Lithium installs on the Sabbath!

[Mrcoolabah1au]

Wow what great news

[T1 Terry]

Good news following the court results.

PeterH

Tell you the story around the campfire at Taggerty, good for a laugh or two. At one stage I thought they might be ultra cunning but it now appears they might both suffer from Juthro Tull syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_as_a_Brick and thought everyone else suffered from the same problem, including those in the law courts

[Bow]

Is that Max and Belinda's bush tracker?

It is ours and the new battery system is working well.

Greg

[BruceS]

Hi Greg! Been wondering how things were going. You still in the area?

[Craig]

Good to hear. But was there any doubt it wouldn't?

[Bow]

Hi Greg! Been wondering how things were going. You still in the area?

We are at Barn Hill on the west coast south of Broome waiting for a replacement inverter to be delivered. The enerdrive inverters brain keeps turning the 240v of for no reason. Not good when you are cooking bread.

Greg

[Vik351]

Is that a T1 one...???

vik...

[Mrcoolabah1au]

Don’t think Terry would do that

[Vik351]

Don’t think Terry would do that

Was gunna say...

vik...

[T1 Terry]

Bushtracker install all Enerdrive equipment these days but Greg didn't want their batteries or control system, so the van arrived here in Mannum with one lead acid battery and the Enerdrive set up all wired in.
In Bushtrackers defence, Enerdrive supply a "One size fits all" board with everything attached so Bushtracker only need to connect the cable groups together so the board becomes part of the electrical system. Ideal for mass production and minimises the technical skill level required in those that are doing the assembly and that keeps wages cost down.
In Enerdrives defence, they are making a product designed to drop in to a given space requiring the minimum of skilled labour to install. They have the inverter made for them and labelled as their product and in their brand colours, so they are reliant on the quality of the manufacturer as they are simply label engineering their products, they don't actually make any of them. The inverter in this case is very well designed when it comes to plug and play, the two 240vac plugs for power in and power out can be unplugged from the inverter and plugged into each other therefore bypassing a dead inverter. Very clever on two fronts, simply plug and play to install and simple plug and play to bypass. No idea if that was intentional or not, but that is the end result. The inverter itself how ever is a tad power hungry on stand by, not an issue with a large lithium battery pack and a heap of solar, but Enerdrive and Bushtracker must have known about the problem so they include a big disconnect switch on the DC feed side so the inverter can be isolated to save battery capacity. The down side is the 240vac doesn't work if the inverter is shut down and as far as we could see there was no mention regarding the two AC plugs being disconnected from the inverter and plugged into one another to get around this problem, hence my previous comment about doubting this was intentional but rather a good outcome.
As the inverter had the symptoms before the T1 Lithium installation it rules out anything we did as the cause and the symptoms are that of a failed/cracked motherboard because it looses the reprogrammed information and reverts to the base programming from the factory that is designed for lead acid batteries.
Thumbs up to Chris from Enerdrive for putting a replacement inverter in the mail to Greg so they can continue on their trip and as a bonus the install is relatively easy with the AC side being plug and play so no need for a licenced sparky to do that part.

T1 Terry