SW re-discovers lightning [RE-wrenches]

[Kurt Nelson]

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Greetings all again,

I posted a month or so back about agrid-tied w/battery SW system that
worked fine for almost five years, perhaps took a hit in a lightning
storm (owner came home after a weekend away/storm to find the whole
system "just shut down" and no power to the home.

After she got things fired back up, her inverter suddenly seemed
vulnerable to even minor storms and showers.

The home is grid-tied so they were just without back-up for the last
couple weeks and I finally got over that way today.  While I couldn't
find anything wrong with the inverter, the battery was total toast.  The
heliotrope CC had the battery held at 28, and if I put it in EQ the
battery would go to 38 VDC in a second or so and then drop to 18V in a
few more seconds without PV or SW support.

I'm hoping what we have here is:

1)  Bad battery went south, most noticeably after a weekend of vacancy
complete with a power outage to the home.

2)  After that, and with a rainy and stormy spring in the upper Midwest,
the home owner felt that failures of the system were related to the fact
that it was always raining/storming, even though the storm was a long
ways away.

3)  I guess the question is would a lack of battery/too small a
battery/mostly really dead battery result in SW shut-downs, even if
there were no other utility outages and the batts were floating in a
inverter and PWM solar heaven??  

Then again, could it be that the tiny dead battery isn't offering the
usual (healthy battery) buffering of lightning induced voltage surges to
the DC side of the inverter from the PV/DC wiring?

This may be an early post/update, as we'll see how things perform with a
healthy battery once again.

Kurt Nelson


Thanks as per usual -- Kurt Nelson
SOLutions 

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