Victron Quattro not Using Generator Input

This week’s visit was to the Royal Motor Yacht Club at Point Piper to visit a Quattro installed on a boat. I was told it was the first Cabo31 on the dock, to the left, which meant absolutely nothing to me, so I rang the electrician that was “doing stuff” on board.

 Apparently a Cabo31 is a 31 foot boat, boats don’t do metric? I was told by several ppl to bring my boat shoes because ppl that own boats don’t like scratches on their investment. A pointless bit of advice as I had to take my shoes off anyway.

 So, to the problem. The Quattro was recently replaced due to a problem it had developed, I’m not sure what that problem was but I didn’t want to muddy the waters by listening to a previous problem so we got onto the current issue.

 The quattro is set up with AC1 in as shore power, AC2 in is the generator which can supply 4500W. The AC loads include a water heater, AC, cooking hobs and a swag of other items of lower power. When a heavier load such as an air con compressor or water heater turn on the Quattro would reject the generator input and switch to battery power, there were no errors or warnings. When the Quattro was using the shore power this was not happening.

 In VE Configure the Quattro was indicating that the generator frequency was 53Hz. The Quattro is OK with using a wide range of frequencies so this was not a problem.

 Generators can be slow to react to sudden high loads, as my first thoughts were that we had an old generator with a shaky output there were two settings to look at. The first was the Dynamic Current Limiter. Setting this to on allows a slow transition of power to be drawn from the generator, the battery would deliver the load and the quattro would slowly transition to load the generator up.

As this setting was already on I moved to the next possibility.

 On the grid tab of VE Configure there is a UPS function selection. In UPS mode the Quattro is more sensitive to the waveform of the input, if it is not within certain limits the Quattro will reject it and use the battery power. This function was selected on the Quattro so I unselected and sent the new setting.

 We then tested the Quattro with generator input, turning on the water heater, the air conditioner and other loads in several combinations. The Quattro no longer rejected the input of the generator which was good news for the sparky and boat owner.

 For dodgy generators and loads were the equipment is not sensitive, I would recommend turning off the UPS function of a Multiplus or Quattro.