[RE-wrenches] Sunny Island 5048 & Enphase

[Mark Drummond]

I believe that a sunny island will work with any batteryless grid-tie
inverter, Enphase included. The catch is that it wont work as well as a
Sunnyboy, and that may or may not be much of an issue. If the battery bank
is large relative to the array, like a C/30-40 charge rate, then it will
work just fine. If the charge rate is high - less than that, especially like
a C/3-10, you'll have some serious problems. (while a C/3-10 makes little
sense on an off-grid system, it sometimes does with GTw/BB)
 
I reported on a problem and asked for some advise a few weeks back, and this
is a good oportunity to give an update. I'd rather not take the time to
describe the whole problem, you can look up the original post if you're
interested. SMA seems to have found a solution that was there all the time
(and it took weeeeeeeeeks for them to figure this out, I think another
installer was pushing them harder to resolve it - thanks whoever you are).
SMA-America was not aware of some of the finer details of how the SI works,
and the manual does not go into the kind of detail necessary to make the
system work properly. One needs to buy a special USB to 485 adapter and
change some settings in the Sunnyboy for it to work better than it would
with any other grid-tie inverter. Apperently the next version of firmware
should fix this so it's not necessary to do the configuration change.
 
Bottom line is they seem to have resolved my problem (3 week lead time on
the special cable, so I haven't been able to test it), but it was
frustrating what I had to go through to get the system to work the way it
should. I think SMA-America's tech support is more knowledgeble now and
others should benefiet from what I had to go through. I just couldn't
beleive that no one else had seen this problem. We don't generally consider
ourselves to be on the cutteing edge here at Positive Energy. But apparently
we're on the bleeding edge on this one.
 
Mark Drummond

Field Manager

Positive Energy, Inc.

NABCEP Certified PV installer

 

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From: re-wrenches-bounces at lists.re-wrenches.org
[mailto:re-wrenches-bounces at lists.re-wrenches.org] On Behalf Of I2P at aol.com
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2009 3:41 PM
To: re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org
Subject: Re: [RE-wrenches] Sunny Island 5048 & Enphase


In a message dated 5/15/2009 2:09:07 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
Richard.L.Ratico at valley.net writes:

Has anyone tried this combination offgrid?


 
 
Marv told me that Enphase does sync to Sunny Island.
 
Don Loweburg

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<http://travel.aol.com/travel-ideas/domestic/national-tourism-week?ncid=emlc
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