Hi,
My father purchased an EB200 and 2 x 180w 48v shingle panels on my advice for his remote off-grid holiday home in the South of France. I set up the system for him on a weeks trip out there and it was working but I noticed the wattage coming in seemed to be varying wildly and rapidly in peak time between 70 and 220. The peak input of 220 seemed a bit low but the rapid variance was more puzzling to me. Anyway we flew home after charging the unit back up to 85% from generator.
7 weeks later we returned out with my pregnant sister, her year old baby and my son accompanying. Arrived at the house with a 12v refrigerator we purchased en-route. The first thing I noticed was that the green light was not illuminated during sunlight as I expected but when I pressed the button, nothing happened, unit would not power on! I held the button down and it illuminated after a few seconds and remained lit up for maybe 20 seconds or so and then turned off but the screen never came on.
I checked panel input with multimeter and saw about 70V+. We got into a bit of a panic when it would not turn on after another attempt an hour later. We had fresh milk that needed to be cold for the baby and 3 phones we needed charged. We charged one phone from rental car. I started looking up info on google. Came across other people with similar issues on same and other bluetti units where if the unit got discharged to a low enough level it would not power on even though I assumed the unit would not allow itself to reach such a low state of charge. I found a video on youtube of a guy opening another bluetti unit and charging the battery directly with the plug in charger unit enough to bring it back up to a critical voltage to allow it to power on. I mentioned this to my father who was in a pretty low mood at this stage the following morning. Milk was spoiled and temperatures were 40 degrees celsius. He had to drive 50 minutes to get more milk. Asked him would he return the unit but he said that could take weeks and won’t help us out right now when we are stuck so he asked me would I open the unit and try the direct charge of the battery. I did this and the battery measured 32V. After running the generator and AC charger for 45 minutes the battery then measured 49V. I reassembled it and powered it on. It powered on successfully, I connected the solar input and things were looking up. Then I noticed that the solar input was cycling graphic as if it were charging but the wattage was reading zero when I checked the info screen. It showed a voltage but zero watts.
I started the generator again and charged it through the port up to 35% so the ac charger input port was working. I then set it to car mode on the other input and plugged it into rental car. It was also charging ok. Set it back to pv mode, reconnected solar input and still nothing! After leaving it like this for a couple of hours I noticed that the charge level was depleting quite rapidly with only a 9w dc load. I disconnected the PV cable and the charge level then stopped dropping so rapidly. Reconnected the PV cable the following day and again after a short while the charge level seemed again to be dropping with no load attached.
Inverter is working fine. DC loads are working fine. Charging from car or wall charger is working fine. Solar input is detecting voltage and activating the graphic for charging but wattage is zero and not charging at all (seems to be discharging the battery). I can only assume that this fault occurred sometime after we left and began discharging the battery rapidly every time the solar input activated. After a few days this would have depleted the battery and presumably left it in the completely non-functional state we found it in when we returned. We were there for a week and had a tough time because we had no fridge for milk or food for kids.
My father was very dissappointed and down after being excited to return to solar power with family and the unit was almost 2000 euro. I felt somehow responsible because it was me who advised him to buy this setup. I was wondering could someone advise me on what the issue might be and how we can go about remedying the problem. Sorry for long post but just trying to give as much info as I can. Thank you and kind regards.
Gary