Hi, this is Josh with Solar Tech TV from Wholesale Solar, and today we're going to
go over how to program your Magnum power center to work with a Kohler 14 res a
generator using the Magnum auto gen start module.
This is no substitute for reading the installation manual but it's meant to help get you through some of the
pitfalls that you may come across there's a couple of oddball things here
and we're going to get right in and look at some of the characteristics of the
AGS and familiarize ourselves.
the AGS unit itself has got this terminal block and we can terminate eight wires at this is where we bring in our run signal our
battery bank voltage signal and our two wire start, we've also got a network and
a remote port here our network port is what we're going to use to plug it into
the Magnum network for communication and to get it to run and this remote port is
actually for a temperature sensor that we're not going to use for this
application. You'll also notice there's a test button
which is really helpful for diagnostics and also a status and ready LED light
that will help give you an idea of what it's doing if we take a look inside of
the AGS there are a couple of things that we need to note in here the two
things that we really want to look at are this voltage jumper here we've got
this set for 48 volts and then these four dip switches down here which we'll
get into in a little bit they control the three relays inside that dictates
how the AGS is going to perform and interact with your generator.
Magnum Energy has wiring diagrams available for these let's take a look at one and see
what we can figure out. When we get in we see that pin two is our run signal that
comes from the generator we'll circle back around to pin two because it's one
of the trickier parts of this install but the rest of the wiring should be
straightforward you've got pin three is the positive
from your battery bank pin four is the negative from your battery bank and pins
five and six just go out to the two wire start on your generator now on the
Kolar Res series generators those terminals for the two wire start are
going to be three and four and they're going to be labeled as a start / stop
now when we're getting into the actual programming
of the the physical AGS itself we got to get in and be looking at the
voltage jumper as I mentioned is on 48 volts and when we look at the diagram we
see that out of the four dip switches only dip switch two is required to be in
the up position for what we're trying to accomplish.
We know that pin two is the positive that's coming in from the generator for
the run signal but what we need is a negative to correlate it against to
complete that circuit or else we won't be able to measure 12 volts across pins
2 and 4 and you'll notice on the diagram that it's got the negative of the
generator battery or the crank battery connected to the negative of your
battery bank and that's what's required to be able to complete this 12-volt run
signal so if you're not measuring 12 volts from pins 2 to 4 when the
generator is running and you're sure you have the right run signal wire be sure
your negatives are bonded.
When it's time for the AGS to start the generator it'll close the two wire contact on pins 5 and 6 and that will crank up the
generator but the AGS doesn't have ears it doesn't have any way of knowing that
the generator is running unless it gets a run signal and this is where you start
bumping into problems with AGS faults and things like that you need to be able
to measure 12 volts between pins 2 & 4 when the generator is running only
otherwise this whole thing's not going to work and to be able to get the run
signal we have to get inside the generator the wiring diagram will show
using a generator hour meter or a run light to get a run signal but your
generator doesn't have one right so we have to get in and track down where this
run signal is. Now, Kohler is really good about labeling all of their wiring and
so the run signal we're looking for is labeled number 70. Seven zero. And it says 70 about
every 3 inches on the entire length of the wire from where it leaves the
controller and from there it goes to the stepper motor it goes to the fuel
solenoid goes to the starter solenoid I'm going to show you the easiest place
to tie into this but know that there are multiple options let's take a look.
I wanted to give you guys a quick tour the inside of the generator here where we
make our terminations. This is the side of the generator we've got our fuel
regulator so our fuel solenoid here we've got where we switch between
natural gas and propane this one's already set for propane up here we've
got our AC output this is our leg one leg to neutral and ground that runs over
to the inverter input and over here I wanted to point out this is this remote
start/stop that I mentioned it's labeled three and four so these terminals here
are what run over to pins five and six on the AGS that's the two wire start so
I get asked pretty often how many wires am I supposed to run for my AGS unit and
the answer is in most cases you'll have your AC wiring plus four conductors you
got your two wire start you've got your positive run signal and then you've got
your negative that comes back to complete that circuit.
We talked about having the track down this 12-volt run signal coming from the Kohler generator
and I want to get in here and settle where it is once and for all because
it's a real common trip point for people. I like to access it in here behind the
controller now I've got the screws taken out of this one already but if you take
these two screws out you can lift the controller up and we can find our number
70 wires hidden in here I took and wrapped an orange wire around this one
so that we can see where it is and it stands out this orange wire won't be
here on yours just keep in mind that this is where this number 70 wire is
it's labeled 7-0 right on it don't make the mistake of using 71, seven
one, that's a crank signal and it won't work for this application.
Once we've got all the wiring verified for the AGS we can go ahead and plug in the terminal
block assembly the status light will come on in blink once and the ready
light will come on and continue to blink. If you're using the temperature sensor
it will come on solid and if you're not using the temperature sensor like in
this application it will just blink. You will also find when you get in and look
at the AGS status on the Magnum remote it will tell you that TS is open and
that's referring to the temperature sensor and it's totally normal.
Now that the AGS is hooked up and wired, it's time to get into the Magnum remote
and make sure we can turn it on and off manually. To do that we're going to get
into the control button, we'll rotate over to Jenny control we'll change it from
the default of off to on and that's going to close our two wire connection
on pins five and six and that should initiate a crank cycle on the generator.
Here's where it's mission-critical to get in and make sure you can measure 12
volts between pins 2 & 4 when the generator is running and if you can
perfect, that's great work, we can go ahead and turn the generator off and
then we'll get in and program it because ultimately we want our AC and control
for the generator to be set to auto. So let's look at the programming for that.
We'll get in... turn our gen control to off and then we're going to get in
and do the programming for the AGS setup now that's going to happen under setup
and then we're going to rotate over to AGS setup. Now there's a lot of different
ways to use this device and a lot of different parameters that you can enable
for it to turn the generator on and off I mentioned temperature being one
earlier with the temp sensor you can also turn the generator on and off based
on time based on state of charge based on lots of other things I'm only going
to walk you through voltage I prefer to start and stop generators based on
voltage so if you want to use one of the other methodologies be sure to utilize
the manual is going to be your best friend there. The default on here is a
little bit too low for me. In general we want to be looking at keeping our
battery bank above 50% if we can and to be in there we're going to be looking at
having the generators start at about 48.2 this remote will
allow us to go 48.0 or 48.4, we'll shoot for 48.0.
And it's got a delay, the default is 120 seconds this is so you don't have nuisance
starts of the generator every time a larger load comes on if you're familiar
with DC systems you know that things like well pumps and that will
temporarily pull your DC voltage down and we don't want to have the generator
kick on every time the well pump kicks on so we have this hundred and twenty
second delay meaning that in this case the battery bank voltage will have to be
at or below 48.0 for 120 seconds to start the generator we'll leave that there.
As far as where we want to stop the generator your absorb target is going
to be the best place. Now, this is up for discussion but in general we know when
the battery bank switches from bulk to absorb that your state of charge is
around 80% now I assume you've got a solar array that's available and is
doing the lion's share of the charging so we're looking at using the generator
to take us from 50 percent to about 80 percent now the crown batteries that
we're using call for an absorbed voltage of 58.0 so we'll want to get in and
make sure that our stop voltage is at or below that 58.0 absorb target if we
set our absorb for 58.0 and we set our stop voltage for 58.8 it's just going to
run and run and run until it hits your max gen runtime so it has to be
something that's achievable, we'll shoot for 58.0 and we'll give it that same
120 second delay so now we've got our gen run VDC set from 48.0 to 58.0 and
we've got 120 second delay on either end of that and now to be able to use those
settings we just have to circle back to control we'll go to Gen control and then
we will set this to auto. Now if we circle back in here I want to point out
a lot of these other things in here gen run VDC is the first thing in this menu
I want you to pretend that Gen runtime isn't here. It says off, we want to leave
it off. Gen run amps is off Gen run SOC is off
run temp is off we're just going to get in here and focus on the volts DC being
the parameters that start and stop the generator. The reason being that the
Magnum battery monitor kit gives you a state of charge reading but it's not
always a hundred percent correct we want to be using the best available data and
the voltage is the most solid piece of data we have to work with at this point
we've got the AGS hooked up to the generator and also hooked up to the
magnum power center we got in and we're able to get the generator to start using
the magnum remote we were able to measure twelve volts between pins two
and four on the AGS unit when the generator was running we got in and we
programmed all the parameters for starting and stopping the generator
nothing left to do now but congratulate yourselves on a job well done if you
have any questions feel free to call us or visit the website. This is Josh the
Tech Guy, have a great day!