Maniac_Powerwall

Joined
Dec 20, 2018
Messages
214
Hi,

I did finally finish my Maniac_Powerwall after over 1 year of work and lots of reading and asking in this community. Thanks to all of you answering my questions and showing me a good way to get all of this up and working.

I want to show you some pictures of my work. Hope you enjoy watching and reading all this:

This is my capacity test station. With the SKYRCs you could get quite accurate and reliable results.

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Repacking :D

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I built a tool to bend all busbars identical. That made the production much easier.

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All busbars are made of 3 twisted 2.5 mm solid copper wires. Getting rid off the isolation was not so funny.

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Making 28 of them is a tough job. Like everything else. You need so much time.

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I spot welded fuse wire to the cells on both negative and positive side. It was so much easier to spot weld the 0.2 fuse wire than 0.5mm, so I took it on both sides.

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All the packs completed :) :p

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We built a frame for the solar panels, they should be mounted to the balcony.

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We had very strong winds already and it was solid :blush:

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One more from the other side. These are 6 LG panels with 345W peak, so a total of 2kWp. In behind you can see one Trina 335W panel which is grid connected over a micro inverter.

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We mounted OSB plates to the wall and covered them with a layer of fireboards, making it easy to mount everything to the wall. The space between is used for the wires later.

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Also the channels to route the other cables are now nearly the same height as the wall. But you can still run cables out of it.

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The plates to mount the batteries are made of sandwich aluminum with plastic in between. The holders are bent of aluminum, too. I used rivets to put them to the plates.

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Between the packs and holders I used adhesive foam tape. That no scratching can occure when inserting the packs.

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The uncle of my girlfriend had this cool cabinet for me. I also got a second one and they were fully equiped with cool things :cool:

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Here I have plenty of space for everything I need. Batrium, breakers, lightning protection, PC and so on.

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You can close everything nicely and its all perfectly tidied up. I still need some things and also want an external switch for the tiny PC. I need to solder some cables to the original switch.

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All packs mounted to the wall. The cables are going through the plates inside the spaces, so you don't see them anymore.

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The inverter is a MPP Solar PIP5048GK doing a good job for now. The output runs from the basement into my office room. Powering a PC which is online 24h a NAS, Router, Phones and other equipment. Hopefully these things will run without switching to the grid the whole year. In winter it could be a problem with only 2kWp. I also need to figure out what to do with surplus in summer, but I already got one more micro inverter which can be used on batteries and is gridtied. So maybe this would be a start!?

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One more picture from the other side. The setup is 14S100P with around 280Ah which is about 15kWh of storage. But at the moment I will only use it from 3.5 to 4.0 Volts which will probably be around 8 kWh, but hopefully it will last longer.

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Thanks again. Feel free to ask me anything you want about my Powerwall. Hope that you like my build. Stay healthy and safe :)
 
Thank you OffGridInTheCity :D As you can see there is space for more cells. Also think about three phase system upgrade in the future. I don't know if something like this is ever finished, so I fully agree with you :rolleyes:
 
That is beautiful. My hats off to you good sir. Love the extremely clean look. I am still working on making mine clean looking. The pouch cells don't make for the cleanest look. And in my RV, I needed function before beauty as I needed power.
 
Thanks, im planning some more small cosmetic updates. I do like to make a cover under the inverter to hide the cables there. And small other things.
 
Wow, great set up and nice attention to detail on the wall mounting. Where did you source your aluminum back plate?
 
Thank you all. These plates are made to mount on the outside of your house wall. The 'Fassade' we say in germany I think it is facade!? :)
 
My Batrium had some kind of freeze yesterday. It was still working but no communication. Not on wifi and also I couldn't connect via USB. Hope this will not happen again. I needed to restart it. Now it is working again!?

Anyone having this issue before?
 
Maniac_Powerwall said:
My Batrium had some kind of freeze yesterday. It was still working but no communication. Not on wifi and also I couldn't connect via USB. Hope this will not happen again. I needed to restart it. Now it is working again!?

Anyone having this issue before?
Yes - my WM4 (with expansion board) WiFi stops working 'now and then'. Mine is under the house which has vents to outdoors but is not exposed to 'wind' or anything like that and the temp is steady 55F low in winter and 75F hi in summer. I mention this because it seems to occur when there's a strong humidy or weather change - like a rain storm moves in or in early morning after a rain when sun comes up - which could cause humidy? or somthing to filter thru the vents and affect it.

Its bizarre but has been ongoing for 1.5yrs now - ever since I got it. Each time, I have to cycle power. I upgraded (about 4? months ago) to latest firmware but didn't fix anything.

Because of this, I usea cheap laptop near the WM4 with USB cable/communicationand then Remote Desktop into the laptop for info - and this fixed my problem as I don't use WiFi anymore. @Daromer has commented that his WiFi works perfectly when i brought this up a while back.
 
There is a reset button on the WM4. But I can't find how it works. Short press? Long press? I can cycle power but it seems easier to use the button. Couldn't say that there is any high humidity here at the moment. But didn't measure that.
 
hello maniac,
nice project, but I have some questions.
how many amps can do the fuse wires?
how much standby power MPP Solar PIP5048GK needs?
over a year of work means, how many working hours?
you find find the batrium problem?

greets from Berlin
marc
 
@ Oleksii: No, its just a simple label writer. It's printed to adhesive and I put them to the cells.

@ hardy: Standby is about 70-80 Watts. Quite high. You can double the usage for calculations. In my case I use 100 watts and there are barely 200 watts pulled from the battery.
For now Batrium works without any issues. Hope it stays this way :)
Fuse wire is rated 5 Amps. But I think it can handle some more for a few seconds.
I don't know how many hours for sure but some hundred hours for everything!?
 
Had again two times in the last week that the Wifi of Batrium fails. System runs perfect but no Wifi via USB i am able to connect.
Very annoying since every time I need to restart the Batrium and it cuts my Pack from the inverter.

Any idea how I could solve this problem?
 
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