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Has anyone installed solar panels? What has been your experience? DIY install extra appreciated. (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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Thinking of self installing a 5kW solution onto a South facing garage. DIY solution appears to be 60% cheaper than hiring a local installer (Ohio)

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[โ€“] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

What kind of charger are you using that needs to voltage match the batteries? I'm running 500V strings on a Luxpower 18K and it's not an issue with the chargers in that.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Schneider MPPT 150. We sell a lot of Schneider at work and I got a good price on it. However it's totally a piece of crap. It's the only "150v" device I've ever seen where 150v is the do not exceed voltage rather than the operating voltage, and it will trip offline at 140v which causes a huge issue here in Canada where OCV can rise greatly below -20C.

    Wouldn't recommend Schneider in general as they require their own proprietary CANBus mod to get telemetry out of any of their equipment.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    That's been my impression of Schneider, great on AC but their solar stuff is a placeholder for "nobody every got fired for buying Schneider". I thought they ran Modbus on their comms, pretty sure I've seen the modbus maps for them around the Homeassistant forums. Maybe it's just some equipment, but the Conext is modbus afaik.

    I wouldn't say the "150V" should be operating voltage by default, most SCCs I've used put that as the "do not exceed" number, just like the current. I've smoked relatively expensive charge controllers by being slightly over either of those numbers. Though Victron seem to be able to take it for a while without cratering.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Conext series support modbus BUT only through an overpriced gateway unit, the actual devices speak Xanbus unless they have updated them. There have been reverse engineering efforts that I think found it to be a polarity flipped or bit flipped CANbus but at the time nobody had a reliable translation layer. I believe Schneider bought Xantrex and rebranded their inverters and chargers as their Conext solar line.

    The "do not exceed" nameplate ratings may be more typical in solar, but in the regular electrical world when I buy a solid state device like a 480 volt VFD, I expect it to run at 480VAC, and in fact to have a fairly broad operating range from probably 450-500VAC. Likewise I would expect the current rating to be full load operating current, hopefully with at least a 10% service factor and 20% safety margin on top of that.

    I was honestly pretty disappointed when a 150VDC unit tripped offline at 140VDC, not even making the "nameplate rating" but if this is standard for the industry I guess I can't pick at Schneider for that at least.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    140 is a little light but yah, it's definitely a solar thing only. It's possible it bounced over the 150 for a very short time to trip the cutout, and the 140 number you're seeing is a time-smoothed average in your reporting system. If you're using something trustworthy like a Smartshunt to get that data, then yah, tripping 10V short isn't great.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    I checked the manual and it's actually documented to trip at 137V and open its fault relay, and won't reclose until the input voltage drops to 134V. This is hidden in the fault section and not really advertised in the specs.

    Obviously in a cold weather overvoltage situation this loss of load causes immediate runaway, which resulted in many full days of lost generation until I rewired the array down to 2s strings.

    This issue was actually what resulted in me building the first dump load for the system, because as long as I kept the array loaded enough it wouldn't trip out. No way I was breaking the connectors or my fingers off during several weeks at -30C!

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