I need advice from an electrical expert in the heat and light areas mentioned below with 3 issues::

1.  Disposal of large Lipo battery for recycling

2. Fault with Solax battery inverter system.

3. Integrated control electronics

I have had  4.5Kw Solaredge roof panels for over 8 years installed by a company recommended in Bristol, that continues to be troublefree after one panel's micro controller was replaced f.o.c.

My independent solar battery installation is now nearly 5 years old.
The installer went bust so no help from him.

It uses Solax batteries already replaced once, free new batteries supplied by Solax under warranty and installed by me.
I am stuck with a big old Lipo battery and can't find a way to get that recycled.  Any ideas?

Now the online monitoring for battery inverter is showing no functionality at all so I suspect an inverter or communications fault.

While I am a retired professional electronics engineer I have temporary eyesight problem which precludes me doing much.

Can you advise how I can get this sorted?

If the Solax battery inverter is OK and it is a comms problem I would really like to have an integrated monitoring system which talks to 3 systems:
Grant heat pump, 2 years old
Solar Edge roof panel inverter, some 8 years old
Solax battery inverter, some 5 years old

Is that feasible?
 

Contact Solax to see if they have a Take Back scheme and their support to help diagnose the fault. Contact your local recycling centre and ask them if they’ll take it (unlikely). Contact a company like Wastecare who take batteries although generally its bulk smaller batteries. If you google battery recycling you’ll see there are quite a few companies doing this so hit the phone. One of them will take the battery. Recycling home storage batteries is going to become an increasingly bigger issue and also a business opportunity over the coming years. 
 

I don’t know anything about Solax, does it support the Modbus protocol? 
 

There’s a lot you can do with Home Assistant if you can connect to the hardware. 

 

 

Edited August 12, 20251 yr by Kelvin

Is it a triple power 3, 5 or one of their others?

 

No inverter model given but Solax use a dongle that plugs into the bottom of the inverter to feed data to the online portal. Have you knocked this when replacing the battery?

 

Is the battery working fine according to the inverter, just not showing up on the online portal?