[RE-wrenches] Outback VFXR3648 failures

[Ray]

I had all kinds of trouble with the one and only VFXR system I did last 
summer.  Every morning when the system would try to sell back, one 
inverter would drop, which meant half the critical loads all got dropped 
too.  Considering the idea behind all the money for GTB is to keep those 
loads up no matter what, we as an industry looked very bad.  A firmware 
update a couple months later finally fixed the problem, but in the mean 
time I had Outback Tech support trying to blame my wiring for the problems.

I had so many call backs due to this, along with Midnite "Rapid 
Shutdown" issues, that I'm very hesitant to even take on anymore backup 
power systems. I actually talk most people out of it right now.  If you 
already have 99+% power availability, its going to be hard to improve 
that.  More likely, as in our case, we are decreasing the up time not 
improving it, and the customer is paying tens of thousands for that down 
grade.

I'm just too honest to promote GTB right now, especially with Tesla's 
disinformation campaign that makes people think they can backup their 
entire house for any outage for $5k. I was doing backup systems before 
we were even allowed to grid tie in the 90s, so I consider our current 
state of the art to be in total disarray:

shameful over promotion coupled with dangerous under performance.

R. Ray Walters
Chief Technical Officer, RemoteSolar.com
BS Mech Engineering, 1988
Former NABCEP Certified, 2004-2016
Licensed Master ELectrician, Colorado
303 505-8760

On 5/3/17 12:51 PM, Starlight Solar Power Systems wrote:
> Battery Wrenches,
>
> We designed a mobile power system with 6 Outback VFXR3648 inverters 
> stacked for 240 split phase. The battery system is a 20kWh lithium 
> ion. So far, 2 FET boards have failed and the customer called today 
> with another failure. Outback said they had an early problem with 
> these. I want to know if anyone else is having issues with these and 
> is the problem really fixed before I quote another one.
>
>
> Thank you,
>
> Larry Crutcher
> Starlight Solar Power Systems
> (928) 342-9103
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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