[RE-wrenches] Fortress Shutdown?

[Ray Walters]

Greetings All;

I have Fortress Battery installation with a pair of E Vault batteries 
set up in a Master/ Slave arrangement.  Its been working fine for over a 
year, but the customer just had a complete shutdown of the batteries 
which left multiple freezers, and refrigerator with rotting food.   When 
he rebooted the batteries by turning on/off the main breaker on each, 
they both come up and showed 100% SOC on the Master, and 98% on the 
other.    There were no fault codes.   I just recently installed a 
larger PV array, and so the system has been reaching full charge every 
morning.

I have multiple calls in to Fortress, but not hearing anything back from 
them at all.  We did have a lightning surge event a few months ago, that 
damaged a Midnite SPD (first ever for me), and took out the control 
board on the generator.  One VFX inverter has an LED out, but we only 
use two inverters of the Quad stack, so I just switched to another 
inverter.  All other equipment appeared fine: Midnite controllers, rest 
of the Outback VFX quad stack, and never any issues seen with the 
Fortress batteries.

The other odd thing, is since he rebooted the batteries, the system is 
working fine, and recharging to 100%  by 9:30 am as before.    Is it 
possible the Fortress BMS were damaged and are now having an 
intermittent shutdown issue?  I did ask him to temporarily disconnect 
the comms between batteries, in case it is a bad BMS on one, it will 
isolate it from the other.

This is a tough one to figure out, since it hasn't happened again, and 
there are no fault codes.  The Mate 3 shows a low frequency AC code, but 
that's usually just from the generator shutting down.    Any help, 
ideas, experiences, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ray Walters
Remote Solar