Growatt BMS 113 error

[droyls]

We have a Growatt SPH3~6k TL BL UP Inverter PV system with 6 x Growatt ML33RTA batteries which have been working fine until the evening of 20th Sept when they stopped charging & discharging and generated the following errors:

BMS Error:	1: Depend on BMS error code 2:If error message still exists,contact manufacturer.
BMS Error 113	1: Restart inverter. 2:If error message still exists, contact manufacturer.

I contacted the installers (Infinity Renewables) and ran through various procedures to completely shutdown PV, Inverter & batteries then restart up again, plus they got Growatt to make a firmware update for the Battery Management System followed by a further shutdown, restart.

Looking at the LED's on the batteries, 5 of them were showing 3 green LED's with one R/A LED flashing, but 1 battery showed all LED's on solid.
Update: 5 batteries now only have 2 green LED's showing, the 6th remains with all on!
Looks likely that the imbalance between the batteries may be the root issue (1 suggesting it is fully charged, while the other 5 are now at 34% charge).

My understanding is that the LED's are showing charge levels, i.e. 3 out of 4 = 75% charged but don't know if this is correct or whether they have any other coding meaning? Battery SOC is now down to 35% in the Growatt web dashboard (was 60% when fault first surfaced) so there is some natural loss of charge.

I have tried shutting all down and taking the single battery out of the equation (removed the Red power connector, & bypassed the Line In / Out connection but it made no obvious difference?

At present the earliest date the installer can get anyone out to us is mid October so looking for anything else we could try that might help either resolve this or bypass the fault??

Note: the PV system was installed in June / July 2022 with 3 batteries initially then expanded to 6 batteries in January 2023 with no such issues until 20/09/23 for the BMS 113 error which is now reported daily at just after midnight! PV is working fine and the only upside is that we are exporting all excess energy via our Outgoing Octopus fixed tariff which helps offset what we have to import!

 

[droyls]

A status update on this annoying issue!

I checked all the Battery to Battery comms cables using my RJ45 cable test tool and all looked ok except for one which initially showed some missing connections but then showed correctly after unplugging / replugging to clean the connector pins.
I also checked the Crystal terminating plugs (pins 4 & 5 joined) and found no problem.

The above didn't make any difference but this afternoon I decided to swap out the Crystal plugs with some spares, again with no difference, but then decided to fully isolate the one battery which was still showing all 5 LED's suggesting it was fully charged (versus the other batteries with only 1 or 2 LED's now showing as they dropped charge to below 25%.

I powered off the batteries then removed both power connectors and the RJ45 comms cable, then connected the previous battery comms cable to the last battery.
Powering on the batteries again looked a lot more positive this time round and checking on the Growatt Dashboard showed the batteries were now discharging as expected.

I have configured the Dashboard to charge the batteries overnight when my Agile Octopus tariff is offering the lowest cost per kWh below 5p per between 02:00 & 06:00 which will confirm all is back working again.

Am still waiting on the installation team from Infinity Renewables to come visit so have sent them an update advising of the above along with a query about warranty for the battery which was only installed back in January 23.