentiate between a whole mess of BT devices and what specific device is to be selected to change the right one. Even here in the videos it happend not just once he is struggling with his smartphone and thinking about what BT device is what... This is simply bullshit. Not to speak every mfg. has his own App thingy. And fiddling around with baud rates or serial interfaces!? What? We are working here on devices with a power able to litterly weld construction beams to a solid mess of molten metal. If you now wanne tell me you feel able to do so but have problems with a brain-dead simple and about 50 year old serial protocol, I might say you even should by something else - ready build. With this serial link, connected to my server I could look inside the BMS litterly all over the world, by entering the virtual machine filled with this tools. Even reconfiguration of the Victron system is possible thousands of miles away. What do think will your funny BT crap do here in my concret house, sitting on my desk in the 2nd floor while trying to connect to the BMS in the basement? BT is a gadget. It has no place in an even entry stage of "professional" enviorment. Nobody in there right mind would here rely on BT. Even more: The funny "smart" BMS thingys are even not able to do a damn simple firmware update. How stupid is that!? And not to speak about the fact BT on this BMS is useless by putting it in a metal enclouser. How on earth should the RF come out of it? So for this gadget you don't have to spend more money for the BT components - even though they are just a few dollar - you have to spend even more by putting the antenna somehow externaly. As of my perspective I am really thankful they didn't walked the way every other chinese gadget BMS manufacturer walked along, and instead made a more professional oriented hardware. The only real downside is, they really have to produce a more accurate translation. Some parameters or warning/error messaged are hard to understand. But all other parts of there monitor application are just handy to use. It's just settiing the parameters easily like editing a Excel sheet, also to the history log download ability in list view is briliant to transfer the data to other applications and/or do some research related to problems.
In most countries an electronic or BMS is not considered to be an isolator from an electrical perspective though. It is as per the standards and regulations.
Hallo Andy! Ich hatte auch das Problem dass er das laden verhindert wenn SOC hoch ist, aber diese Funktion kann man abschalten. In der Software ist das der Punkt: "Intermittent power supply function". Wenn diese Funktion deaktiviert ist, dann kann man auch bei SOC 100% weiter laden. Ich finde das BMS nicht schlecht, man kann viel einstellen, fast zu viel ^^ Kommunikation mit Victron über CAN war auch kein Problem, Victron Kabel Typ 1 und es läuft. Grüße
I ordered one MASON 135 DIY Kit and they charge me for "DDP shipping cost including tax to the gate shipping cost US$ 305,68" from China to Germany. Weight is about 75-80kg. That´s ok.
I have a 2p8s battery pack 24v 620ah contacted Seplos for the diagram of how to connect the pcb bars to this configuration since they said their bms is 8s to 16s 200ah and the 48v 16s 280ah box would work but they don't seem to understand what 2p8s means their documentation is also deficient for different configurations
No you have to explicitly order a 8s or 16s version they are not 8s to 16s. You have also to specify your communication interface CANBUS to RS485 when ordering. wiring 8s is like the 16s but only one cable. Remember the bms can handle a max of 500Ah per cell. It won't be able to manage your 620Ah with 2 cells in parallels.
I would like to buy a diy kit from SEPLOS. But, I have a lot of CA100 cells that I would like to use, but from what I can see these cells will not fit into the case. I can't justify spending even more on a complete battery solution when I have perfectly good cells already. Need to find a different solution to house my CA100 cells.
Hi Andy, If running battery packs in parallel did you confirm if all BMS's switch off in the event of a cell fault? And if not what would be the result if one pack disconnecting due to an over voltage cell and then reconnected at a point when the rest of the packs were near flat. Not a good result one would think!!!
Yes, they all disconnect at least for overvoltage safely from what I have tested.. If only one pack disconnects due to OV, it only disconnects the charging function, not discharging. So, if you put on some load on, all batteries, including the one with OVP triggered, are getting discharged the same way and voltage stays still the same.
If the total cost plus shipping is less than a ready made, then yes, I'd get it, but with a $400 shipping or whatever, plus having to buy the batteries and ship those, the overall cost might just be cheaper to buy the fully ready made one. It's just a matter of doing the numbers and if you want to consider your hourly wage in there. As for the CANbus cable, you can keep them disconnected during operation, and have them almost plugged in so you can quickly plug them in for any modifications. seems to be a ok compromise.
It's more to give people some option who want to do DIY rather than ready built. Cheaper or not aside... If you computer is close to your battery, yes it's not too much of a hassle except form turning everything on, starting the software, connecting again and logging in to everything $%#%^
Hi Andy, regarding the packaging. I recently got a box and all the small parts were all neatly packed in a cardbox. I sent you an email about that. Unfortunately you did not answer. My Communication with Seplos is great. They answer quickly. I "abused" their 206AH case to use it with my 200AH cells (206AH are 50mm width and my 200AH are 55mm). With a bit of force (like you had with the 280AH batteries, it was possible to fit them into the housing without any problem. I was also able to use the busbars (copper) which were with 4 holes with my batteries. I sent you also photos about that. Today I will integrate it in my solar system and test it intensively. As this first box was a test, I will order 3 more and then I also want to program a little software with an ESP32 + RS485. Here is (from another crazy bavarian guy) a compiled version to communicate via WLAN with your Seplos: github.com/KlausLi/Esp-Seplos-Controller Unfortunately he does only provide the compiled version and not source code, so everyone (including me) has to do it on his own. Maybe at least I may get infos about the RS485 protocol from Seplos itself. Servus, Wolfgang
Thank you, Wolfgang. Sorry for not replying to your email. I'm getting around 40-50 a week and it is totally out of control. I did order one of these batteries each to see the differences and connect them together eventually. Seems, that there is a problem with compatibility. I'll see if I can make it work somehow...
Heya, I like the case a lot nice and sturdy. the long pcb for the balance leads is almost a must for the eye. but the bms has issues and for 200 dollars it shut be a active smar balance whit minimum of 1A balancing that most be possible. and comminucation in this time and age shut be plug and play and with a app on your foon
Yeah, well... you can get the case without the cells if you're concerned about that. So this is just something they offer. We have talked about this in that specific video already: ua-cam.com/video/uuB3qwjh994/v-deo.html But fair point, is this another negative point or something to consider because you don't have to buy them from Seplos?
Thank u Andy Yes the prize for shipping over the top $478 AUD and if your going to have a rack system Times that By 4 kits That close to $2000 AUD That stopping me. But i do like the kits there up gradable for the future So yes if they lower there shipping cost i look into it then But i not going to pay $478 AUD Just for shipping #SEPLOS Take care Andy and Miss Andy see u Next Video Mate
I've been wondering... in the event that one or more cells vent, what will happen? That case looks relatively air tight. How much volume of gas would there be and how quickly does it happen? Obviously not something you can test but has been on my mind. If I were to install this in my house it'd be nice if there was a vent connection to hook it up to a dryer vent-style outlet to direct the gasses safely out of the home.
I think it's like $400 difference when buying the ready-built battery vs the DIY case coming with batteries. They also give you 10 years warranty ont eh ready build battery. For what it is worth...
Good afternoon Andy well I took your advice and purchased 2 JK BMSs, have just fitted one to my first bank,and I'm looking forward to it doing a better job for my balancing of the battery cells.but have come up to a small problem how do I get to start up this BMS,I purchased the one that comes with the on/of button and LCD,screen HAVE PUSHED THE BUTTON 1000 TIMES,OK MAYBE 3 OR 4 TIMES AND , oops left the caps lock on again, it doesn't start up can u tell me what it is I'm not doing right please.😫🤔.I was under the impression that it's press the play button and it starts up.Ok thank u cheers from sunny hot Victoria,oooooo it's 17 c,now sun is out.Rene.
@@davidb.5544 Hi David how many seconds do u think it will start up on I held it down for about 6 or 7 seconds that usually starts many things.should I hold it down longer I'm not sure how long to do that.Rene.
It should start immediately after pushing the button and also beeps as a confirmation. Very hard to tell as we don't know your system and cabling. You can only double check all the balance cables being in the right order (measure the voltages) and also make sure to have the bat - is connected to the BMS. Can you swap to the other BMS and see if this works?
I think you forgot one negative point?? The busbar on de 280kit was to short to connect the left to right cell rank (you fixed it with your own cable). So technically this means that the kit isn't complete or not compatible with all eve 280ah cells..
Hi, I wanted to ask some information about the SEPLOS MASON system. How does it actually work if you connect multiple SEPLOS MASON systems together ? How do you charge the batteries and how do you discharge the batteries ? does it always work one at a time until it is discharged and then switch to another one ? or do all SEPLOS MASONs charge and discharge at the same time?
Batteries can be connected in parallel for greater energy. They will all charge and discharge together. Charging and discharging is generally via a hybrid inverter that produces 120V or 240V to power appliances and also functions as a battery charger when connected to an AC input.
Hi:) - Thank you for a stream of very informative videos:) Planning to use 2 x DIY Seplos Mason packs for a boat project and though I pick your brain if you do not mind:) Can see that you can use either 16 x EVE LF280K or LF304K (believe you tend to opt for the first option). Do you see anything negative in using LF304K or is it just a cost versus output question? - Another question that I am interested in your view on is that my batteries will be stored out of sight. Due to this my idea is to extend the cable to the display window and mount this away from the box (and to plug the display windows with a dead plate). Can you see any negatives in doing so?:) Thanks again!
Maybe shipping costs is how they make up for a reasonable price? Does shipping costs become a profit center? I have seen a wide variety of shipping costs for similar items.
Built 1 and 1 on the bench. Needs a JK type BMS (2A active ballancer). Shipping cost, at least to the UK are prohibitive. well built though (280 at least) i dont mind the "windows" software as I'm rubbish with phones but a PC genius🙂
@@OffGridGarageAustralia Well wasn't speedy. 38 days and counting, expecting another 20-30 days via container ship. Gives me time to finish my system so no big deal.
Great critical review Andy. Not only is it valuable to Seplos, but also to other manufacturers. They get to see what the competition have, and they get to see the good and bad. The things you have mentioned are generally universal amongst other customers. In an age of too many "reviews" being sponsored and censored before release, it's great to see genuine stuff coming out.
Thanks a lot, Paul!
@@OffGridGarageAustralia
We are discussing feeding and housing Communists? Our ancestors, fought and died so we could be members of the Christian Race (pure-blood) and free of Tyranny?
Making a better Commie, one affiliate link at a time.
The seplos doesn't stop at 95%. It keeps charging until pack voltage is above the set limit. But it does request the charger to lower the charge current (if possible, charger does not need to answer to it) at around that point. First it steps down to max 10A and further on it request only 2A. This allows a slow steep to the max voltage. As you know, a higher current results in a higher overal voltage so high current can easily cause one cell to go overvoltage. This is the MAIN reason why you need communcation to the charger. Even a high current balancer couldn't keep this up. And yes, 2A is still too much for the 150mA passive balancer but my experience is that the BMS keeps the cells perfectly in balance.
And what is your problem with connecting the two BMS-es? They should just work togegher. And no, if one BMS shuts down his pack (for any reason) it will not cause the other BMS to shut down. This is not true.
Andy has different BMS submodels 10D and 10C I belive, those are different on a comm side. You need to match them but it doesn't say upfront anywhere so many fall into this trap. JK is even more fun, they sell different BMSes under the same part number... Dealing with china is a pain in you know what and with the tripping shipping costs may not even be feasible soon.
Too bad we don't have an open source platform for this... BTW, these bms are made and branded for seplos. Seplos is just a reseller.
Thanks a lot, Igor. That is great information. Glad you shared this here.
So from my understanding, the BMS just gives the signal to slow charging but does not itself limit the current. This would mean though, that all other banks will receive this current as well. So not just this one bank will be charged slower but the whole battery system as such.
With the standard settings of the BMS, mine stopped charging at 95% so I thought this is a default setting. I could not see it slowing down at this point but as you said, it may just send the signal for that via CAN.
More testing coming to fully understand this system.
Thanks again, much appreciated.
Thanks for posting this. This is the main reason for comms (charge and discharge current control). Andy’s testing won’t work as he has a raspberry pi and will either need to get a can hat and program that (that video would be hilarious), or get a cerbo.
@@nebulight wait for the video🤣
@@OffGridGarageAustralia yes the other banks will receive the lower charge current also. But due to the automatic balance in parallel packs they are also at or nearly at the high voltage high soc point. All packs have the same charge voltage. As soon as one pack reaches high soc it will first receive less current just due too how parallel packs work
Effectivement ton constat est honnête et mérite que SEPLOS ce penche sur ces améliorations techniques ... toutefois je reste convaincu par la qualité de ton choix sur ce KIT SEPLOS et je le trouve superbe pour construire soit même sa batterie, surtout pour tout ceux qui aime ta chaîne UA-cam et qui aime l'aventure technique. Merci encore pour toutes ces remarques et bonne continuation.
I have 3 Selpos Mason 206Ah 10.5kWh battery packs, which uses the 3.2v 206Ah Prismatic Battery Cell modules, and just like yours the the battery packs came disassembled, so the BMS setup procedure is necessary because you are acting as the assembly line in a factory. These packs are design for this in mind. In fact the Mason Battery Pack I have, which has those click on/off connectors you pointed out are design for vehicles, not home storage hence the lack of a cut off switch. I am now about to order their Pusung 135Ah 7kWh 51.2v Battery Pack which is designed for home storage and comes with a cut off switch. Your review is very honest and I can agree with most all of the findings you've made. To answer your question on joining to packs together and the master BMS having autonomy over the 2 packs is correct. The lowest cell module will determine the cut off procedure for the entire bank.
Here in USA 🇺🇸 EG4 battery 🔋 is a much cheaper and better salutation for me at
$ 1,400 bucks. There well made and work really nice when paired with EG4 6,500 watt converter at $1,200. But I really enjoyed watching your videos and that was a great honest review of this battery system thanks.
Tangential: It seems that there is a specification of Seplos RS485 protocol available on the internet. If it is accurate, it means that a custom monitoring and management software for such a BMS could be built fairly quickly. It might be running on a small computer like a Raspberry Pi which could then have a web interface. It could effectively serve as an alternative to native mobile application connected over Bluetooth. And it should be simpler to integrate into home automation systems like Home Assistant.
"BavarianSuperGuy" has developed this
I use ICM Pi software. Connects to seplos bms and the inverter and I can import all the data into home assistant using mqtt. Then I use home assistant automations to control everything.
there are already support for home assistant, and other python script to monitor. the only thing not available is settings documentation, but anything readonly is implemented already
I'm interested in such a solution!
It’s always a GOOD day when there’s another video to watch from Andy!
As always…… Thanks Andy 👍, love your work, (and always love your sense of humour too!)
Great summary - I totally concur with your summation.
There is much to like about the Seplos, BUT I do think the Seplos BMS is a fail though, simply because of ultra low balance current, and lack of BT access. They desperately need to improve that.
I also agree- a cooling fan for the battery box would definitely be desirable for warm climates.
Personally: I’d buy the box, but not the electronic components that come with it.
I agree about buying the case at this stage, but it will be interesting to see what Andy’s high amp/load tests reveal on the temperature side of things too, within the individual cases themselves would be good to see how different batteries may vary, or if they even do get very hot, Im sure Andy will do his best to find out. Cheers
Thank you, Dave.
We will do a high amp discharge test once it gets warmer down here. Really want to see what is going on inside this box at high temperatures.
Andy has a video setting his Victron SCC to 27.60V (if I remember correctly). I wonder, if internal Battery Source resistance is say 20 milli Ohm per cell, does his Voltage limit setting , which sets when the SCC will switch from constant current charging mode to constant voltage absorption (which has a corresponding high but declining current charge) effectively amount to 'clamping' (I don't know the more usual technical term here) the Charging Source of the MPPT controller, so reflected to the Battery as a "load" the internal resistance of the battery is the series connection with say 16S cells plus the 'apparent internal resistance of the charging source as if it were a load'. I have a Daly 4S, and recently reviewed Andy's video on the Daly which didn't see it as being made great again, and the Daly switches of charge MOSFET at 14V, which would be 28V for 8S bank. Balancing also switches off. So Andy's recommendation to set Victron gear to charge at 27.6V means charging and balancing continues in 'absorption mode', at a relatively high 50Amps for my setup. The Daly cannot balance the cells as the highest cell reaches 3.65V whilst the lowest is 200mV below that when the battery reaches 14V, and the balancer and charger is switched off by the Daly, but as it floats the cell differential voltage drops yet no absorption is permitted by charger if I were to set Absorption at Manufacturers 14.6V recommendation. It's a brand new battery. So I'm wondering if Seplos is a better option if I want to connect to my Victron GX and run DVCC. Does Andy have a review on this Seplos connecting to Raspberry Pi? Does a low absorption voltage setting of 27.6V clamp any high cell runaway voltage due to internal relatively high cell resistance and because the cells internal resistance is in series with the solar charger, the SCC looks from the battery to be a much higher impedance/resistance that forces any runaway voltage rise to stay set at 27.6V whilst current amps are still permitted to flow into the battery, even into the high cell which is also 'clamped' whilst the Daly or Seplos could still 'balance' with low balance current limits?? Hmm I really wonder about this stuff.
I am truly considering buying two of the big cases, but the shipping cost needs to go down!
And I really like your videos! You have both knowledge, charisma and you have a really cool accent 👍🏻😁
Greetings from Norway 🇳🇴
Be very carefull cause one point has not been mentioned but had happened in germany several times. If you order such big Mason Diy Kit you will pay the bill incl. shipping and norwegian import duty and sales taxes upfront. So far so good.
One morning a courier driver will ring on your door and give you a parcel but first asking you for handing over taxes and in case of bad luck you will pay the import stuff again for the small BMS they had shipped later but arrives earlier incl. a bill of the full diy package about 800 and more €.
The norwegian customs then will do the math and ask maybe for 20% on top of the 800€ bill and therefore you would have to pay 160€.
You will pay that believing you will get it back but SEPLOS does not care at all, even in cases where you would only have a bill of 230€ for the BMS and the then 46€ duties on top. You will be lost in these cases and Norways finance agency will benefit and SEPLOS.
So you need to make sure that youi pay with paypal and nothing else to fight against Seplos mismanagement.
Ok. Thanks for the tip 👍🏻😊
It is with anything you import though, not just this case...
Good day to you dear Andy,
The need for balancing could be determined by expressing that when one cell is “behind” this will be the “king” of the total pack (battery). When all cells are within specs, it is most important to top-balance the pack. Otherwise the one cell is demanding his/her SOC to the whole package. Although this has being covered by you very well, some of us are does not being aware of the importance to first top-balance the pack in order to reach the top SOC of the whole pack. I am still learning and I greet you with most friendly regards.
Please keep your channel alive….. Beste groet, Peter
Thanks a lot Peter. I will do some more testing and exploring with the Seplos BMS. It seems very interesting and 'different' to what we had before.
Hi Andy
I have 2 seplos BMS’s connected and communicating to my PC. The main benefit for me is they display both pack information on the seplos Home Screen, cycling automatically between packs on a loop.
To answer another question from your vid tonight. (Excellent as always). Changing one perimeter does not change both bms’s only the one your working on.
Why connect to your inverter?
Well for me I’m connected to a so far inverter (pylon protocol). And the seplos communicates correct soc to the inverter, this inverter communicates this info to the cloud (then to my phone). As you rightly say seplos has no Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection, this way for me is an easy solution for my present inverter (I know I have to upgrade the inverter.
Hope this helps
Tony
Cheers mate, good info to know, i have been wondering about some of these functionalities you have mentioned here, as I have 3 x Seplos “Suntorque” 5kw batteries connected to a all-in-one PowerMr 5kw MPPT with B/T, but I have Iphone so it doesn’t work (Dammit!). Plus, been having issue with communications to BMS’s too. Im getting there slowly.
Thanks for sharing, Tony. That's a valid point. I think if your inverter is far away it gets the real benefit from the actual battery voltage over this distance rather than using its own measurement. I guess you meant voltage rather than SOC. That should be the same regardless the distance.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia
Hi Andy
I did mean. Soc, If I use my inverters ‘standard settings’ to utilise my lifepo4 system and set high/low voltage as running limits, then the inverter assumes volt drop as constant when calculating soc.
This of course is not accurate enough (lifepo4 charge curve) this leaves me in the dark as to remaining capacity.
@@tonmilly but why does the inverter need to know about the SOC in the first place?
Hi Andy.
If my inverter doesn’t have an accurate soc. I can’t efficiently set my ‘time of use mode’. This allows me to use my off peak rate hearse in the Uk to charge my system via the grid.
During the summer my photovoltaic system charges the cells enough to supply the house, during spring, autumn and winter I use a 50-80%. Time of use target as an off peak cheep rate charge.
If I didn’t have an accurate soc I would be blind.
Power cost in the uk are absurd and getting worse, luckily I managed to get an ev tariff with 4.5ppkw off peak. (45ppkw peak) rate..
Tony
Really looking forward building my 280AH Kit after testing the last 3 Cells. Have some concers about the communication to the SMA Sunny Island Charger but lets see how it will work. Thank you for your quality content 👍
Flawless with the right firmware
If you cannot get it going, get in contact with Seplos. You may have to upgrade the firmware as Patrick said.
Excellent review Andy, I think you smashed it out of the park. I have 3 x Seplos “Suntorque” 100A? 5kw batteries, 2 of which I got around 3/3/2022 a 2nd battery 2weeks later & the third was not delivered till May for some reason, anyhow I still have not been able to communicate with the batteries as yet as the serial cable I ordered doesn’t seem to work. The 1st 2 batteries were connected to an all-in-one system (PowerMr 5kw) charging from 8am-4pm and then running a few appliances through the night as I have 10kw of PV on roof I just slow charge the 2 batteries (20-30A) by day from GPO inside house (temporary trolley mounted setup for testing purposes at this stage). These first 2 batteries continued to lose capacity from the 1st few charges and over 2 months had come down to 54% & 64% SOC respectively. I contacted the supplier several times but did not get much of an answer except that I needed to get communication happening with the BMS, well it is, was, has all been toooo much with computer issues & cable issues & downloads & everything, F**K ME!
Anyhow, thanks to you Andy and your recent Seplos series, I have learnt & figured out some of the issues (still ongoing) & are slowly moving forward, but it is all very frustrating. Anyhow, the 3rd battery arrived and I was hesitant to hook it into my system because of the issues I was having, but I did anyhow and have found that last battery has been able to mostly fully charge each day still while the other two did not, so this could be a reason to want to individually set BMS parameters of newly added batteries to a system and NOT have a primary battery set all packs parameters to one set of settings. I have discharged all 3 batteries individually & then recharged as far as possible to get the first 2 batteries to come up to 88%-94% again thanks to you & your great video’s. Some Comments/Suggestions to/for SEPLOS:- 1. Listen to ANDY. 2. Active Balancing, 2A minimum, built into Bluetooth App for IOS & Android a must, this could have simple and advanced modes for configurations so more people can understand and use at least basic parameters via mobile Bluetooth App and for long distance communications as I have a bus up north I am not often at, so being able to get warnings and change parameters from afar without complicated computer setups would be very beneficial for these situations, boats, vans, etc. maybe consider a proprietary Dolly, or a strategically placed set of wheels/casters and a pop up handle for manoeuvring these monolithic batteries (Im getting too old to be humping these weights). I see you do have a castor base set already, that’s probably a plus! Terminals: just do something better and more user/DIY friendly for the love of God, & I am atheist. Isolator Switch; is probably a must & a nice convenience at least on these batterie’s. These cases and engineering seem very nice indeed & Im sure it would take little to upgrade the earthing system throughout & get another FROG from Andy, & ME!
I really want at least one of your beautiful cases full of batteries to grace & compliment my setup soonish, but I am very hesitant at this stage because it means a fair bit of modifying I would have to do to meet some of these requirements I feel should already be in these pack units and would also add a lot more cost to do the install of such modifications, but then they would truly be great. COST; of shipping does seem rather excessive, cant you do something A LOT BETTER than that, us Aussies do enjoy paying far tooo much for most things on a Global scale, EVERYONE knows that, but this shipping cost is a bit much for many.
I love Andy’s, honest, analytical, logical, funny & fair take on things, he works really hard to do all he does, and generally tries to make everything great (Again!), and he also calls a spade a spade, as he sees it through extensive testing, which is fair and scientific, SEPLOS, you are lucky to have Andy on your side because I know he just wants to make you GREAT AGAIN, and I would soon like one of your improved kits. Ill rap it up, your packaging is atrocious to say the least, get your act together, this is delicate, sensitive, supposedly precise electronic equipment, (temp sensors are suspect if not damaged in transit from shit flying everywhere),,,, did I mention expensive equipment? That should arrive in a professional package (How much are your packing & shipping costs again?) in a 1st class state! Because this is a real F**K YOU to Australian customers from SEPLOS, (thankyou for that, us Aussies dont get reemed properly every day!).
One last thing: maybe get ur programmers and an ENGLISH teacher together so your programming software is a bit more comprehensible, there are some very odd terminology used throughout your system, maybe we need an Australian version, LOL. Anyhow, after such a lengthy caning ( and I dont like being a Troll or an asshole generally), please do take my criticisms (and everyone else’s) constructively, and implement some (at least) changes here as I do believe this mostly good, but could be a really great product with a few modifications. Thanks for listening
Thanks, Evan. Great comment and it's sometimes good to just let it all out 😁
I'm working with Seplos to fully understand this BMS and how it is supposed to work. It's a lot though and will take time.
I first came across you with your Outlander vids which gave me good insights... Glad to have come across you again 👍🏾
Thanks Brian. That's while back, right? I'm still working with battery stuff though 😉
best video ever thank you for let them know the shipping cost and other negatives of the box all true is a grate box but need some modifications y will get them wean they fix some of the problems.. you the man Andy keep it up
Thanks a lot for your feedback.
Dont forget the pre-aged batteries it came with, and don't expect a firmware upgrade to correct hardware deficiencies of an inactive BMS.
Also the better BMS like the JK only prevents over charging of a battery with a high cell, the battery is still able to provide power output.
But the JKs are blowing fets... why can't all these companies just merge and make the best BMS with good aspects from each.
@@Foxfried Why are they still using MOSfets and not IGBTs? They are tougher and easier to handle than the MOSfets.
Yeah, the aged batteries which came with one of the kits is something to consider. You don't need to order them though.
JK BMS also have a programmable voltage LVD that cuts the output. Also shuts down if the SCC voltage is too high.
@@Foxfried - I had 8S (10-24S) DYKB that also blew 3 of 21 FETs. Now with a 8S JK, 40 FETs but connecting inverter direct to battery, with a separate LVD. BMS reports wrong SOC, most of the time. The complex load of inverters produces waveforms on the DC which FETs don’t like. I also tried a 300A contactor, but it used 0.3 to 0.5A.
Hello Andy I agree about Seplos having a robust strong structure but no way to turn off the battery pack in case of emergency or for service or other that is what made me design my own battery pack based on the seplos and adding the breaker to make it suitable
Or you can just add a breaker in line beside your inverter...
There is enough room behind the front panel for a breaker, so adding one should not be too big of a problem. I would just have one next to it as Tito said.
Thanks for the detailed comment, I would like to bring my experience with Seplos, I ordered 2 Mason boxes for the 280 amp kit on 12 August, punctually paid after the adjustments to the order on 18 August 1455 Euros of which 330 of guaranteed punctual shipping , and up to that day contacts have been courteous and quick. After the 8 days of the Alibaba terms for timely shipping I contacted Blake Xu of Seplos, who informed me that the shipment will take place in the first days of September for various reasons holidays and bad weather ... ok, I wait for September and after another contact I come informed that my item is in high demand and shipping will take place later ... today is September 10th and there is no shipping track, I have been under a lot of pressure to make the payment quickly, but the same cannot say about the shipping and the answers that seem to me to take time by making imaginative excuses each time different. I am very disappointed I just hope that the dialectic gives way to facts. A cordial greeting and thanks again for your time.
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience. That is not good and certainly a part they need to improve in. Whatever they promise, they need to keep.
I Was Thinking About Buying The 24 Volt Version!!!
All The Problems You Are Having!!!
HUMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!
I Will Wait for All The BUGS To Be Ironed Out
Thanks for All The Info. You Are Saying About These Batteries!!!
GREAT CHANNEL MT FRIEND!!!
But are these real problems or just compromises? Would you not have the same findings with any other battery system. Nothing is perfect.
Thanks to you, I have 14x 280 DIY boxes on route 😁. By the time the slow boat from China arrives, I hope the firmware has improved.
14! You powering a submarine?
14!!! Wow, that's a big setup. Hope you have used my referral links 😊
I think the review is very good . You seemed to calm down a bit from the previous Seplos problems . And you did the scientific review as you do normally. So good job there. Greetings from a small town close to Prague. And today my adventure with cells starts. I just received EBD-A-20H. 1-30V,0-20A.200w load. Good price too. Maybe somebody could modd it to 40A. I'm pretty sure the limit 20A is software... With 1 cell.
Thank you. I have the feeling this Seplos BMS will provide a lot more content then I originally thought. It has definitely some interesting features I want to explore and learn about.
Good luck with your cells and your build.
I have 4 of the 6.9KW Mason kits, and 3 of the 280AH kits. I also purchased JASSN busbar to connect them in parallel. I plan on keeping each battery isolated from a comms perspective, so no worries there. I LOVE their cases, and the BMS on battery status screen. All they need to do is add access to all functions via the screen, and the PC issue goes away.
Thanks for sharing. I have seen the bus bar/breaker combo they have. This is only for split systems though from what I get?
@@OffGridGarageAustralia don't let the "split thing" confuse you. it has 6 inputs, and 3 outputs for up to 3 inverters. NOproblem to use it for 1 or 2 inverter.
How much was the 6.9kwh kits cost? The website says $1000 but in skeptical that's the price. Unless the kit doesn't come with the cells in that case that price is far too high.
@@randybobandy9828 It was like A$2100 at the time including the cells. Seplos said, they will reduce the price. $1k seems to be a pretty good price considering the BMS is already ~$200.
Hi Andy. Re. Seplos shutdown/standby
Toggle switches stop the shutdown. Go to
‘Upload parameter’
Left hand window ‘fiction switch’
Scroll down to the bottom of the list
‘Switch off function’
And
Standby function
Toggle switches as needed
👍
Thank you. I have the full list of all function switches now rom Seplos. I quite like this sleep function actually. It turns off the BMS after 48h of inactivity.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia
That’s great. Have you noticed ‘heating’. (I think it was heating.). I contacted seplos to get a breakdown thinking it was for a cell heating switch, all I had back from them was ‘this was for other applications
‘Be nice to have this active.
Tony
@@tonmilly Can their BMS heat the battery with a pad? I haven't seen anything like this on their website.
I ordered 2 of the Mason 280 DIY Units around 08 August, price was aprox. 1250 USD icl. Shipping & DDP to Austria, shipping by train (!) to Poland, then via UPS to Austria. It should arrive around 20 September. Comunication via Alibaba with Semplos is quite good and quite fast.
There you go... Thanks a lot for sharing.
Hi Andy, the communication is absolutely essential for some hybrid inverter. My brother has a Solis Hybrid inverter and it require canbus communication for any lithium battery to get the battery setting, you cannot set any parameter at all beside basic setting for lead-acid battery like voltage, charge/discharge current and capacity, on top of that can only charge current up to 0.2c of the capacity setting. It doesn't really work with his inverter at all I mean high voltage alarm daily, as soon as that happend he has to restart the inverter to clear it. as far as I can find only Seplos BMS can properly communicate with his inverter via canbus. We verified this with Seplos before making the purchase.
my brother doesn't have computer at home, so I program bms for him once and done. Bluetooth option is convention but not necessary.
About the 95% SOC BMS turn off charging be default, it is not true in my case it only limit charge via resistance. And your comment about this kind of contradict yourself in this video ua-cam.com/video/OsvPYw6hoHc/v-deo.html in a way. limited charging above 95% soc is just another way to manage your battery cycle life and you can always turn it off if you wanted to, it is not like they take that option away from you like some company does.
Thanks for sharing these information. I will clarify this with Seplos.
I know the 95% is not hard wired and can be turned off if needed.
Did you ever get the big battery to communicate with your computer?
I too am also interested in hearing what the problem was and how you resolved it. Thanks Andy.
Yes, I did. Video is coming soon...
Not yet, I had to find a laptop computer, download the software, get an rs485/usb adapter etc. I hop to try hooking the bms up to the computer today. Will let you know.
Love this video! After watching this video I would buy them. To me the pros outweigh the cons. The case would be the reason I would buy. I would consider the BMS a free gift. I don't care if you can connect to an inverter or charge controller. I actually don't like anything connecting to anything in my solar system wirelessly. If anything connects, do it with wires.
Yes, the case is a very big PLUS for this system. We will see how the BMS turns out and what benefits we can get out of some comms...
Rain? What's rain? Here in Northern Germany we've haven't had proper Rain for months. A few drizzles one or two weeks ago and lately the wind's been picking up but overall it's extremely dry :D
I don't have one (yet*) but I reccomended them to my boss and he got two 280ah cases which I will install for him. So we'll see how it works out, worst case I'll throw a JK in there and call it a day :)
*I've got a DIY case for my LF280Ks with a JK 200A
I'm about to sell my suburban home and plan on taking what I get from it to reinvest in an off-grid property I'm slowly working on. Besides earthworks, one of the first major investments I'm planning on is building out a total solar-based power system, and placing it in a well-insulated, enclosed trailer, so that I can move it wherever I need on the 6.5 acre property as it is developed, and/or even take it to my parent's house in an emergency, or even move it completely with me should I decide to move to one of the farms we own and lease out, going from a 6.5-acre off-grid homestead to 140ish acres. Thus mobility is key.
That being said, I want this system to be able to power a full homestead cabin, complete with a mini-split heat/air system, ham radio, etc, as well as a nicely appointed shop, complete with air compressor, welders etc. So It's going to be rather large. I'm planning on full Victron other than the batteries. For those, part of me who wants to DIY, I've built a couple of small batteries, but nothing this large. Since however, I want at least a good portion of the system to be pretty much foolproof (me being the fool), and dead reliable, with excellent, quick support should there be a problem, I'll likely go SOK, EG4 or the like, with the option of adding DIY capacity in the future.
So for me, given the options and this criterion, the Seplos's would be out of the running.
* Non-standard terminals
* Bad packaging, which I could see leading to a support call should something become damaged in shipment
* Questionable offshore support (especially as tensions seem to be rising between the U.S. and China)
* BMS Communication problems
Yeah, for something that's not a hobby, but I would be completely relying on.. it's a pass for me.
Then I would suggest you look at either building your battery with a REC BMS to communicate to your Victron system or maybe buy Pylontech US3000C packs. EG4 does not support communicating to Victron, but I think SOK does. You can read all the comments above about why this is recommended in large systems. Good luck with this project! I'm going to build a prototype energy trailer like this to promote my business and loan it out to various events like mountain bike races and municipal events to promote the use of clean energy and stop relying on loud, smelly generators. I have several commercial customers interested in buying small-scale mobile systems like these for running air and water monitoring equipment so I'm thinking the investment would be worth it.
I've been watching these for a while now and they looked pretty good overall, and your review gives a better insight. I would like to see how the 200A version goes in real life to compare against the trusty 200A JK.
Thanks Trev. We will test this here and find out 😉
Re the shipping cost - I think weight is not the issue - it’s volumetric size. Shipping they will take up about 2/3 the volume of batteries with padding. Can they do better on cost - it probably depends on how many they sell and how fast you want the case. As others have pointed out communicating correct SOC to the inverter is critical if you’re running cloud based software that supplies loads based on how much energy is left in the battery, or controls charging based on solar output. Plus I think it’s mandatory if you want to add a battery to a grid connected inverter.
Yeah, they said it wouldn't matter if flat pack or boxy shape as the weight is what they pay for.
I don't think the SOC is a fair point or an argument for communication. Even if the inverter is far away from the batteries and the voltage drop is relatively high on large loads (bad system design?), the inverter needs to shut down on a low voltage regardless what the actual voltage or SOC at the battery is.
Andy, I've heard your gripe a few times about canbus and your perception of a waste that it is.
Here are a couple things my system can do with canbus it couldn't otherwise.
First is charge rate control when the pack is stressed. Too hot, too cold, cell peaking, etc. Canbus can gracefully command the inverter/mppts to slow down or stop. Your 150ma of balancing can actually be plenty in a system where charge rate can be reduced to a trickle. You can do 3.6ah on 24hrs, surely your cells aren't so awful they are that far off? Though you tend to go weeks between full charges so it likely is more pronounced. I'm grid backed but do not feed in. I can top up each weekend on low tariffs.
The other feature that is of great use with canbus is to have significantly out of proportion charging capability to battery bank size. To run Aircon from solar I have an array that is significantly too big for the battery bank. Canbus allows the mppts, inverter and battery to have a combined understanding of where the power is. I can set a charge rate of say, 50 amps to the battery, and have 220 amps incoming from the mppts when the inverter is consuming the other 170 amps. If the inverter load drops, rather than the bms going into protect, it keeps the canbus informed of its ingested amps and the mppts ramp down their charging current.
I can also commission completely out of whack banks and canbus keeps the charge rate under control automatically. It turns a binary on and off into a ramped charging profile that passive balancing is capable of resolving.
Someone else mentiomed this, but huge systems often need all the battery banks operating as one. My two 15kva inverters can operate 500amps continuous draw and peak 800amps. That would blow the guts right out of a lone mosfet bms if the rest are shutdown on low cell.
Canbus can also provide a discharge ramp, it can tell the inverters that the batteries can no longer operate in their state and the inverter can stop even before a true low voltage disconnect occurs.
Canbus really shines though in a hybrid offgrid/grid backed setup where the goal is to self consume as much as possible.
You can achieve some of this with the victron shunt, but I don't use one in my home build, I use the bms shunt and canbus.
My bms happily controls the charging. It holds absorption at a slow trickle until its done its configured share of passive balancing and then tells the chargers to all shutdown. I don't have to rely on an overall pack voltage to be right for the final phase of charging, the bms can regulate it dynamically.
Anywho, just wanted to share! Have a great day!
Interesting read. I'm about to build a Mason and was wondering whether to bother connecting it to my Multiplus.
Andy, Regan just gave you five or six video ideas. You can test some of these without having a second or third identical Seplos pack, but some will require two or more packs communicating together. If you're willing to do these tests, I will donate a Cerbo GX to The Off-Grid Garage so you have native VE.CAN ports without cobbling together adapters for your RasPi. I will send you an email and see if you're interested.
@@cuisinartOH1 Indeed would be very instructive
In diy fashion Andy could also make yet another video using a usb to can interface on the raspi! See how it compares to the Cerbo.
I love my Cerbo, I don't super love the price tag but it sure looks clean with its native can and bus ports!
Thanks a lot for the inspiration and thoughts, Regan. Some of your points make indeed sense.
I knew about the temperature throttling as an advantage 👍
I'm still not sure about he 150mA balancer. As I tested it, it won't do well with 280Ah cells and didn't really lower the voltage in these specific cells and most people will face this problem during winter and not being able to fully charge their battery. The spread across the cells will increase during this time and I doubt 150mA will be enough. Even if the BMS could slow down charging, it would need to slow down to almost 0A for that small balance current to be efficient.
To limit the charge current for the battery but still be able to directly feed large loads form the SCC is another good point. Not sure how many people would have that though as they would also want to run the AC during the night. This is per system design and not a standard set up where we have a certain oversized solar generation combined with a load running only from this solar. So I would call this some sort of special set up for a daytime load only.
Again, if you control charging current to match your balance current, that would mean to stay way under 150mA per battery bank in charging to have any effect from that balancer. I cannot see this working with 280Ah cells though. Or it takes a loooong time to balance and to be effective.
So with your large system and 2x 15kVA inverters, if one battery gets low, it will shut down all the other banks as well, effectively turning off your power?
I don't quite understand the discharge ramp option you were talking about. The inverter can only turn off and on but not really ramp down in case of a low cell. I can understand it could be a problem for a single battery bank to supply power if all others have shutdown already. But this is more a system design. With a hybrid inverter, it should have switched to grid long before any batteries get that low.
I will definitely dive into this whole communication world soon. I have access to one of Seplos tech/engineer, so that should help.
I also have the CAN hats for the Raspi here and started installing them. What a nightmare! I should really consider a Cerbo and the Victron A cable for that to be plug'n play.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, that was really great information and something to think about.
I would be interested what sort of devices you're using, BMS, inverters, SCC, batteries...
Hello Andy, thanks for this info, is a good video.
Seplos now make up the cost, for the 135Ah with battery (Allibaba 1.450usd) now 2.160,-usd and plus shipping cost of 450,-usd. Jehh is nice.
They had just lowered that a few weeks. Maybe they have forgotten to update it? I'll confirm...
Definitely the communication has to be improved right now! Actually I like the Mason like you, it is very solid, it is well designed and if the bms is not doing what I want, I kick it out and use an jk or a daly or another one 😉 but the case is top of the pop! That's the reason why I bought a second one. Best regards from sunny hot Germany 🤣👍🤘. Danke Andy.....Marko
Thanks, Marko. We will see how the BMS will work once the two batteries are connected and if we get any benefit from that set up.
Andy, I'm using 3 bms from Seplos and when 1 pack is fully charged, the other is still charging. Same thing with discharge process, if there is 1 pack discharged the other is keep discharging until low voltage disconnect occurred.
Great info. Thanks a lot, Romie.
And you have them all connected via RS485?
As I said in your other video, I ordered 8 of the DIY 280Ah/200A BMS kits and all kits came packaged VERY well - no damage or issues. As for grounding, if you buy ready-made batteries (e.g. Battle Born) they do not need grounding and these cases are powder coated. I think your negatives are very opinionated. The terminals could be a positive from a beginner aspect. As for the BMS parameter settings/BT access, I think you are not considering these BMS' are meant to be enterprise grade. You would not find BT access to anything within a data center. That would be a HUGE security hole - "What do you do if you don't have a computer at home?" This comment baffles me. How did you order the dang things in the first place??? Sure I understand the Mac scenario. I use 99% Linux at my house, but the market share for home computers is still majority Windows. I'm working on an open source app to communicate with these BMS'. Hopefully I can bridge the non-Windows gap for others and I'm hoping to setup a Raspberry Pi image to monitor these. As well though, you should only need to change parameters when you first set them up. These batteries should be "set and forget" appliances. For balancing, you should only have to top balance them when you put them into production (as long as you new Grade A cells,) and again - "set it and forget it!" You SHOULD only be charging to 90% and discharging to 10% in order to preserve your cell investment. I look at it as a feature that I don't have to worry about doing any calculations to setup the 90/10 rules. If you have to balance your cells often, then I think you have other issues. I can also say that they DO NOT shut off other batteries if one is turned off. They do however, all turn on when the master (#1) is turned on and they are all connected to RS485 and addressing is set. I agree there is room for improvement. Though in my opinion, every battery has room for improvement. I'll be putting out my video on these soon. For those who have Schneider equipment, I also have a python app that I wrote to query the Schneider equipment using the Conext Gateway. I also have a Home Assistant add-on for it as well along with the instructions for creating a Docker image on my Github page. github.com/shorawitz/conext-api
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and opinion.
i agree to everything you said, albeit my negative experience with the 280AH version, which i eventually had to return.
communication with my Growatt SPF was a swift, & it showed battery percentage down to the decimal. However, it acted up on the charging side where i would be draining the battery with a constant load of 1kw for 4 hours, & battery percentage would drop respectively to 71% from 100% ; however, when i start re-charging, it jumps within a minute to 100% again at which point it would stop charging. then draining back at the same pace yields the same results albeit for just 2 more times (4kWH X 3 ~ fully discharged) until eventually it drops from 100 to 6% in a sec & automatically shuts down with an "undervolgate fault".....At which point it would then charge normally to 66% for hours & hours, then hits 100 from 66 in a sec........& repeat!
customer support wasn't able to pinpoint the problem & agreed to return it.
@ilcooldj what was you experience ordering from seplos?
@@michaelkaine345 My experience ordering is better than average with Chinese companies, but not 100%. Support 50/50. Actually 50/50 is probably too high. I just reread my original post and I didn't mean to come off as combative towards Andy. I really appreciate all of his time and effort producing this content for our benefit. And now that I've had mine in production for a while, I appreciate his opinion even more.
Very informative. I figured out that a 52 V 280 Ah pack would be way too heavy. So I was considering making two 26 V packs and put the in series. According Seplos that is not possible. It would be a bit more expensive, but I was willing to pay for that to be flexible.
Seplos makes a 100 Ah battery that is manageable with two people--about 125 lbs.
Hello from Germany. (Heute mal auf Englisch) I'm now starting to build my seplos battery! But without this case, only the eve lf280k cells and the seplos 16s 150 amp bms! My thought was, to save the money for the case and built an own one. I've loaded my cells all to 3,65V separately and put them in parallel together for passive balancing.
In a view days I might be able to report how the system works!
But, after viewing this video, I think I need an active balancer for top balancing! 😅🙈
I will report!!
Greetings from Germany
Grüße aus Deutschland! 🤙😎
Thanks for sharing, Oli. Did you get the batteries form Seplos as well?
I must have missed it. Last time you were unable to get the computer to talk to the 280Ah battery pack. But now you can?
Yes was also keen to find out how this was resolved. A few people in the comments suggested the dip switches could be in the wrong position as they were mirroring the 6.9 Mason and the settings were different on the 280. I wonder if that was it?
It will be in one of the next videos... I got it going but there is a catch.
One thing I forgot about was if your whole system is communicating and you put in the wrong parameters that are system wide and they fail, they are going to fail when you have the least ability to repair it. Or worse yet doesn't shut down the the system but damages the battery thru fat fingering 3.95 instead of 3.65. I like setting each part independently.
Those leads you can get from power plus hearing melboure because they use them for their batteries to make sure of ip rating
I think power plus use genuine Amphenol connectors. They look great!
Also as stated in other comments, these "drawers" are more or less one component from a full racked battery system which uses bus bars. The little quirks like this make more sense when considered as part of the whole system.
I guess the "DIY" label is maybe the point of confusion.
If you're selling battery systems, installing them etc, building the battery drawers with your own, separately sourced cells would probably make good business sense. Ditto on lack of wireless management. If this is installed in a shopping center, a school, a military facility, a high rise building, you don't need each drawer to have that. It's DIY for the business selling a large parallel bank, multi-rack system, configured initially, then monitored by another part of the system (like the inverter they communicate with)
Yeah, Amphenol, that was the company I could not remember when I made the video.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia I came across these some time ago while making plans for a battery. YAFA Store seems to stock these connectors on the ally express acquisition place.
@@CollinBaillie Great, I'll have a look. Thank you.
Edit: They seem to be different connectors at this store.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia Maybe you can look at swapping out connectors on both batteries and getting something mechanically identical and have the terminals you want?
Power Plus use Amphenol SurLok connectors, according to a video they have on YT about how to crimp them.
Be very carefull ording the DIY kit or even the 6,9 battery cell edition cause one point has not been mentioned but had happened in germany several times in 2022 already.
If you order such Mason Diy Kit you will pay the bill incl. shipping, import duties and sales taxes upfront. So far so good.
One morning a courier driver will ring on your door and give you a parcel but first asking you for handing over taxes and in case of bad luck you will pay the import stuff again for the small BMS they had shipped later but arrives earlier incl. a bill of the full diy package about 800 and more €.
The customs then will do the math and ask maybe for 20% on top of the 800€ bill and therefore you would have to pay 160€ again which you had already paid just due to the mess that has happened in germany in 2022 quite often without solving the core issue right.
You will pay the amount to the driver still believing that you will get it back but SEPLOS does not care at all, even in cases where you would only have a bill of 230€ for the BMS and the then 46€ duties on top. You will be lost in these cases and your finance agency and SEPLOS will benefit.
So you need to make sure that you pay with paypal and nothing else to be able to fight against Seplos mismanagement later on.
Did you specify you wanted DDP shipping?
That totally depends on how you negotiate the price with Seplos and what tax regulations you have in your specific country.
Something to consider with everything you buy from abroad.
As I own 2 of the 135's I think your spot on on both the positives and negatives. I have not experienced the shutdowns as you stated. But I run both as dumb not using the CAN connection. The BMS does need work and does need a better balancer. I do need to buy a few of the 280 boxes and DIY them myself. But this also makes me wonder if I really even want to use their BMS. Just connect the NEEEEEY and an active balancer and I have the perfect box. Then again A few Custom PCB's to allow the connection of an active balancer would be sweet indeed. Again the batteries have performed flawlessly. So A bit of heartburn over balance at 95% is not a big thing. But how far down the rabbit hole can we go to make a perfect functional battery? I think very far. New terminals, New PCB's, New BMS's, New active balancers, the list can go on for awhile. Oh Oh the cable that runs to the BMS can we get a Y there and connect the Active balancer? Either at the cable or at the connector itself. I really like the boxes, I have had NO issues, and I would like more. I have not purchased the 280 boxes myself as The total cost is still a bit to high. Great Videos and thanks for your time.
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience. I think in terms of the balancing, the question is, how far up you will charge your battery. If you keep it at the 95%SOC level and charging will slow down above that, I guess it will somehow work.
I need more of these batteries to do more testing. One each is just not good enough.
put a small switch on the negative pole of the balancer cable and cut it, if you need balanve, use small switch to conect the cable break and turn it on whenever you need the balancer.
After years of building serves you learn very quickly remove the HDDs before moving , and replace when racked .. The same principle applies here build in situ .
Yeah, could be a bit difficult with the batteries if you have the battery in a rack.
Is a good system for beginners and for the ones to start to dive into potential full DYI. Prefer these one's to all the others that include 3D printed parts and other stuff. The connectors terminals on the big one should be using the standard most common out there at least...
...
I ordered the SEPLOS BMS 200A 11 days ago after they said it would take about 10 days to get to the UK not the 60 days stated on the Alibaba contract but it hasn't left their warehouse yet, so I am starting to think maybe their promises to customers are not reliable, having said that they are fairly responsive to emails. I will chase them again after next and update my experiences here.
Mine took approx 45 days.
10days seems rather unlikely unless they have a cancelled order sat at the UK forwarder
Maybe 10 days is possible when they are actually in stock but they haven't had any 200A BMSs available for about a month now. I think they are supposed to be arriving any day now.
@@niktak1114 sorry, just re-read your post. You ordered BMS only which would be sent via AirMail.
I misread it as buying the Full Case + BMS
They offered me air freight as an option but it took around 60 days for it to arrive here (sitting for almost 3 weeks at AU custom because paperwork was missing).
Being an attractive package, I can see why looks and some upfront simplicity would be the clincher to buy these. At the end of the day, you pretty much indicated that you will be doing some significant mods to the workings. Too many for me to say yes at this point. Convinces me even more to up my own game for a better looking finish though.
I probably won't do any significant mods to the battery but rather more testing to fully understand the system.
My dad has 2 seplos battery banks connected in parallel to his inverter with canbus, the BMS is configured as master and slave and they communicate via RS485, in this setup the master BMS would relay any warning to the inverter so the inverter can react according what it's program to, it does not turn off the battery as a whole. If you have communication from all bms to inverter/charger then inverter/charger will decide what to do when there are warning occurred not the master BMS.
if your inverter/charger support RS485 communication, in that case your inverter/charger will act as master BMS and relay the message internally. and the max parallel unit would reduces by 1, from 16 to 15 max.
Thank you. That is good information here. What would happen if only one battery goes into an overvoltage situation? Would the charger turn off/slow down charging to all batteries or would only the single BMS of that battery react and slow charging down for this one specific bank?
@@OffGridGarageAustralia Since all batteries are connected in parallel Seplos have a formula that they shared with me as follow
“
1: Charging current limiting algorithm
1.1. A device triggers a charging alarm of voltage, temperature, current and capacity or any charging protection, and is judged as no charging current;
1.2. When zero devices can be charged, the charging current is fixed at 10.0A；;
1.3. When a single device can be charged, the charging current shall be ["Charging Overcurrent Alarm Value"-10.0A]; If the charging overcurrent alarm value is greater than 20.0A, it will be reduced by 10.0A, and it will be fixed by 10.0A when it is less than 20.0A;
1.4. When more than two sets can be charged, the charging current shall be ["Charging Overcurrent Alarm Value" * number of sets/2];
1.5. When the voltage of any single cell in all parallel battery packs exceeds "set value of monomer overvoltage protection" +30mV, clear the charging current and set the charging capacity to 0A;
2: Discharge current limiting algorithm
2.1. A device triggers the voltage, temperature, current, capacity discharge alarm or any discharge protection, and is judged as no discharge current;
2.2. When zero devices can discharge, the discharge current is fixed at 0.0A；;
2.3. When a single device can discharge, the discharge current shall be ["Discharge Overcurrent Alarm Value"-10.0A]; If the over-current alarm value is greater than 20.0A, it will be reduced by 10.0A; if it is less than 20.0 A, it will be fixed at 10.0A
2.4; if more than two units can discharge, the discharge current will be as per "Discharge over-current alarm value" * number of units/2;
”
(the original text is in Chinese)
Inverter will regulate charge/discharge current accordingly which sent by the master BMS. I have verified this on my inverter's LCD
@@Pey5531 You're the man. Fantastic information. Thanks so much for sharing this here.
How can the inverter regulate the discharge current though? If it is a hybrid inverter, I can see that it can regulate the charge current as per above formula but discharge? That's hardly possible, I guess. It depends on the load....
@@OffGridGarageAustralia It can limit discharge in ongrid mode and the extra from the grid to supply the load but in offgrid mode can't regulate but the inverter will gracefully shutdown itself down once it hit the low voltage protection communicated from the bms
@@Pey5531 ah, yeah, I forgot about the grid connection. That makes sense.
Andy, the batteries should be used in conjunction with the Seplos JASSN busbars, which has breakers for each attached battery.
What if i use a single battery? I don't need bus bars
Some requirements need an isolator at the battery not at a junction point. Yeah, it's not ideal in my eyes. The TUV PUSUNG they have has one in the front panel, so, the design is there. They just need to be more consistent.
Oh and yes the comms need to interface to our mppt chargers and maybe home automation via mqtt or Or something. The only thing about going to the inverter is say the frequency shifting option so that ac coupled charging could be controlled via soc.
Hmmm, I don't see the point still... Having the BMS on the MQTT is fine but the charge controller throttles charging anyway when we hit absorption. It does not need to know the SOC of the battery. Neither does the inverter 🤷♂️
SOC is just displayed for my pleasure.
I see a need for when the amount of solar panels deliver amps from the solar charge controllers that exceed the Battery charger current. Eg I desire to run 50 Amp 48V 2400W, but may need 4800W at times, so I install 4800 W of solar panels. To adjust the charger controller current limit between 50A and 100A requires Victron DVCC. Or else I double my battery bank to handle 100A charge. So far I have used the MPPT current limits by themself to limit battery charge current. If I add more solar panels I could run large loads diverting excess charge away from battery charge current limit. So is it economical to have reserve solar panel capacity with no desire to store it in a battery, it is only used directly from the solar panel to the house/shed load.
@@aidendeem903 But could you not limit the charge current in the MPPT directly and don't need DVCC at all? That would have the same effect.
For me, the primary benefit of battery to inverter/charger communication is backing down charge current when one cell approaches overvoltage shutdown to give more leverage for BMS balancing current to fix the situation without a BMS shutdown.
Seplos terminating charge when a cell just approaches overvoltage cutout, leaving cell balancing incomplete, is not a good option as highest cell will quickly drop below 3.4v stopping its bleed balancing prematurely. You lose the charge current overpotential terminal voltage rise when you stop charge current which is the best cell comparison indicator of cell SOC balance. Guess they feel having battery shutdown is worse than having imbalanced cells. That logic will just create a continuing downward spiral of degrading SOC balance of cells.
From their perspective, they may turn charging back on after highest cell drops, so the balancing will eventually be done. However, many chargers will interpret the drop off in charge current as absorb complete and go to float voltage therefore preventing further balancing of cells by BMS.
I do believe in having 1% to 2% of cell capacity rating in balancing current capability, particularly when you do not bring battery to full state of charge often, limiting balancing time opportunity. Only having 150 mA balancing on 280 AH cell requires a lot of time holding cells at higher absorb voltage to achieve balancing which is not great treatment of battery. The more time spent balancing above 3.4v, the more cell electrolyte damage is done.
So Andy, get busy building my 2.0 kit! Just keep shipping down!
Hahaha, you wish!
Hi Andy, thank your for your well made review! I enjoyed it very much, especially your demonstration on top of the box "...I will show you something...hops, hops hops..." 😂
At video position 22:50 you said, you've paid only 600 bucks vor 16 battery cells... That can't be true?! If I'm wrong, please provide the sellers store 😉
In a system that uses say, 600 amps, it's essential that all batteries shut down at the same time to prevent overloading of a single 100ah battery bank. If you look deeper I bet this is a programable feature. If it's not, it should be.
Is that a must or a nice to have?
Lets say you have 3x 270AH battery units, with a bms, shutting down at 250A.
If a single bms or battery fails, with that 600A, nr2 and 3 have a 300A load.
Because of the overload (Lets say) nr2 stops first.
Then nr3 has a 600A load and also stops within the next (few?) seconds.
The build in bms protection kicks in.
Maybe not that elegant, but it does the job?
@@gubbernl the build in protection won't necessarily kick in.
There was an overload test on the channel, and one mosfet burned before the bms turned off.
Yeah, interesting thoughts. I guess, I never look at this communication stuff from a large scale system design. In my little garage it might be OK and I have designed my three batteries so that they can handle any current. But as the system gets bigger over time, it could actually benefit having a comms from the battery to give other components a better understanding about the status.
Good on you for acknowledging us Linux users!
Well, that's your won fault! 😊
Hello Andy, I also bought such a bms 150a without a box. This should work together with my Sma System Sunny Island 8.0h 13. This also worked. What bothers me is that the seplos BMS continues to allow a charging capacity of 6kw just before 100% and then suddenly shuts it off. This throws my system completely off track and produces battery errors via can. This should be improved so that from 95% it can only be loaded slowly, e.g. with the Pylontech bms. Of these I also have 5x us3000b. This works wonderfully.
150ma should be sufficient for real grade A/EV grade cells that are top balanced. A lot of people use non-A grade cells that aren't even the same age though. In that case I could see needing more.
did you try the new firmware they put out for sma ? it was a fix for a customer ;-)
Why is the charger not already throttling down in your system (aka absorption voltage and current tapering off)? As I said, the BMS should not be charging your battery.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia at sma unfortunately already because the Sunny Island leaves the charging process to the bms. Lithium batteries cannot be set on the inverter. Sma can only be configured for the lead-acid battery. With lithium batteries, it no longer accepts the target voltage. With the pylontech us3000 series, for example, the charge from the bms is throttled from 90%. unfortunately seplos doesn't do that. even at 99%, it still charges with 6kw if these are available and then it is switched off abruptly and the inverter goes into overvoltage. all not true.
@@Black86Panther the Seplos should throttle charging with the right settings. It would only turn off completely of there is an OVP or something like this.
Are all the settings correct?
It looks like there is room on the front panel to add a breaker or disconnect switch. Also a small fan ( it might not do any good). Good video.
Yeah, should be enough space for a breaker. I'm not sure about a fan in terms of dust...
Could the front terminals be sidestepped and instead drill two holes and run cables through glands in front panel directly to Battery cell or busbar terminal bolts? If Andy has successfully built his own rack shelving unit for Battery 1,2 and 3, couldn't a battery box, or tray, not shelf, be made using square hollow tubing and corner joints that can be bolted. Then insert a BMS that is known to support comms with inverter and chargers, and actually . So do you reckon it is cheaper to modify this with a breaker and terminals, or, build a custom box, rather than shelves?
My experience of Seplos has been disappointing; they appear to be having supply chain problems (nothing fails like success). I ordered 3x 280Ah boxes at the very end of July, but the 200A BMS have been out of stock since then, so the estimated shipping date has been slipping and is now mid-September. I've also got concerns about the fuse provided (Zeeman ANMH) which might not handle the dead-short currents. That combined with 'DDP not being DDP' rumours makes me concerned.
I am starting to wonder whether 100Ah server-rack batteries will take over this part of the market; 48v x 100Ah batteries are under 1,000 USD (plus shipping and taxes) on Alibaba.
I can confirm DDP was indeed DDP in my case. Delivered to the Netherlands.
Server-rack do appear to be cheaper than this kind of ready made DIY.
The only downside is that you don't know which battery or hardware they put in, and can also not replace cell or repair it as easily if something goes wrong.
Thanks for sharing, guys.
My order got delayed as well due tot he 200A BMS. I ended up changing it to the 150A BMS so they could finally send it out.
Andy I like your battery 2.0 better, I have built something similar (just a lot smaller) and have now gone the homeassistant route towards optimising and using the sun's energy to supply 95-100% of my needs. Communication is a big thing when it comes to evaluating data and making sensible choices. Manually turning on the pool pump when there is excess sun feels like you are babysitting your power usage
Thanks Heinz. The Home Assistant route is certainly very interesting and would integrate nicely with my system. I just feel this is almost a UA-cam channel on its own though. But I will go down this path at some stage. Sooner rather than later, I guess.
Any pointers to what type of Home Assistant you are using? I have the option of using Victron Multiplus II AC2-out to switch on hot water around Midday. I also use smart power plugs to schedule hot water and pool pumps so am also approaching 95% sun/battery power (if not overcast for more than a day or so). Andy has in the past said that he used a Victron assistant, but has he reviewed Victron DVCC or ESS compared to the PV inverter assistant I think I recall he used? I have tried ESS and the older manual voltage conditional limit setups. I have grid backup. Because Victron really request the use of DVCC only with a BMS in communication with the GX. Now the Andy had RaspPi and Seplos support Victron, isn't a DVCC review of its pro cons a natural next point of investigation?
@@aidendeem903 I do no run a victron system but my Deye has similar functionality with AUX out (but I am not using it). In my case I use node red to fetch all inverter values and publish the on MQTT so that they are available on HomeAssistant. From there I am busy trying to wrap my head around the built-in automations/blueprints/scripts available. There is also another option of just using node-red to action the usage of power (since all entities in homeassistant is also available on node-red, so smart switches can be triggered on/off). I use smart switches to switch on usage of power (for things like my heatpump), and in the case of a water heater element that uses large currents I use a smart switch paired with a high current relay.
It would be nice to get the Seplos DIY boxes, but allowing for your own BMS.
With a blank front panel and you drill your own holes?
Good review, and pros/cons for my decision.
Personally I see the availability of a PC interface as a pro - as I hate to walk always with my mobile to the battery room, or drive to the beehouse to get access to the JK's. Ok I placed now a old mobile there to do a remote access. Best would be to do a mobile app for the mobile junkee's which live in the battery room *smile*.
I totally agree with the shipping cost, I think their Idee is to have local dealer, which would solve this.
Thank you for the work, and constructive feedback. Hmm what will I now do with all my 310AH cells ...
read my mind....especially on that "living in the battery room". Can't understand why enthusiast DIY'ers would be keen on using a mobile via bluetooth in proximity vs the comfortable PC from afar!
I was keen on them initially but thanks for your investigation I feel there are too many quite serious issues with them. Now I am not so keen and looking for alternatives
From my point of view it looks ok..
shipping cost is too much, 150mA is not good..that needs to change.
There should be option to get(order) bms that support higher balanc. current..lets say 1A ..
Also that carton box inside the box is good idea..they should implement it ..
terminals are not good..not sure why they went with not traditional terminals..if they included cables then it would be ok..otherwise ..change terminals..
I would add also about 60% score for now..if they will listen to us then they might get to 80%-90%..but who knows.. lets wait and see how they will respond ..
Fully agree with you on that. Let's see how much they are able to change/improve.
Thanks Andy
I have 6 of the 200a versions
No disconnect if one reports an error . Just that bms blocks charge/discharge
Negative . The frigging weight.. 2x3 stacked up
Another consideration, for the big seplos is that the shipping can be divided by 2.8 to 3 because just 1 of those is equal to 3 of the 100ah server rack batteries.
That's not how shipping companies work, unfortunately. Usually shipping is based on actual weight OR volumetric weight, whichever is higher. If you shipped the cardboard box the Mason comes in, empty, you probably pay the same shipping fee because of the volume it takes. If you filled it with lead, you'd be charged more because actual weight is higher.
At the moment, everything shipping from China is over the top. The stated reason is that shipping is over burdened (not back up to pre-COVID levels yet) or just costing more (oil prices?). It's insane.
@@CollinBaillie I'm saying that the shipping cost for 3 100ah batteries would be the same as 1 seplos
Very Good Comments
Good overview of the pros/cons. I think it has potential but just isn't ready for mass consumption in the state you got it.
I think the recommendation hinges on the question of if the cost of Seplos is substantially cheaper than Jaikper. I know they are kind of different products, Seplos being much more DIY, but DIY for the sake of DIY when Jaikper could be just as good, if not better?
Remembering the Jaikper has a circuit breaker and arguably better terminal connectors.
Total cost of ownership being the critical point.
you have many option for 100Ah battery on the market for around 1500 $ . seplos is not one of them. however I still go with seplos since, I have access to their technical staff and they are helpful when there is a need to investigate or to modify the firmware.
I really like the half DIY style they provide as you exactly know what's inside the box and how it was put together.
Sure, just looking from a pure financial or convenient perspective, other solution could be more suitable for some but that is not the point here.
The BMS could have actually more potential as I realise at the moment. I'm in discussions with their tech staff to find out more.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia I get the desire for DIY, but if the quality isn't there, it makes less sense. The main positive is that you can more freely buy those storage grade cells and add your own 4A balancer.
hi andy
it actually makes sense that this different Battery packs talk to each other or to the inverter/charge controller. imagine you have a really big PV - so big that in full sunshine you have all the parallel batteries on max charge current.
so when you than have a problem/fault with one BMS and it disconnects ->all the other Packs will also disconnect because of OverChargeCurrent. than it would be nice if your inverter/mpptcharger lowers the charge current so the rest of the packs can still continue to charge on their individual max charge current. otherwise you have all the batteries disconnected because of a single fault in a single Pack and a lot of Energy that could charge your batteries is lost until you manually clear the issue.
Best regards form Upper Austria
If one pack of many in parallel disconnects while charging, the other batteries will continue to charge normally. No communication between batteries is necessary.
I would like to see you try the batrium bms
Why if there are already plenty of these and it is a quite expensive solution ?
They, Batrium, would need to provide them to Andy for free otherwise I would not even think about cause they are really expensive.
Rather than the expensive ones I would suggest to check the open BMS by Stewart Pittaway which you can build on your own and expand later.
Looks far more promising for a diy community than the Batrium one.
I am in contact with Batrium for a while but never got the hang on it. It's not a straight forward BMS and I'm sure it will just work. Where is the fun...
I also looked at the Open BMS but didn't have time to order all the parts and solder this all together. The ready built version was not available for a while and some parts are still hard to get. And the flashing and programming probably turns away a lot of people.
I don't think the lid is a problem from a grounding perspective. On Large Synchronus generators with 400V AC I have never seen a ground wire between the housing and the lid and the bolted on side panels, there are just some nuts like in a server rack in the housing and the painted lid and side panels just bolt on with short bolts in to the nuts.
but none the less it is a good thing to do.
I guess this depends on the regulations. There are some exceptions where star washers are allowed.
There’s a port on the bms that you can connect to a switch. You’ll find its description in the manual, chapter 8: connections. They call it inner switch.
And you can depress the reset button to turn off the bms
Yes, but it's not a mechanical switch as most electrical installations and regulations require it in terms of an isolator. It is still electrical connected event he FETs are turned off.
loving the videos and content ....quick question from a beginner ....how about having a seplos system and adding a extra jk bms in paralel with the current seplos one ? ( it would help with holding up at the top balance)
No, i Had contact with the Technician as Well and i pushed them for 2 Firmware Updates as SMA was Not working properly. 2nd Update fixes it
but that is good to know that SMA is working now - or at least for your edition cause I am not sure if these are all the same regardless the Ampere they can handle.
@@typxxilps yea, we have 4.4, 6 and 8 of the Sunny Island working
17:45 The need for a computer to change the settings is a huge 5 thumbs down for me.
The battery pack will be located NOT where my computer is. In case I need to change settings, I have to bring down my laptop, desktop! It is a big pain!
Agreed. I haven't owned a windows laptop in 20 years. I'm going to have to buy one especially to admin the Seplos.
Yeah, it's a bit of a pain but as I said, once setup, it's not as bad any more. However you would need to connect from time to time to just view the status, I guess. I do this all the time with BMSes via BT.
Definitely they need to have/keep the big general screw terminals on the front...
You can "turn off" the BMS by simply pressing the Reset button for 2 or 3 Seconds. The BMS will turn off and disconnects the positive terminal. As far as I know theres a "Switch" pinheader on the board to connect a additional switch for this purpose (normal used to remote control).
And about the configuration software: I love this solution. I havely dislike all this BT bullshit in the market. Most of the time I even have no smartphone on hand.
Most people have a smart phone to hand that they can quickly and conveniently pull out to change settings, view stats. How many people have a Windows laptop tucked under their arm? Also how many people are technical enough to mess around with baud rates, knock up RS485 cables etc? Not many. Seplos really missed a trick by not making the configuration easier, especially after putting so much thought and energy into making the build so straight forward and simple.
@@danmc1313 How many people are able to differentiate between a whole mess of BT devices and what specific device is to be selected to change the right one. Even here in the videos it happend not just once he is struggling with his smartphone and thinking about what BT device is what...
This is simply bullshit. Not to speak every mfg. has his own App thingy.
And fiddling around with baud rates or serial interfaces!? What? We are working here on devices with a power able to litterly weld construction beams to a solid mess of molten metal. If you now wanne tell me you feel able to do so but have problems with a brain-dead simple and about 50 year old serial protocol, I might say you even should by something else - ready build.
With this serial link, connected to my server I could look inside the BMS litterly all over the world, by entering the virtual machine filled with this tools. Even reconfiguration of the Victron system is possible thousands of miles away.
What do think will your funny BT crap do here in my concret house, sitting on my desk in the 2nd floor while trying to connect to the BMS in the basement?
BT is a gadget. It has no place in an even entry stage of "professional" enviorment. Nobody in there right mind would here rely on BT. Even more: The funny "smart" BMS thingys are even not able to do a damn simple firmware update. How stupid is that!?
And not to speak about the fact BT on this BMS is useless by putting it in a metal enclouser. How on earth should the RF come out of it? So for this gadget you don't have to spend more money for the BT components - even though they are just a few dollar - you have to spend even more by putting the antenna somehow externaly.
As of my perspective I am really thankful they didn't walked the way every other chinese gadget BMS manufacturer walked along, and instead made a more professional oriented hardware. The only real downside is, they really have to produce a more accurate translation. Some parameters or warning/error messaged are hard to understand. But all other parts of there monitor application are just handy to use. It's just settiing the parameters easily like editing a Excel sheet, also to the history log download ability in list view is briliant to transfer the data to other applications and/or do some research related to problems.
In most countries an electronic or BMS is not considered to be an isolator from an electrical perspective though. It is as per the standards and regulations.
you link for SEPLOS MASON 280 DIY Kit 15kWh dosent work :(
Thank you. I'll replace it ASAP.
Hallo Andy!
Ich hatte auch das Problem dass er das laden verhindert wenn SOC hoch ist, aber diese Funktion kann man abschalten.
In der Software ist das der Punkt: "Intermittent power supply function".
Wenn diese Funktion deaktiviert ist, dann kann man auch bei SOC 100% weiter laden.
Ich finde das BMS nicht schlecht, man kann viel einstellen, fast zu viel ^^
Kommunikation mit Victron über CAN war auch kein Problem, Victron Kabel Typ 1 und es läuft.
Grüße
Danke Dir. Hast du das BMS direkt am Inverter angeschlossen oder am GX?
@@OffGridGarageAustralia Das BMS hängt bei mir an einem Cerbo GX, und ich hab es an beiden Kanäle erfolgreich getestet, BMS-Can und VE.Can
@@sierra7924 danke dir.
I ordered one MASON 135 DIY Kit and they charge me for "DDP shipping cost including tax to the gate shipping cost US$ 305,68" from China to Germany. Weight is about 75-80kg. That´s ok.
Yes, that sounds OK for a pack including batteries. People really need to get a quote and ask for the shipping costs before ordering.
I have a 2p8s battery pack 24v 620ah contacted Seplos for the diagram of how to connect the pcb bars to this configuration since they said their bms is 8s to 16s 200ah and the 48v 16s 280ah box would work but they don't seem to understand what 2p8s means their documentation is also deficient for different configurations
No you have to explicitly order a 8s or 16s version they are not 8s to 16s. You have also to specify your communication interface CANBUS to RS485 when ordering. wiring 8s is like the 16s but only one cable. Remember the bms can handle a max of 500Ah per cell. It won't be able to manage your 620Ah with 2 cells in parallels.
I would like to buy a diy kit from SEPLOS. But, I have a lot of CA100 cells that I would like to use, but from what I can see these cells will not fit into the case.
I can't justify spending even more on a complete battery solution when I have perfectly good cells already. Need to find a different solution to house my CA100 cells.
That makes no sense in your case buying the Seplos system if you already have cells available. A DIY project seems the best solution.
Just about Firmware Updates, even it is different to the bms's you are using, 123BMS is also able to do a firmware upgrade.
Ah, great, thanks for the info. I had a look at their BMS a few times. Interesting concept.
Hi Andy, If running battery packs in parallel did you confirm if all BMS's switch off in the event of a cell fault? And if not what would be the result if one pack disconnecting due to an over voltage cell and then reconnected at a point when the rest of the packs were near flat. Not a good result one would think!!!
Yes, they all disconnect at least for overvoltage safely from what I have tested.. If only one pack disconnects due to OV, it only disconnects the charging function, not discharging. So, if you put on some load on, all batteries, including the one with OVP triggered, are getting discharged the same way and voltage stays still the same.
If the total cost plus shipping is less than a ready made, then yes, I'd get it, but with a $400 shipping or whatever, plus having to buy the batteries and ship those, the overall cost might just be cheaper to buy the fully ready made one. It's just a matter of doing the numbers and if you want to consider your hourly wage in there. As for the CANbus cable, you can keep them disconnected during operation, and have them almost plugged in so you can quickly plug them in for any modifications. seems to be a ok compromise.
It's more to give people some option who want to do DIY rather than ready built. Cheaper or not aside...
If you computer is close to your battery, yes it's not too much of a hassle except form turning everything on, starting the software, connecting again and logging in to everything $%#%^
Hi Andy,
regarding the packaging. I recently got a box and all the small parts were all neatly packed in a cardbox. I sent you an email about that. Unfortunately you did not answer.
My Communication with Seplos is great. They answer quickly.
I "abused" their 206AH case to use it with my 200AH cells (206AH are 50mm width and my 200AH are 55mm). With a bit of force (like you had with the 280AH batteries, it was possible to fit them into the housing without any problem. I was also able to use the busbars (copper) which were with 4 holes with my batteries. I sent you also photos about that.
Today I will integrate it in my solar system and test it intensively. As this first box was a test, I will order 3 more and then I also want to program a little software with an ESP32 + RS485.
Here is (from another crazy bavarian guy) a compiled version to communicate via WLAN with your Seplos: github.com/KlausLi/Esp-Seplos-Controller
Unfortunately he does only provide the compiled version and not source code, so everyone (including me) has to do it on his own. Maybe at least I may get infos about the RS485 protocol from Seplos itself.
Servus,
Wolfgang
Thank you, Wolfgang. Sorry for not replying to your email. I'm getting around 40-50 a week and it is totally out of control.
I did order one of these batteries each to see the differences and connect them together eventually. Seems, that there is a problem with compatibility. I'll see if I can make it work somehow...
Heya, I like the case a lot nice and sturdy. the long pcb for the balance leads is almost a must for the eye. but the bms has issues and for 200 dollars it shut be a active smar balance whit minimum of 1A balancing that most be possible. and comminucation in this time and age shut be plug and play and with a app on your foon
Andy! I need an extra PCB for my large 280 seplos box, I'll buy one off of ya! I shorted a lead and the connection on the PCB is gone...
Are you in Australia?
@@OffGridGarageAustralia US, happy to cover shipping
@@hummmingbear I still have the original packing and will get a quote for shipping. You can have two if you like.
What about the old cells?
Yeah, well... you can get the case without the cells if you're concerned about that. So this is just something they offer. We have talked about this in that specific video already: ua-cam.com/video/uuB3qwjh994/v-deo.html
But fair point, is this another negative point or something to consider because you don't have to buy them from Seplos?
Thank u Andy Yes the prize for shipping over the top $478 AUD and if your going to have a rack system Times that By 4 kits That close to $2000 AUD That stopping me. But i do like the kits there up gradable for the future So yes if they lower there shipping cost i look into it then But i not going to pay $478 AUD Just for shipping #SEPLOS Take care Andy and Miss Andy see u Next Video Mate
I've been wondering... in the event that one or more cells vent, what will happen? That case looks relatively air tight. How much volume of gas would there be and how quickly does it happen?
Obviously not something you can test but has been on my mind. If I were to install this in my house it'd be nice if there was a vent connection to hook it up to a dryer vent-style outlet to direct the gasses safely out of the home.
what is the cost difference between a SEPLOS and the total DIY from China
Very similar.
I think it's like $400 difference when buying the ready-built battery vs the DIY case coming with batteries. They also give you 10 years warranty ont eh ready build battery. For what it is worth...
I'm looking for the power overtemperature ntc: it is faulty and i would like to replace it.
Good afternoon Andy well I took your advice and purchased 2 JK BMSs, have just fitted one to my first bank,and I'm looking forward to it doing a better job for my balancing of the battery cells.but have come up to a small problem how do I get to start up this BMS,I purchased the one that comes with the on/of button and LCD,screen HAVE PUSHED THE BUTTON 1000 TIMES,OK MAYBE 3 OR 4 TIMES AND , oops left the caps lock on again, it doesn't start up can u tell me what it is I'm not doing right please.😫🤔.I was under the impression that it's press the play button and it starts up.Ok thank u cheers from sunny hot Victoria,oooooo it's 17 c,now sun is out.Rene.
You need to hold the button down for a few seconds and not just push it quickly.
@@davidb.5544 Hi David how many seconds do u think it will start up on I held it down for about 6 or 7 seconds that usually starts many things.should I hold it down longer I'm not sure how long to do that.Rene.
It should start immediately after pushing the button and also beeps as a confirmation.
Very hard to tell as we don't know your system and cabling. You can only double check all the balance cables being in the right order (measure the voltages) and also make sure to have the bat - is connected to the BMS.
Can you swap to the other BMS and see if this works?
I think you forgot one negative point?? The busbar on de 280kit was to short to connect the left to right cell rank (you fixed it with your own cable). So technically this means that the kit isn't complete or not compatible with all eve 280ah cells..
It is compatible if you use the expected EVE cells LP280K or LF304.
Yes, correct, this one busbar won't fit if you still use the older LF280/LF280N cells.
Hi, I wanted to ask some information about the SEPLOS MASON system.
How does it actually work if you connect multiple SEPLOS MASON systems together ?
How do you charge the batteries and how do you discharge the batteries ?
does it always work one at a time until it is discharged and then switch to another one ?
or do all SEPLOS MASONs charge and discharge at the same time?
Batteries can be connected in parallel for greater energy. They will all charge and discharge together. Charging and discharging is generally via a hybrid inverter that produces 120V or 240V to power appliances and also functions as a battery charger when connected to an AC input.
Can you put the box vertically on its longer side? I want to install the 280Ah Mason DIY Kit in my campervan.
Hi:) - Thank you for a stream of very informative videos:) Planning to use 2 x DIY Seplos Mason packs for a boat project and though I pick your brain if you do not mind:) Can see that you can use either 16 x EVE LF280K or LF304K (believe you tend to opt for the first option). Do you see anything negative in using LF304K or is it just a cost versus output question? - Another question that I am interested in your view on is that my batteries will be stored out of sight. Due to this my idea is to extend the cable to the display window and mount this away from the box (and to plug the display windows with a dead plate). Can you see any negatives in doing so?:) Thanks again!
Maybe shipping costs is how they make up for a reasonable price? Does shipping costs become a profit center? I have seen a wide variety of shipping costs for similar items.
Built 1 and 1 on the bench. Needs a JK type BMS (2A active ballancer). Shipping cost, at least to the UK are prohibitive. well built though (280 at least) i dont mind the "windows" software as I'm rubbish with phones but a PC genius🙂
How much were you quoted for shipping? I paid just over $100 to the UK, didn't seem too bad given the size of it.
$100 is a very reasonable price for shipping to the UK! I'm actually impressed by such a low price.
@@OffGridGarageAustralia Well wasn't speedy. 38 days and counting, expecting another 20-30 days via container ship. Gives me time to finish my system so no big deal.