EG4 Chargeverter Plus Review (Gen 3) | Install, Test & Off-Grid Charging Explained

Instruction manual. Mounting brackets. Power cord. Communications cable.

Gen control cable. Negative battery cable, quick connects, ring terminals, positive battery cable, quick connect ring terminals. This right here is the EG4 Chargeverter Plus. And this right now is going to be the third generation of the EG4 Chargeverter, primarily because the first generation was the yellow one, the second generation is the Chargeverter GC for gen control, and this is a Chargeverter Plus.

There has been some upgrades in this. It's going to be I think it was IP54 rated, which means it can kind of be outside, take a little bit of rain splashing or whatnot, but it's not designed to get wet, not designed to be in direct sunlight. It's fine if it's outside in a covered space the whole time. You don't want direct sunlight on it, and you don't want it getting directly rained on, but being outside is going to be okay.

It's also rated for, if I remember correctly, a little bit higher altitude, but if you look at it, it's got a lot of stuff going on for it, right? The primary things besides what I just mentioned already is the gen controls, which is this cable here, can get you a lot more capabilities, they say, because you can program in things like start time, idle time, ramp up time, stuff like that, even fan speed and all that stuff is controllable. So, that's great. But the reason that I bought that is not for any of those reasons, but to replace this Chargeverter GC, which does not work anymore for me.

So, trying to go into the warranty process and all that kind of fun stuff, I saw that, "Hey, this new model is available. " So, for me, I'm going to be replacing the one that doesn't work with this one, and hopefully this one will work. >> [music] >> So, let's go take a little bit of closer look at it, right? This right here is obviously going to be the front part.

It's got a little DC rated circuit breaker right here. Obviously, because it's designed for intrusion protection. What it has is a waterproof, or maybe water resistant, case right there so that the water doesn't get in right there. The label and all the fancy stuff is going to be up here.

It's got a little screen up here. We'll have to get it installed and get a closer look at that. But, if you look at the device on this side, it's going to be the power cable. Looking at the power cable here, it looks like it's the exact same power cable as the one on the GC, which has a quick connect.

This one can be rewired if you only have 120-V receptacle, you can rewire this to be only 120. But, if you do wire it to be 120, that means the maximum output of this is going to be uh uh 50 amps cuz it's going to cut it in half. Because this 14-30 plug is designed for 240, and when at 240, this thing can charge at 100 amps on the battery bank. So, looks like it's going to be a direct replacement.

So, if that's the case, we'll let you know. If not, we'll also let you know. If you want to move around to this side right here, what you will see is right here is the gen control connectors, which is this right here. Then, you also have a communications uh port right here.

And this one is, you know, the Ethernet port. But, this is nice because it seems it's got the cover on it just in case, you know, you weren't going to be using that. That way, it kind of keeps it a little bit more water resistant. And obviously, you got the quick connects for the uh battery cables right here.

Uh these terminals look like they might be M8. I think these are M8. Looks like it's 22 8, so it looks like an M8 connector ring terminal. So, if you're going to attach this to some bus bar or something like that, make sure that the bus uh studs are going to be able to take M8.

All right? So, uh that's interesting because it looks like uh these connectors, the quick connects here as by design, have this little uh gasket looking thing on them. So, it makes them a lot more water resistant, which is greater dust uh resistant, but there's no water resistance on uh this connector here. So, if you're also using comms, it doesn't look like the cable that they sent you, which is going to be looks like an RS485 1A to B cable, uh which is, you know, uh ethernet cable, which is might be rewired only using a few pins.

This one doesn't have any water resistance on it either, right? So, um like I said, it's not exactly designed to get splashed or rained on. And this thing doesn't look anything in particular, so if you need to rewire one yourself, you probably could. Um probably not going to go ahead and do that because I'm not going to be using this thing with communications.

So, uh air goes probably out that side. Well, once we set it up, we'll let you know. Uh but on the one that we have, the air goes in, I believe, this side and comes out this side. Back side looks like that.

Uh it's got the two holes for the mounting uh screws and brackets there. We'll go ahead and get that installed. But in case you didn't really know what this was, it essentially takes AC power and then charges uh DC power out right here. You're going to be asking, "Why would somebody need something like this?

" Well, first of all, it is a charger. And you don't have to use this charger, you can use pretty much any LiFePO4 charger on the market to charge batteries in case you need to do that. So, one, it is a charger and it also solves that problem. The other situation is for charge verse in general.

A lot of people who are using these things off-grid and stuff like that sometimes use generator power to charge the battery bank just in case they don't get enough sunlight. And then that's the case, most of the generators that people use are going to be non-pure sine wave inverters. So, it's a general generator. So, with a with a generator gasoline powered generator, we really going to get is unless you're in the perfectly awesome sweet spot, depending on what your generator is, it's going to have what they call THD, total harmonic distortion.

So, the sine wave and the power curve kind of looks, you know, not perfect. And if you're going to be using that to charge, you know, through your let's just call it 6000 XP, 12000 XP, 18K, whatever you got, right? Then you could potentially damage the sensitive electronics in those devices because you're not sending it clean sine wave, right? So, this takes you still can to send dirty power to this, right?

Non clean sine waves and then also charge the battery banks using this. So, it really solves particularly two purposes. One, get clean DC charging, and two, just charging in general. So, that's the reason these cut types of things exist.

The neat thing about this is that it's got this generator cable, which if I can do this, I can stretch it in one arm's length, okay? Exactly from pretty much end to end. Um I'm trying to figure out how many people are going to have the generator exactly on the exact outside, like directly on the other side of this wall cuz this cable is not going to be long enough. Uh but if you look at the cable, it's only three wires.

It's got the C, NC, and on. So, you know, it's easy it's going to be easy to splice this thing up. Looks like maybe I don't know what this is, like 14- or 16-gauge wire that's in here. Uh so, you know, if you need you could probably splice this thing up.

You can also custom make this uh cable in case if you want. You don't even need to splice it up. Just get your own low-voltage cable, wire that up there. Uh you'll be fine.

But, yeah, something they might want to think about in case a lot of people are using this for uh generator control and stuff like that, you probably want to get a little bit longer cable like so. So, what I'm going to do is go ahead and get this thing installed, and then we will go ahead and plug it up and see how it works. So, as you can see right there, we just installed these two clips. Uh they're not really clips, they're pieces of metal.

And what they do is they let you mount this uh the brack- the bracket mounts onto the charge inverter, then you mount the charge inverter to the wall. Uh these charge inverters historically do get pretty hot, so I would recommend not mounting them to something that is combustible. Let's go ahead and get it installed. All right, y'all, here we have it installed right here, the Charge Inverter Plus here, and here is the previous Charge Inverter GC 5 kW that wasn't working for me.

I don't know if you guys saw the videos or not. Uh I was troubleshooting this with EG4, and eventually decided to just RMA or uh you know, warranty this mess. So, uh this one is broken, um and they gave us a little bit of credit back for this to use towards this. So, in a way they did honor the warranty cuz, you know, whatever we paid for this was applied to this.

[music] So, that's actually great. Um not sure what the deal with this is, and we couldn't figure it out. We tried everything, changing voltages, settings, troubleshooting, checking versions, all that kind of fun stuff, but that didn't work. So, this unit is now dead.

But, if you want to compare the old unit to the newer unit, look at that right there. The newer unit is significantly bigger. May Not significantly, but a little bit bigger than the previous one. I can also confirm that this cord is a is the same plug as this plug right here, primarily because I took it off of here and applied it right there.

And then also, these cables are the exact same cables as the cables that were on this one cuz I took it off of there, applied it right there. So, we're good to go. So, as you can see here, uh we have it, you know, mounted. I'm not sure you can see it very well, but I always have the charge verters mounted just a hair off the uh off the backboard.

Uh there's a lot of noise going on there. Uh but, I just use like a small nut, you know, in between there just to give it a little bit of uh air space on the back. That way, it has some air space to flow. So, let's go ahead and set this here.

This is the first time charging this up. Says it's discharging. That can't be true because the breaker is off. So, uh we'll go in here.

You got to hold this button for a few seconds. Generator settings here. Uh voltage start. Uh we're going to start [music] this at 43 just so I can get it to start and then stop at 55.

Going to charge at 95 amps. You see right there. So, we'll get out of here. Actually, let's just see what's on the next page, right?

So, go back to the next page. Enter. Generator settings. Preheat time, cooling time, protocol, can protocol.

Not using any of that. Uh charging time, 30 minutes. Yeah, we don't really have any of that primarily because uh we're not using the GC cables that you would use for generator control right there. Uh so, we don't need to worry about that too much.

We're just going to be using this as a Chargeverter. So, let's just go ahead and open this breaker. We'll flip this switch. We'll see it ramp up, hopefully.

There it goes. Look at that, and we are charging. I think it ramped up quickly to about 94 and 1/2 amps. SOC means state of charge.

It's going to say lost because I'm not using communications. If you want to use communications, you could use that and plug it in to your batteries. That way you can charge when it's low or whatnot. I usually just use voltage.

That's additional communications complexity you don't need. Some people may need them. They might want that. They might not, right?

So, it's up to you for your use case and what exactly you need. As you can see right there, that snaps in pretty nice. This case is IP67 rated. Not sure you can see that right there.

Uh but this Chargeverter is really nice. Look at that. This screen is essentially the same screen. The screen is not much not much better by any means.

I think it's exactly the same. Um but if you look at the Chargeverter for this, slightly bigger in case you need to put it outside, good for you. So, I'm going to do some wire management up here. Probably need to do some cleaning from uh the what do you call it?

The fiber cement board that's behind it. But look at that, no hassle. It's pretty much four screws. And like I said, I would highly recommend mounting, you know, putting some air space back there, mounting it like that.

Easy to use, plug and play, all the same essentially same components have cable on the outside, so easy to go. Would I recommend this? The answer seems to be yes. Uh if you want a link for this, uh there'd be a link in the description below.

[music] Feel free to use that. Uh I'm going to see if I can find a coupon code or whatnot. If we can get the coupon code working, there'll also be a coupon code for that as well. So, hopefully this video helped you guys out.

If you have a great uh day, you know, hopefully you have a great day, but uh seems like so far the company's good, Signature Solar's good. Uh we did get this from Signature Solar. Uh you know, working with them with the warranty process and all that stuff seemed to work [music] out. Can't complain too much, right?

So, uh have a great day, get back to work, and we'll see you guys next time. >> [music]