Lite 10 8 Battery

[Marlys Stotesberry]

On the battery side, the Sunsynk manual says Pin 1 and Pin 5 are CAN-H and CAN-L respectively. But the Freedom Won doc looks like it's saying Pin 4 and Pin 5 are CAN-H and CAN-L. (if I'm looking at the table 5.1 correctly...looking at blue/white and blue)

The one labelled 5.2 Control cables at the bottom gives the Pin definition of the battery side RJ45. Table 5.2 table above with the RJ45 diagram of 1-8 is actually labelled pin out of various inverters & brands.

The Sunsynk manual probably talks to the pins of a SunSynk battery. Read the inverter manual for the plug on the inverter's side and read the battery manual for the plug on the battery side. Table 5.1 indicates that the Freedom Won has multiple CAN-H and CAN-L pins.

So the FreedomWon has multiple CAN h & CAN l. You just make sure to match them accordingly. I have kept it simple & used pin 4 & 5 because then it's a straight 1:1 crimp. All I do is leave out the other copper cables the reason to leave the others out is because the other cables have a multitude of stuff & signals can conflict in some cases.

This year, I seem to be logging several Support Tickets a month with Freedom Won compared to having no problems at all when I first started installing their batteries 7 years ago. In almost every case, they want me to go back to site so they can log in, do a firmware upgrade and change some settings. Even after they have done this, the main issues continue to be unresolved.

Freedom Won also seem reluctant to verify exactly what the issues are. They have full access to my sites on VRM and all my config files, and the installation setup has been done as per the Installation Manual.

1) *SEVERE* SOC Drift on eTower and Lite batteries. I have started to see a few other posts here with the same issues. The Battery SOC will jump from a constant charging of 70% or 80%, right up to a full 100% within seconds. Similarly, I have seen a battery that is being gradually depleted suddenly drop down to a hard 0% SOC, and the entire system shuts down and goes to sleep.

2) eTower batteries going to sleep after being depleted during a long power outage, but not waking up when grid returns in the evening. The batteries only wake up when there is solar power on the DC bus.

3) Firmware incompatibility for Lite batteries. I installed a second Lite battery in parallel after the first battery was installed less than 2 months prior, and the batteries would not charge or discharge in parallel. Freedom Won had to dial in, and reflash and change settings on both Battery Units.

4) Frequent Low Voltage errors, causing the inverter to shut down as soon as there is a power outage, even with the battery SOC being way above 50%. Additionally, the loads at the time of the power outage were under 1 kW. Regarding this error, I have been since been informed that the Low Voltage Pre-Alarm of 51.5 VDC can be lowered to 50.0 VDC to resolve this, even when 51.5 VDC is stated as the setting in all the manuals.

I am looking for feedback from community to assess just how widespread and "common" these problems are. Freedom Won seem to be communicating that these are isolated incidents with my installations, and I have a feeling that they might be downplaying the severity of how common this problem is in the field.

i dont know if this issue is in the same area as yours it a Victron easy solar with freedom etower on power outage unit runs well but then after 2-3 hour just turns off and the display on the Victron is blank and you need to turn off the Victron and back on again to work so any help would be greatly appreciated

While the battery has had issues (as have other manufacturers using the PACE BMS), from your other posts your system seems to have issues and most likely isn't configured well or possibly sized incorrectly.

Having massive SOC slide/ more like cliff. Upgraded to latest firmware across the board, checked all the settings, FW Anydesk into the system and made tweeks but nothing worked. Battery replaced. The faulty one is now on a lower float charge for a couple of weeks on my test bench to see if the cells will balance. Had cell variance of 0.6- 0.8. which a week in has not altered. Have also pulled out another battery with similar issues and seeing slides and unbalanced cells to a lesser extent on 2 more sites. Sad to see as i am/was massive fan of these batteries.

I say no more, the solution is a Group Act /Litigation to recover our losses and to re-establish integrity in storage systems. We have in-house legal and with a united front we should be able to have a round table with Freedom Won tech gurus, to tell us why they sell FW units with known problamatic BMS systems.....and then request a so-called ticket to justify a weak, unsupportive argument.

At the outset, let me state, we are big supporters of Freedom Won. We've got 400+ FreedomWon batteries in the field and we're still heavily invested in their products, buying 2-5 batteries per week from eTower to 80/64.

From late last year and intensifying in Q1-2 this year, we've had a boatload of hardware issues on FreedomWon batteries (and the old firmware issues). We've performed hardware repairs on a long list of batteries which are are currently compiling to submit to FreedomWon to help them understand the scale of the problems.

We now have a "Battery Day" on a nearly weekly basis which we did not have in the past. This is to attend to maintenance issues. The technical support team at Freedom Won are overwhelmed and they say as much. We often spend hour(s) waiting for them onsite with laptop connected and online on AnyDesk.

Freedom Won cannot accuse us of dropping them. We've taken on the task of doing our own hardware repairs so the experience for customers is better than us having to remove the battery and shut their system down until a third party can repair it.

But, in our opinion, none of that should be happening. The batteries should be robust as they were in the past and the support should be sufficiently scaled and capacitated to meet the requirements of the installed base. I know of at least two very large installers of FreedomWon who have been told by FreedomWon that they're the only ones experiencing problems.

Freedom Won has a track record of not communicating with its customer base (crucially installers). It is high time they changed that and I have personally raised their communication failures with them and asked them to improve that.

To better serve our growing customer base, and after a lot of research, we have added BYD to our offering and are delivering BYD where customers are less sensitive to the 'look' of the solution. Our sales team is still selling FreedomWon as the primary solution in the residential space. It is crucial to us that we have another option in case of serious manufacturing delays as we've had issues with on a few occasions of the recent past. And, I guess, in the long run if the quality and support issues are not resolved, we'll probably move the majority of our solutions onto BYD.

But being an installer working on remote sites, driving to site 2 to 5hrs just to get there and on site you try to resolve an issue yourself. When support is needed, that can be the same day or sometimes the next day, depending how busy the support people are.

Eventually got mine back again, with more new firmware, looks like a bias may have been added again. So far it seems better but it is too early to tell, it does sync a little early but this is better than the alternative.

Hi @Jonathan , I have a FW 10/8 installed with an MPII since early March 2022. The battery has performed very well so far and I haven't had any issues. As part of my legacy equipment (from the days of lead-acid batteries) I still have a BMV-712 connected to the system and can confirm that SOC estimation (especially during slow charging) is terrible. The attached graphs show SOC from the BMV-712 on the left and from the FW on the right for the same time period.

I've learned to live with this since I know to read SOC from the BMV-712 (even have the small display still mounted next to the inverter) and the battery is charging correctly (charge voltage limit drops in line with the BMV-712 reporting SOC > 98%).

Thank you! This is brilliant! It in fact confirms our suspicions that this is a built-in flaw with the Freedom Won batteries, and that no amount of firmware updates and settings tweaks can "fix" a hardware problem.

The SoC jump is related to a slight current sensor inaccuracy. This only happens on some sites with Victron inverters. We did establish that the challenge is related to the sensor's difficulty with processing the wave form on the DC bus that is delivered by the Victron inverters. Freedom Won has a software fix for this issue, which needs to be deployed on sites that display this phenomenon. We do not deploy the fix on all batteries because the fix is only applicable to sites that display the issue. From September 2022 we will be using a new type of current censor that will be better suited to dealing with all scenarios.

We were forced to use a new sensor at very short notice last year because of the chip shortages. The previous sensor we used for many years was simply not available. The new sensor is similar to the original sensor.

Your Technical Support Engineer Rudene communicated to my customer this morning that Freedom Won does NOT yet have the replacement Current Sensors that were supposed to be in new battery units from September, as you state in your "Expert Answer" above.

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