[RE-wrenches] Enphase

Jason Szumlanski jason at floridasolardesigngroup.com
Mon Sep 26 16:30:02 PDT 2022


I should probably write this in 48 hours after Hurricane Ian passes by
here. But I'll give you a couple of personal opinions.

Complicated? No. It's pretty dead simple since there is no DC aspect to
consider. But there are a lot of little things, I'll call them quirks, to
learn and understand to make commissioning easier. A strong background in
the Enphase ecosystem makes it all pretty intuitive. I'm not sure how
someone new to Enphase in general would see it.

>From an installer perspective, you're taken out of the loop on quite a bit.
You become pretty reliant on customer support for some things that don't
work out of the box sometimes. There are pros and cons to this. There is a
lot of remote diagnostics, resetting, updating, etc. And communications can
be absolutely infuriating. The WiFi radio in the data monitor is
embarrassingly weak. They didn't learn that lesson, and the comms between
the gateway and batteries is also extremely poor, which means proximity and
line of sight are of paramount importance.

Batteries seem to fail updates and require resets initially, but once
everything is up and running it seems reliable, except, again, the wireless
communications aspect which sometimes results in frustration. But all
things considered, once it's all set up it seems reliable, but time will
tell.

Back to Hurricanes. The 40 kWh limit is pretty pathetic for our market
where people can easily consume 100 kWH per day in September. The bulk of
that is air conditioning, which is also the #1 or #2 thing people want to
back up in the first place. A 40 kWh whole house solution, realistically,
is really a partial home backup when so many sacrifices are required. There
is also a serious limit on the ability to support the surge requirements of
central air conditioning. A soft start kit is virtually required, even with
a maxed out 40 kWh system.

I hope to have nothing additional to report after Hurricane Ian. But if
some systems go off-grid for any significant amount of time I will
certainly learn a lot and share the results.

Jason Szumlanski
Florida Solar Design Group




On Mon, Sep 26, 2022, 7:04 PM Drake Chamberlin via RE-wrenches <
re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org> wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> Looking into the Enphase Ensemble system, I'm not sure that is a
> direction I want to take. It seems that they are extremely complicated
> and require a 30 hour training course to commission.
>
> Once installed, are they reliable? Do they require on going tweaks and
> firmware upgrades?
>
> Will the IQ8 micro inverters taper charge with phase shift? I am
> considering the possibility of AC coupling some to a pair of Radians.
>
> What is the most reliable and economically feasible way to provide
> backup power today?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Drake
>
> Drake Chamberlin
> Media & Communication Action Project
> https://m-cap.org/
>
>
>
>
> --
> _______________________________________________
>
>
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