SolarEdge replacement

[Worcester]

We have one site causing us serious grief

It has a solar edge system on 8 panels: 4 east 4 west @ 15° (2kWp)

It has over 2 years 'blown' the fuse on 4 inverters, as it a non replaceable item, each time needs a replacement inverter.

We've monitored the AC supply over an 8 week period and both the DNO and Solar Edge say it is neither external not internal environmental influences. The DNO have even replaced the overheads

So time to swap it out for something else, bearing in mind that thjis will be at our cost and the client wants remote / internet (ideall including PVoutput,org) monitoring.

Perhaps we could add in the fits anything module from solaredge so that a single string inverter will cope.

Best Suggestions bearing in mind t's coming out of our pocket ?

 

[whinmoor]

I'm not sure there's a suitable twin-tracker. How about two 1kW inverters? Maybe a Solis 1kW mini for each direction?

You can get them with integrated DC isolators if you didn't fit one with SE.

 

[Worcester]

Yep can't find a twin tracker 2kW, currently leaning towards the Solaredge gizmo (SolarEdge Safety and Monitoring Interface) and an SMA SB-1.5TL-INT

What experience do you have of the Solis - quality / support / @ £60 (for 2) will the warranty even be honoured in 10 years or will it be an ancient scroll of no value? - There's no wifi access, it's Cat5 hard wired so the Solis Data logging stick won't work

My solution will cost the same (or less) as I'll get Solaredge to supply the interface module. And won't mean stripping the roof to remove the optimisers. This year there was only a couple of days when peak power was > 1.55kW according to the solar edge monitoring system.

Ginlong's monitoring website {http://www.ginlongmonitoring.com/ }shows a badly installed solar PV system as one of its headline images..

 

[whinmoor]

We've only fitted about 5 Solis inverters and haven't yet had a failure. I think the brand is reasonably solid. The low start-up voltage for small systems is helpful. They are also very light compared to comparable brands (a Solis mini 2.0 is under 6kg whilst a Samil 2100TL is 18kg). The wi-fi datalogging sticks are easy to insert and configure. We've not tried hard-wiring one for comms.

Are all SE optimisers capable of working with a third party inverter? I thought they had a special "Universal Optimiser":

http://www.solaredge.com/files/pdfs...es-indop-add-on-power-optimizer-datasheet.pdf

So, I think a trip up to the roof might be required whatever you do

 

[Worcester]

There are two ways to use SolarEdge optimisers with "any" inverter, one is the newer Universal Optimiser, with the older ones you can get what is basically the guts of the front end from the SolarEdge inverter in a stand alone box that precedes the inverter and does all the optimisation and monitoring.