[RE-wrenches] Mate 3 lock-up

[John Blittersdorf]

Jay,
  Glad to know you have had good luck with the mate 3.  I am depending on
it and OpticsRE to monitor some remote sites.  The mountaintop transmitter
site has worked flawlessly but the main problem is keeping the internet
connection up there that is transmitted from another mountaintop site.  At
a second home remote site I saw a generator fail an exercise run on Sat and
called the caretaker Sunday when the system was going down.  It went off
line at 9 pm yesterday but it is sunny this morning and everything came
back on at 8 am but the caretaker will have to chain up and drive the 2
mile mountain road to manually reset the Eco-Gen.  It might have been the
last -9 degree night with 45 mile and hour winds.

   I was able to contact Outback this morning and the magic button is the
UP button.  Push and hold. That will release the lock button to work, then
go to settings, system, then do clear internal datalog.  There have been
some issues with it not overwriting when memory runs out and it locks up.
Also he said to go back to firmware version 3.011 or older.. I will once
again ask the customer to consider adding solar as it would recover the
inverter which would charge the generator battery and at least prevent
battery abuse.  It is great to watch the sun heal most of the ills.

John Blittersdorf
Rob Stubbins Solar

On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 9:26 PM, Jay <jay.peltz at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi john
>
> I'd like to know that trick, but just unplug the cat 5 cable and
> reconnect.
> That'll work.
> I've not had any issues with the ags not working as planned with mate 3.
>
> But dead generator battery makes me think genny didn't start, system shut
> down at LBCO.
>
> But a week to take it that low, I'd suspect a weak battery in the 48v.
>
> Jay
> Peltz power.
>
>
> On Dec 18, 2016, at 5:41 PM, John Blittersdorf <
> john.blittersdorf at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have had several instances of the Mate 3 locking up where I cannot
> program anything and the main screen is abbreviated with only one bar.  The
> first time this happened I had been given a command with 2 buttons to push
>  to unlock it from an Outback technician and it worked.
>
> Now it has happened again and it is a weekend and I don't remember the
> keystrokes.
> Anybody out there know what they are?
>
>  This system is a gen set and inverter only. No solar.  Either the
> generator is not starting or the mate 3 is not starting it or something is
> going on with the VFXR inverter and the mate.  It worked fine for about 8
> months and worked OK on Dec 8 where it started the generator with the 2
> hour start...the only info I could recover... no events survived the total
> power loss of dead generator battery and main 48 v bank down to 7 volts.
> One other very puzzling thing is that the batteries went so low.. No DC
> loads other than the inverter and Mate 3.  Could the Mate 3 and the control
> board on the inverter draw down 8 golf cart batteries from low battery cut
> off to 8 volts in one week?  This is the 2nd time I have had to jump start
> this system back to life and it doesn't look good to the customer who ran
> an identical system with an old Trace 2524 for years with no problems til
> the Trace died of old age.
>
> John Blittersdorf
> Rob Stubbins Solar
>
>
>
>
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