[RE-wrenches] Outback AGS issues

[William Miller]

Colleagues:

As you may recall, I have a client experiencing intermittent generator auto 
start issues.  The residence is a weekend rental, so manual gen start is 
not possible -- I can not train every tenant.

There are reportedly some problems with older Mates in this 
regard.  Outback tech support gave me a very specific description of the 
problem: when switching from manual generator to auto generator run, the 
bulk timer sometimes does not reset.  This means that at the next automatic 
generator start, the bulk timer starts at zero, resulting in a very short 
generator run time. This bug is fixed as of version 4.1.6, the latest version.

I drove the two hours to Big Sur yesterday with a newly rebuilt Mate.  I 
found that the existing Mate had 4.1.6 firmware, so the problem I have must 
not be caused by the acknowledged bug.  I found an AGS Error displayed.  I 
ran the Mate thorough all of it's paces and found absolutely no problems.

I did have a report that the generator displayed an error code the first 
time this happened, but not the second.  This causes me to suspect the 
generator, but I have no proof.

I left a four channel data acquisition system monitoring: battery voltage, 
generator start signal, generator AC and inverter AC.  If the problem 
happens again, I should be able to isolate the cause between either the 
Outback or the generator.

I think this is a very important issue because anyone with an Outback 
system and a generator needs to know if they can trust an Outback system to 
start a generator reliably.  No one on this list has been able to say with 
certainty why their particular Outback would not reliably start a generator.

I will report back when I learn something new.

William





Please note new e-mail address and domain:

William Miller
Miller Solar
Voice :805-438-5600
email: william at millersolar.com
http://millersolar.com
License No. C-10-773985
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.re-wrenches.org/pipermail/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org/attachments/20101022/9ffe3cd3/attachment-0002.html>