Transcription
Beautiful sunny weather today. The pool fence solar system is producing 1 kilowatt hour per hour, and overall, it is pretty nice weather. Good afternoon, and welcome back to the Offcut Garage here in sunny, and yeah, nice weather, hot Australia. We have, we have—come on, there you go—we've got uh, almost 50 amps outside. That's beautiful. It is close to 2 p.m., so we are over the peak production already, and solar is slowly tapering off now. That is all right.
Okay, my friends, I have already um, set up our test environment today. We want to test another accessory, another module, another new device for the old style but new B series of the JKBMS. Yeah, and this time we want to have a look at the parallel module. It is the JK BLMK5A. So it reveals it already here. It is a 5 amp current limiter module, and that's how it looks like—just a small box, a bunch of cables on one side. We've got a red running LED, a three-pin connector. This is the control wire going back to the BMS, turning on the parallel module. Got a double-pin connector B+, and we've got two times two double-pin connectors, P negative and B negative. The module comes in a metal case, and this is how it looks like when it is connected. So obviously, we've got the B positive connected to the main positive of the battery. We've got the P negative, the double blue cable going to the P negative of the BMS, and the B negative, the two black cables going to the B negative of the BMS. And this is basically the last unknown port we have not used so far.
So as you can see from this setup here, the current limiter sits actually in parallel to the BMS. Yeah, it connects to the B negative and P negative. So how this all works now is once the BMS reaches the maximum charge current, it would usually turn off the MOSFETs inside the BMS and stops charging into the battery. And to be honest, it still does that, but it also activates the current limiter, even the BMS is not allowing current to flow into the battery anymore. The activated current limiter does, and with a black and blue cable, it basically bypasses the MOSFETs which are turned off in the BMS but limits the current going through it to 5 amps. So usually when the charge current into the battery hits the maximum charge current we have set in the BMS, the BMS would actually turn off your charger. Yeah, it would disconnect the charger, protect the battery, and charging current goes to zero. With this module here, it still allows to charge the battery but with 5 amps only. We have seen this in other BMS's as well—pretty much all the inverter BMS's, Sepos, uh, Pace, the JK inverter BMS, the Tunga Luma BMS, and the QSO battery. They all have current limiters from 10 to 30 amps depending on the model, and they're basically all do this. So instead of turning off the charge count altogether, they just limit the charge count into the battery. And this is basically the last feature we have missed here from the new old style old new style JK BMS B series. And with this current limiter, the functionality of the B series BMS is pretty much exactly 100% the same as from the inverter BMS. We have all the features, all the functions, all the modules now, even they are externally connected like the current limiter module.
All right, let's do some testing here and see how this works and if it works and what the pros and cons are. So we use the button here on the display to turn on the BMS. We've got the red flashing light there. It's ready for Bluetooth connection. All right, so this is the 412. There we go. We are connected now, and unfortunately, we get a temperature sensor abnormal warning here because we have only one temperature sensor connected to the BMS, but there is only one temperature sensor in the box actually for this BMS, and I've checked both boxes because uh, Jon has sent me two of these BMS's, and they both only come with one temperature sensor. So you always get this temperature sensor abnormal warning in the app now. And also this BMS does not come with a power button for some strange reason. There's no power button in the box. I don't know why. And here again in both boxes, no power button for this BMS. And uh, this is the second uh, B2A8 S30 PHDR. So this is the—you may remember from the last video—we have pricricked one of these because we fleshed it, we force updated it with the wrong firmware G Kong sent me, and it is now constantly beeping as soon as I turn it on. This is the second one works just fine, but I've chosen this one because it is a 4S8S BMS, and I've connected this to this 4S battery here. These are EVE 100 amp hour cells, and I want to show you actually something pretty cool here. So if we go into the Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery Scanner and scan one of these QR codes, so it gives us the details here—Eve uh, 105 amp hours, blah blah blah, Jingman factory—and it also includes now a button here where you can actually save the data sheet of this battery on your device. I've never seen this one before here. So let's do that. Uh, downloads, yep, okay, that is saved. We go into files. There it is. Open it. Yep, that's fine. And there's our data sheet. How good is that? This is an amazing app. It is Chinese English, but that's fine. Uh, here we've got the specifications, and we can see the standard charging current is 52.5 amps and discharging the same 4,000 cycles at 25° at 45 only 2,000 cycles. Still a lot of cycles. It gives us all the details by clicking on this button in the app now. Cannot recall having seen this button here. Must be a brand new thing. Yeah, as always, this app is of course linked down under the video.
Okay, so we are now logged into the app. We've got still this alarm here which says cell count not equal, temperature sensor abnormal. That's fine. We fix this in a second. Uh, we've got all four cells down here, 12.7 volts. Go into settings, and the first thing want to do is click on the Lithium Iron Phosphate button up here to reset everything, and then we go—cell count is four cells, capacity 105 amp hours. It's not that it matters here—and we have a quick look through all the settings here because this is the default settings the BMS comes with. Start balance voltage 3 volts is too early. 3.45, it needs to be at least 3.65. 3.4 is the requested charge voltage from the inverter. State of charge resets on 3.445, perfect. And recovery state of charge is zero voltage at 2.7. Under voltage protection 2.5, power off at 2.49 volts, nice. And we've got a requested float voltage of 3.35 per cell, perfect. It looks all good. I'm impressed. Useful set settings are—I was just um, praising Gong a little bit too early because now it caught my eye—the charge under temperature protection sits on negative 10°. We cannot charge lithium at negative temperature, so this should never be on a negative temperature here, so I would suggest this sits on 2°. Ah, yeah, and the recovery here on 5° for example. Yeah, so they need to change these two temperature parameters and the balance start voltage, and then we've got pretty good. Yeah, they all look good. Absorption timers it's on half an hour. Flow timers it's on 5 hours, perfect. And everything else here—LCD, buzzer, try contact—that is all good. I have the protocols here, nice. Now, apart from that, everything looks good.
Okay, so let's test out this current limiter. We go to here—continued charge current 40 amps. I don't have 40 amps here. We can put this one on 10 amps, and we say 20 seconds. 20 seconds. Okay. Okay, so if we go over 10 amps for 20 seconds, it should actually turn off the charge MOSFETs up here and also turn on the PCL module. Just go into controls and check that this one is not disabled. Where is it? Here—disable PCL module. Oh, this is activated. No, no, we don't want to disable this, so then now it's enabled, and it should work. All right, let's start up the power supply, and this sits on 3 amps now. Yeah, sure, 3 amps. Okay, going all the way up to 9 amps, and I go to 13 amps, so we are clearly over the 10 amps now, and let's give it uh, 20 seconds, and then we should see the charge MOSFETs up here turning off and also the PCL module turning on, and the red LED should also turn on here. Here it comes. Perfect. Look at this—charge MOSFETs off, PCL module on, red LED is on here on the module, activated, and we are still measuring 0.54 amps, so there must be still some current going through the BMS through the shunt, but here we can clearly see we have only close to 5 amps of charging current. Right, so if we try this again here, uh, okay, let's charge again with 13 amps. We've got the screen recording here on the side, so we can watch the charge MOSFETs and the PCL module and see what happens to the current here of the charger. 20 seconds. Boom, there it is—charge off, charge MOSFETs off, PCL module on, and the current from the charger is reduced to close to 5 amps noise. So um, usually this current limiter turns off by itself if the charge current into the battery goes under the maximum charge current we have set in the app. Right, so if we go under 10 amps, it should actually turn off the charge limiter after a while and then allow the full current going into the battery because it's under the maximum charge count we have set. So if we do that and set this one here to say 8 amps, yeah, and just wait for a moment, it should actually periodically measure the normal charge current going into the battery and then decide if the current limiter module is still necessary or not. Okay, um, I'm not sure how long this will take now. Uh, let's leave it running for a couple of minutes and see when this actually happens. I can't remember when the other BMS's actually do it. It could take like four, five, six, 10 minutes or so until this happens, but they actually check periodically if the charge count is still above the set maximum charge count. So give it a few minutes here, and I'll be right back.
Okay, it is now 20 minutes later, and the um, current limiter is still active, so the BMS does not turn off the current limiter and goes back to normal charging even our charging current is under the set limit. You can see here the power supply still supplies some 5 amps. So I wonder if the current needs to go under this 5 amp, maybe if you go to 3 amps for example. Yeah, this is under the 5 amp of the current limiter, but now the light is still on. Okay, so when does it turn off? Geez. Okay, I'm lowering the current to 2.8 amps, 2.7, 2.6, 2.5, 2.4. Okay, so around 2.5, around 2.5 amp it seems to turn off, and now I can actually increase the current again to like 9 and a half amps, and it charges normally again without the current limiter. M, okay, so the charge current needs to go under 2.5 amps to turn off the current limiter. I think this is a bit too low because this would mean the battery is fully charged and the charge current has already tapered off to 2.5 amps. So the other situation where the charge current goes under 2.5 amps is in the afternoon when the sun goes down. Yeah, so once this current limiter is activated, it stays activated until the current going into the battery goes under 2.5 amps. I think this needs to be a bit better like in the other BMS's we have tested, and the BMS should actually periodically, like every 5 minutes or so, turn off the current limiter, check how much current is actually coming in still from the charger, and then make a new decision—is my charge current over the set threshold or not? But here it seems like the current limiter stays on all the time until the current goes down to 2.5 amps. Uh, this is certainly working, but it is not ideal. CL, we can do firmware updates on these BMS's now. So if we go under controls and disable the PCL module like this and then we increase the charge current again to like 13.5 amps, I just want to see if we can actually activate and deactivate the current limiter. So this should turn off the charge MOSFETs now and not activate the current limiter. Yep, perfect. Look, it is off. Current has gone to zero, and the PCL module is off as well. There's no limiting function. This is how it would work without this feature. So the other problem I see here is that we are still measuring 0.54 amps into the battery, right? But what about the other close to 5 amps coming from the charger? Yeah, we are still adding 5 amp hours per hour into our battery, but the BMS does not know anything about it because this one bypasses the internal shunt of the BMS. Yeah, and as you can see in the app here, we are only charging the battery officially with .5 amps, but clearly 5 amps going into the battery. So that means that our state of charge calculation will be way off after the current limiter has actually activated cuz the BMS doesn't know how much amp hours actually go into the battery. And this is actually not the case with the other BMS's we have tested because they still measure with the internal shunt how much current is actually going into the battery because there the current limiter is built in and reduces the current going through the shunt, and here with the external device we are bypassing the shunt. Oh, this is actually getting—no, it is not even hand-warm—forget about it. And the state of charge calculation will be a total mess, I mean, even messier as it already is with the JKBMS's.
All right, my friends, I think we are finally there, and I've shown you all the new stuff regarding the new inverter BMS version 19 and the new old style B series of the JKBMS's with all the accessories we have tested here, like the alarm light and buzzer here, the voice module where you can just um, record your own voice and it plays it when an alarm occurs, and of course the communication module for these B series BMS's which enable us to parallel these batteries in a master-slave environment. We can also mix these BMS's now with these ones—version 14, 15, and 19 works with the B series and established and working communication—so that is pretty amazing. We can connect this to the computer and import and export the settings of the B series BMS, and of course we can also do now firmware upgrades on these old style BMS's here from version 15 onwards all the way up to version 19 at the moment. An outstanding feature I didn't think we will ever see for the B series BMS, so very nice. And of course what we have tested today is the parallel module, the current limiter which kicks in when we have an overcurrent situation with the BMS, but this one actually counts this limited current correctly, this one doesn't. So I'll report this as a bug back to J Kong here. Not sure if they can fix this somehow because this one doesn't have a shunt here, so they probably don't know exactly how much current goes through this uh, current limiter. So by the way, this BMS can actually do a bit more than we actually see from the outside here. I'll talk about this in a video very soon, and I'm just getting all the information from G Kong together here. There is some more outstanding stuff which is under the bonnet, and this is something we need to talk about in regards to the version 19, 15, and 14 BMS in a video coming very soon here on this channel.
All right, my friends, thank you very much for over 108,200 something subscribers here. Welcome to everyone new on the channel. Welcome to all the existing viewers here on the channel. Thank you very much for being here, for sticking with me, for leaving nice comments, asking questions in the comment section, and of course a very special thanks goes to the donors of this channel here—channel members as well as people who are buying me a beer, a smoothie, a coffee. Welcome to the SPAT team, and we will use this solar panel alignment tool in one of the next videos because you have already seen I have set up the winter pool fence situation again—temporary for this weekend only—and of course we had to calibrate these panels before we set them up. Also, thank you very much for all your comments you have left under the last couple of videos about the new old style JK BMS and the version 19. If there are any specific tests you want me to do with these BMS's here, I have already noted a couple of things like uh, resetting passwords on these BMS's here as well as paralleling these ones with older style, even older older style. So questions arose—how can we combine these older BMS's with these newer BMS's here and maybe even with the inverter BMS's? Is there a way? So I will definitely do more testing about this here. I'm very interested in this myself, but if you want me to do any more testing here with this equipment, these devices here, let me know down in the comments. I'm more than happy to set everything up here and show you with a camera here on this channel, guys. And until the next video when we do something—Oh yeah, then we set up the um, pool fence system which I've already done, so this will come in the next video then—and I'll talk a bit about the energy consumption now in almost winter time here in Australia and how I can fix it without installing new solar. So there will be another very interesting video. Until then, guys, you stay charged, stay safe, and thanks again for watching. See you then. Bye-bye.