[RE-wrenches] micro-inverters

Rebecca Lundberg rebecca.lundberg at gmail.com
Tue Sep 13 18:23:17 PDT 2016


Esteemed wrenches,

I'm hoping the experience of this list can help give us a broader
perspective on the current market performance and as a secondary concern,
tech support (or lack thereof), from solar micro-inverter manufacturers.

Are others having much trouble with micro-inverters? We have had repeated
issues with several different brands on our systems in Minnesota:
- 8 Enphase systems with mostly M210 and M215, have had to repeatedly go
back to sites to replace units. The new replacement ones seem to be lasting
better (we sure hope they will). Enphase is harder to contact in recent
years, but we're happy they at least provide a predictable stipend. Are you
also having to replace a lot of this brand of product? Are the newer models
holding up better?

- We gave a new inverter busbar design concept a try (tenKsolar) and though
the micro-inverters were supposed to take turns and be 'redundant,' the
ones with APS micro-inverters needed 100% replacement and the ones with
Lead Solar micro-inverters have a problem where if one of them fails it
appears to send a signal to all the rest so the entire busbar stops working
-- in action it's far from redundant. When we purchased the tenKsolar Rais
Inverter Bus (RIB) the spec sheet didn't tell us what brand of
micro-inverter they would use as the OEM so we couldn't research the
viability of the product or company or warranty stipend (or lack there-of)
of the micro-inverter OEM. We assumed it was a tenKsolar product and they
would provide warranty replacements, service, and tech support, but our
experience has been far from that. When something goes wrong tenK says
'it's not our product that's failing' because they don't actually
manufacture the micro-inverter (it's an OEM), the micro-inverter company
says 'it's not our product' because tenKsolar has it wired and used in a
very unique manner specific to the tenKsolar product, so both manufacturers
are backing away from any responsibility. A 25-year warranty on the
inverter busbar is a great concept but if/when something goes wrong there
is no support and no apparent warranty at all except maybe they will send
us a new component that needs several hours of work to re-install, so
either the installer does the warranty work for free or the customer has a
very unexpected expense to get their system back up and running a year or
two after it was installed; we think both scenarios are unacceptable (from
our installer perspective :-), do any of you have experiences you can share
here?

I'm wondering if the climate in MN makes us an anomaly. Based on these
micro-inverter experiences we feel like the Rapid Shutdown rule has forced
us to use dc optimizers on residential applications whether we want to or
not -- is that pretty much what all of you are doing too?

Rebecca Lundberg
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