Outback Inverters [RE-wrenches]

[Larry Elliott]

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 Ray

 and all I thought I would just give you a heads up on my so far limited
experience with the new Outback GVFX3648. I guess I feel lucky to have
serial number 00004.



Yesterday I fired it up for the first time in a less than ideal situation.



I am testing this unit with a bank of ultracapacitors that hopefully will
eliminate the need for batteries in grid tie with backup in full sun
conditions or at the least supply heavy surge current when paralleled with a
very small (26 amp hour battery bank).



Here is what I found so far.

Upon application of battery power it fired right up and went into grid sell
mode.

I had not looked at the utility meter first (which I should have) to verify
that it in fact was running but as someone who is only familiar with the SW
s I could not tell from the mate so I called Robin who passed me on to John
who cleared it all up for me in spite of a bad cell phone connection.



I had about 1200 watts of PV laying out in the parking lot that I hooked up
to the MX60 and in full sun ran some initial tests.



Without any changes in setup I was feeding about 800+ watts back to the grid
 This is with a real mongrel arrangement of several different brands and
types of modules on less than ideal cable sizing etc. Not bad.





With a 500 watt flood light, about 300 watts of office lighting and a PC
with monitor hooked up I shut down the grid connection and without so much
as a light blink the FX picked up the load and ran fine. PC stayed on line.
I then disconnected the batteries ( through a Kilovac contactor) and ran on
only the caps (22 2700 Farad Maxwells in series). Again everything stayed on
line.

Then I left all these loads on and started a 1 hp air compressor with no
problem even when the tank was at full pressure. So long as I had full sun I
could run just about anything I wanted without the voltage sagging.
Interestingly I shut down the PV and allowed the loads to run on only the
caps.

With about 280 watts of load I allowed the inverter to operate down to 30
volts and still delivered 109 volts. This took about 9 minutes. Not a real
world application but thought it was interesting.



I still need to get more familiar with the new programming on the Mate ,run
more tests, but this morning it all came back on line and it is still
feeding the grid.

I need to add more PV this week and run the MX60 at its limits and do some
grid intertie efficiency tests.



So far the FX does exactly what the SW's do and allot more without all the
bad things the SW's do.

I'll give additional updates as I learn more.



BTW of all the FX's I have installed off grid I have never had so much as a
hiccup except for  the real early betas. 



Larry Elliott

 

 

Hi All;

 

I really want to help Outback succeed, & I love the PSDC and the MX60 so

far.., but my experience with the FX inverters has been less than stellar.

We're looking at 8 months of downtime of 16 months of service. Some of it

is our fault, I took serial # 00037 when I knew I should have waited. With

this last failure, we could have been back up months ago, but the customer

wants the new grid intertie capability. Every month I hear it will be ready

next week. I do understand working the bugs out and I don't feel like

driving six hours to reinstall the equipment until I can be assured it will

last. When is a realistic ship date for the grid tie versions? Any wrenches

out there have one of these babies?

As with many of us in the industry, Outback is working hard to support

their product, but may sometimes be a little over optimistic.

I'm a flaming optimist myself....but for now I'm using the SW+ series for

my offgrid projects.

 

Ray

 

 



 

 

.

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