Description

At my home we have solar PV hooked up to Victron inverter/chargers and a Redflow ZCell battery for energy storage. I have been documenting the system and its behaviour for four years now:

• Go With The Flow
• Hack Week 21: Keeping the Battery Full
• TANSTAAFL
• Still Going With The Flow
• Something Interesting Happend
• Yeah… That went well.

Alas, Redflow went bust in late 2024, and the latest generation of their batteries - of which I've now had a couple - have proven to be remarkably unreliable. I managed to get about six months out of the most recent one before it started leaking (not good for something that was allegedly warranted for 10 years) but I patched it up and am continuing to nurse it along until we're able to migrate to something else. So, I'm going to write yet another blog post about all this.

Goals

Document as much as possible everything that went wrong and whatever else I can glean from the outside about the design of these batteries in the hope that this will be useful to others such as the Flow Battery Research Collective in their efforts to design an open source flow battery.