[Jeremy Harris]

As I said on my first post, I'm not up to playing with yaml to set something up!

Nor me! YAML has to be the single worst aspect of HA, it's like being back in the dark ages of coding in FORTRAN 77, with it's susceptibility to near-invisible syntax problems, like an indent being one space to wide or too narrow.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

OK, both the top CTs are measuring the total load,so the Zappi one (via the Harvi) and whatever the one on the top left is doing. If that lower CT is the battery system one then it's not seeing the Zappi load at all, which means the CT's look to be OK, but the question mark is over whatever that top left CT is. If that is possibly the battery system CT then that could be the problem, as it would need to be the other side of the Henley block splitting out the charge point supply.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

I assume that you are correct, but I'll have to try to find where it goes.
To be honest I'm still having trouble figuring out what does what.

The two CT's at the top are both measuring the same thing, the total load from the supply. The lower CT is measuring the total load minus the car charging load, so when charging at full power will be under reading the load by around 32A.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

It looks like the CT clamp for the Zappi goes straight to the Zappi, does the Zappi communicate with the Harvi?
In all honesty I overlooked the one top left, but now I'm thinking that could be the one to move.
I think I need to stop looking at the picture for a bit, I'm getting myself confused!

Is the Zappi using the Harvi, or is it directly wired as you suggest? Looks to me as if the coiled up grey cable is the Harvi CT, but if that's really going to the Zappi then that's OK, but what's the Harvi doing? Is there an Eddi in the house diverting solar for hot water?

I'd assumed that this was an earlier Zappi, one of the ones that used the Harvi, but if it's a later one with a direct CT connection then is the top left CT going to the Harvi? I didn't think it was, because I've never seen a Myenergi CT with that type of twin flex, all the ones I've seen/used have either had that silver grey flex or a plain black flex in the same style as that silver grey stuff.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Yes, the top left is the Givenergy battery/solar, if you zoom in there is a Givenergy sticker.

So would assume moving that to the same position as the bottom CT would just read the house load and ignore the car charger.

Great spot! Yes, that should indeed fix it.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Yes, shift it down to where the lower CT is and it won't see the charging current. Try not to get it too close to the other CT if you can, they can occasionally interfere with each other if very close together. If you can space them an inch or more away from each other one it should be fine.

Make sure to have it facing the right way. I've annotated your photo with arrows on the Givenergy CT and on the cable below, just keep the orientation the same. Best to mark an arrow as I've drawn on the CT to be sure to get it the right way around:

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Cheers, we will try that and see what happens.
Just out of curiosity, would you have any idea what the other lead from the bottom left of the Henley Block is for, it's a different type of wire completely?

Let us know if it fixes thing, it should do.

The sleeved line and neutral tails to the left of the Henleys seem to be feeding some other power circuit, must be another consumer unit, perhaps garage power?

Looks like whoever fitted it didn't have any 10mm² or 16mm² double insulated tails on their van so they put sleeves over single insulated singles to make them compliant.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

I think people are getting it a little bit wrong. The top left CT clamp needs to go on the live (brown) wire which feeds the main consumer unit which I believe is the one to the left at the bottom of the brown block. The cable to the right is the live from the battery/solar which the Zappi will monitor with the other CT clamp. If you move the Givenergy CT clamp there then it would only be monitoring itself and not the house load. That is assuming all the labels are correct!

What I've annotated on the last photo is correct, the battery CT needs to be on the tail leading to the main consumer unit, where I have drawn that white arrow.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Then why on earth is there another CT clamp on it already?

The Zappi monitors the incoming grid and the solar/battery, not the main CU.

That question has already been asked! I think there may be an Eddi and that the other CT is the one feeding the Harvi. what we do now know is that the Zappi CT is the one at the top right, hard wired (as it's supposed to be) and on the incoming grid supply (again where it is supposed to be). The Givenergy battery system CT is the one at the top left, also on the incoming grid supply, and it's in the wrong place, it needs to move to the house CU supply tail where I've drawn the white arrow.

We are waiting to find out what the sleeved tails coming out of the left side of the Henley's are supplying. My guess is something like a garage CU. Ideally the battery should be able to see both the house supply and the garage supply, but frankly that's too awkward to do and just monitoring the main CU is plenty good enough I suspect. Might be possible wrangle both tails from the bottom of the right hand Henley into the one CT, but frankly I doubt it, and unless there is a big load on that sub-main I doubt it's going to be an issue, TBH.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

So what is monitoring the fourth connection (bottom left) out of the brown Henley block?

Nothing, which is why @Huffy is going to try and find out where those sleeved tails go. As mentioned above, they must be a sub-main to another consumer unit, perhaps something like a garage supply.

Also as mentioned above, there's no easy way to be able to get the battery system to monitor both the main house load and whatever that sub-main feeds, but that may not matter if the load on the sub-main is pretty low or intermittent.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

You need to find out what BOTH of the sets of tails coming from the bottom of the Henley blocks is doing first. It would also help if you could confirm what the Harvi is doing, as it's CT seems to be the one that's on the set of 25mm² tails, that I would have assumed (given they are 25mm²) would be the main house supply. As the Harvi can't be running the Zappi (as the Zappi has to have a hardwired CT) then I'm going to guess that there must be an Eddi hot water diverter installed, and the Harvi is transmitting current data to that.

So the questions are:

1. What do the larger tails, coming from the lower right of each Henley supply?

2. What do the smaller, sleeved, tails, coming from the lower left of each Henley supply?

3. What is the Harvi sending current data to?

Once these are all positive confirmed then it's easy to say where each CT must be to make the systems work well together. The only thing I can confirm from the way it is set up at the moment is that the battery will always try and discharge into the Zappi, as its CT is in the wrong place.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Though it's not shown clearly, my guess is that the harvi is monitoring both the 'grid' and the 'solar' for the Zappi.

No, this isn't the case, as the Zappi CT has already been proven to be the hard wired one in the right place, on the line tail from the meter, at the top right. The Harvi cannot run the Zappi, as that must have a hard wired connection, hence my question about whether there is an Eddid installed in the house.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

It's not certain from the picture whether it is hard wired or not. It is possible for a Zappi to run only from a Harvi.

It's already been confirmed that the Zappi is hard wired to the top right CT earlier in this thread.

This is a newer Zappi, so by law has to be hard wired. All Zappi's installed since the new regs came into force have to use a hard-wired CT, it's only the older models where using a Harvi was OK.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

So what I said was right. The simple solution is to move CT clamp 1 to Lead 1. The Harvi is just monitoring the solar/battery for the Zappi.

Unfortunately not, that will not solve the problem as the battery CT (which is CT1) must be able to see the sum of the house demand, the solar contribution and the battery itself, without seeing the Zappi load.

The Harvi is definitely not running the Zappi, that is obviously being run from CT2, as has already been pointed out (twice).

We don't know what the Harvi is doing, it seems to have no function given that it is definitely not running the Zappi and there isn't an Eddi installed.

The problem is that CT1 (which is the battery system CT), needs to be around a tail that supplies everything except the Zappi, and that is not possible with the present configuration, as it would need to clip around the two tails labelled "lead 1" and "lead 2". I doubt that the hole in the CT is big enough to allow this, so the solution has to be the same as that I suggested in the other thread dealing with the same problem, some re-wiring is needed to add another Henley block to allow a single tail feeding just the battery/solar CU and house CU to be monitored by the battery CT

Edited to add:

Here's the link to the other thread discussing the exact same problem, with a diagram I drew to show what's needed in order to get the battery CT to correctly sense all loads except the charge point: https://www.speakev.com/threads/hyy...home-3-pro-taking-power-from-solar-battery.190104/?post_id=3739638#post-3739638

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Zappi's can (and really all should) have a second CT clamp to monitor the solar. That's absolutely what is happening here. With an AC coupled battery it would need a third. There's nothing confusing about it.

Except that the Harvi was there before the Zappi from the look of it (it has muck on it and it has the older black CT cable, not the newer grey CT cable), plus the Harvi is not monitoring the solar, it's monitoring the battery and solar system together.

Sadly this does mean that just moving a CT as you suggested won't produce the desired outcome. The battery system CT needs to measure the house load and the solar/battery system load/generation, but not the Zappi load, so the wiring needs to be re-jigged as suggested.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Yes, that makes sense. Your other assertions throughout this thread less so.

In what way?

We started not knowing what was what in there. Things got gradually clearer as more information became available, like the fact that the battery CT was the top left one and the Zappi CT was the top right. I can't see anything misleading once we all had a fair idea of what went where. The one thing that wasn't clear was what the two tails coming out of the bottom of the henleys were doing. One pair had to be the main CU but it wasn't clear what the other pair was doing until today.

So which of my assertions was wrong (after we had all the facts today) and which of yours were?

 

[Jeremy Harris]

This is exactly the same setup as ours. The zappi is monitoring the grid, the harvi is monitoring the output of the hybrid inverter. The zappi screen shows you how much is coming from the PV / battery even if there's no grid import or export.

Presumably if you never wanted to charge from PV / battery you could completely remove the harvi and configure the zappi to not use it. I went down the Home Assistant / Predbat route.

What puzzles me is that the Zappi is a new install, so why on earth fit an old Harvi (and it does look to be an old one) when there is an 8 core run of Cat5e that is only using a couple of cores for the load limiting CT?

If it was an older install, back before the regs change that outlawed using the Harvi for load limiting, then that would explain why the Harvi is there, but it isn't, it's a relatively new install with a hardwired load limiting CT for the Zappi. Seem bizarre to spend an extra ~£50 on a Harvi when one of the spare pairs in that run of Cat5e could have been used for that older CT that's monitoring the battery and PV system.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

The earlier Zappi used the harvi for internet connection, is it possible the Zappi was changed to the new version with built-in wifi and it simply was not removed?

This is the puzzle! Seems to be a new installation, put in some time after the PV and battery system was installed I think. Clearly there must have been some Myenergi product using the Harvi, and it's possible that a second hand Harvi may have been fitted when the new Zappi was installed, it's just that this doesn't make any sense. The installer has run a 4 pair cable to the meter box, so why only use one pair for the Zappi current limiter and a Harvi, rather than just use one of the other spare pairs in the cable? You can directly wire up to three CTs to a Zappi, so it would have been really simple to just connect the battery system CT directly.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Just asked my brother about this.
The Solar and Batteries were installed first then he had the Zappi installed last year to replace his old Pod Point.
And he said that the Harvi was installed with the Zappi.
So I don't think that's going to make anything any clearer.

Seems odd to add the Harvi when the installer had run a cable, but this would tally with what @Phil Himsworth has said about his installation.

Key thing is that it doesn't change anything, in that to get the Zappi to work without discharging the battery means moving the battery CT (the one at the top left) to a location where it can measure the sum of the house load and the battery/solar current. To do that means doing as suggested in the other thread with this issue, re-jigging the wiring and adding another Henley block, I think, as I can't see any obvious alternative way to do this.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

As the existing wiring is not suitable for just relocating the offending g CT clamp then another minimally-invasive option might be to add an additional hybrid battery inverter CT, fitted to measure the power in reverse of the Zappi feed, and connected in parallel with the CT clamp to the battery inverter that’s already measuring the full incoming mains supply. The inverse power measurement from Zappi CT should then be subtracted from the total power CT measurement so the battery inverter can no longer “see” Zappi power draw.

I’m just about to do the same with my own setup as I’ve just replaced a GSL Energy hybrid inverter with a Sunsynk Ecco unit on my battery storage system. The GSL inverter did not use CT clamps, only an RS485 modbus RTU energy meter for power measurement, so only after changing the inverter am I in. position to test this. I’ve also got Solar Assistant and Home Assistant to reconfigure to force-charge the battery storage in cheap rate slots outside the standard IOG off-peak hours, but the CT clamp “hack” should also mean that I can prevent my batteries from dumping into Zappi when it charges outside the standard IOG off-peak times when I don’t want to charge the batteries at that time too.

Very interesting approach - nice bit of lateral thinking!

I can't see any obvious reason why this shouldn't work, either, just a matter of making sure that both CTs are identical, and fitted in anti-phase, which shouldn't be hard to do.

Be great to here how you get on, as this seems to be something that's becoming a common problem.