[RE-wrenches] transformerless inverters and conductor colors

Ray Walters ray at solarray.com
Mon Sep 23 23:17:30 PDT 2013


All Cable and probably other companies can add striping and marking to 
any wire you need.

R.Ray Walters
CTO, Solarray, Inc
Nabcep Certified PV Installer,
Licensed Master Electrician
Solar Design Engineer
303 505-8760

On 9/23/2013 10:57 PM, don at energysolarnow.com wrote:
> Marco- You should not transition to THHN wire at all for the DC run. 
> The PV wire is double insulated for a good reason- the transformerless 
> inverters are such suckers for a ground fault that they need the extra 
> protection. That's why the NEC specifies PV wire.
> I recently did an installation like you wrote, with a transition at 
> the j-box. This developed an intermittent ground fault when wet, and 
> when the P1 inverter failed it was deemed out of warranty.  Learn from 
> my mistake-- use PV wire all the way to the inverter.
>
> That said, does anyone know where to get 1000 volt PV wire in colors 
> other than red, black, and white?
> It would be nice to color code the positive runs like is possible with 
> colors of THHN.
> I'm thinking of buying spools of white and spraying plastic paint on 
> them for a striped color coding.
>
> Don Barch
> Energy Solar
>
>
>     Message: 3
>     Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 09:27:30 -1000
>     From: "Marco Mangelsdorf" <marco at pvthawaii.com
>     <mailto:marco at pvthawaii.com>>
>     To: "'RE-wrenches'" <re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org
>     <mailto:re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org>>
>     Subject: [RE-wrenches] transformerless inverters and conductor colors
>     Message-ID: <000001ceb892$f3e41470$dbac3d50$@com>
>     Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>     Hi all,
>
>     We're doing more and more installs with TL inverters (SMA and P1).
>
>     I'm using double-insulated wire from the array string to the first
>     enclosure, as in j-box, and then transitioning to standard
>     THHN/THWN wire.
>
>     --------------------------------------------
>
>
>
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