Setup and Installation Fortress Power eFlex 5.4 Lithium Battery – We just have to bear with us. This is a Fortress power Eflex 5.4 LFP battery, two of them that we’re connecting to the Sol-Ark, and in a week they will be fully set up to communicate through CAN bus. There’s a CAN bus connection on the inverter right the VAR, and we’ll be able to control the charging algorithms to get you 10 years out of these batteries. That’s what fortress is saying. So, that is cool.
Setup and Installation Fortress Power eFlex 5.4 Lithium Battery
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| Total Energy: | 5.376 kWh | Voltage: | 45-58.4 V |
| Voltage: | 51.2 (48) V | Weight: | 116 lbs |
| Open For Full Specifications | |||
Fortress Power Overview
We were a little worried about that at first, but now we have because a lot of other lithium batteries have gotten their communication, their software working with the Sol-Ark. But, we met fortress out at Spi and kind of developed a nice little relationship with Jing and the crew.
We just went with fortress and the Evolts has been great, and the Eflex is our next move. We’ve done the LFP 5.0 and 10.0’s, but we were these Eflexes are a little bit nicer. So, they’re the latest greatest from fortress power. I hear crazy comments from within the mech room, another thing, I forgot to mention that, these are wi-fi enabled. So, you’ll be able to monitor the battery separately from the Sol-Ark, and I think eventually with the CAN bus.
You’ll have the monitoring through the solar app too. So, you have two ways to monitor the condition of the battery. They are waterproof, fully sealed, possibly for marine applications, IP65, that’s a waterproof case. I don’t know about sticking these batter water and batteries, don’t mix, so I don’t know about that. But I know, you gotta have them in your marine applications.
Fortress Power 5.4kW
Setup And Installation
All right, we’re gonna put this first e-flex up on the wall. So, we’ve got my upper bracket in here, got it in some studs good, spat screws on top. This bottom bracket is just a spacer to a leveler to keep this thing plumb. The bracket is actually hanging on the top bracket, so make sure your top brackets are secure.
Okay, there are two Eflexes on the wall. So, you kind of gets the size of it. There’s the Sol-Ark, two e-flexes, and we put our bus bars down in the 8 inc x 8 inc wiring trough. And we’re just figuring out how we’re gonna probably come down. We got a 2 inc strain relief knockout right here, and we’ll bring all the cabling in.
Again, these are parallels because they’re both 48 volts. So, when you’re paralleling, you need to have your parallel cables the same length if you can. All right, so we’re going to put a 2 inc strain relief. We’ll put that there, bring our cables down. So far so good, just filling up space. It’s exciting, just made our connections.
We’re not all buttoned up yet with the fortress evolves. We got our bus bars down here, obviously, our positive is our red, and the negative is the black. And we got the Sol-Ark working right now. She’s charging, let me show you what’s going on here, what’s going in the battery 72 amps going to that combiner splitting between the two of 35 – 36 amps going in each battery right now.
We’ve got solar, and grid power solar is a joke by the way okay, for you folks getting the fortress eflex batteries. This is an installation, actually, my first install the 5.4, and just showing you a couple of things that you need to consider. Some things you don’t have to do, but we did anyway. We did there’s a grounding in the installation manual. There’s a T-slot on the back, if you do a wall mount, you can ground it out. If you want to the other thing to make sure that all your battery cables because they’re parallel.
The cables need to be the same exact length as close to exact as possible, and then you have two bus bars, you’re going to combine two combiners bus bars. So, we have our positive bus bar over here, our negative bus bar here. And then our home runs that go to the home run on the inverter, whatever inverter you’re using.
In this case, it’s the Sol-Ark 12 k. So, important to know, we can get you these bus bars, we put them inside the wiring trough, as you can see, it’s nice to kind of hide this, and not have anybody be able to touch or arc between the two. As you have your 52 – 54 volts potential between the two, and you don’t want to be crossing that up.
There are rubber boots and covers it makes it pretty safe, up the top of the other thing, there is some communication, when you do more than one battery, you’re running a daisy chain situation, and you do have these terminal buses. There’s a cap in here, just follow the instructions on that. Watch the video below for better details.
Conclusion
Setup and Installation Fortress Power – Now, we will have Can bus communication with the Sol-Ark with these 5.4s, and that guarantees that the charging the inverter will be talking to the batteries, and so you’ll get better control, and get your 10-year life. And you won’t be overcharging any one of the batteries. So, that’s pretty cool.
Okay, so the location of the combiners can be anywhere. We have them fairly close to the batteries, they can be farther away. So, depending on how your install goes. We want to make sure that the battery cables are long enough to reach the bus bars. Okay, hopefully, that helps those getting the 5.4 Eflexes and installing those.
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