[RE-wrenches] All-In-Ones / Sol-Ark fail

Fri Oct 11 12:59:40 PDT 2024

That is the exact error! But I don't think that explains how I have one
string over the expected voltage and one string under. It's definitely
worth checking, nonetheless. This array is 12 feet in the air and pitched
at 5 degrees, so you can't see the glass from the ground.

It is conceivable that I have two issues. The voltage issue could be a
wiring issue and the inverters may have faulted out due to broken modules.
There were tropical force winds there at the time.

Jason Szumlanski
Principal Solar Designer | Florida Solar Design Group
NABCEP Certified Solar Professional (PVIP)
Florida State Certified Solar Contractor CVC56956
Florida Certified Electrical Contractor EC13013208

On Fri, Oct 11, 2024 at 3:49 PM Maverick Brown <maverick at mavericksolar.com>
wrote:

> Jason
>
> Which fault are you getting?
>
> This spring I was getting F23-Tz_GFCLO randomly on an upper roof array.
>
> After further investigation, I found several modules with broken glass.
> After replacing the mods, all is well.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Maverick
>
> Maverick Brown
> Off-Grid Solar Commander since 2006
> Maverick Solar Enterprises, Inc.
>  • Solar Commander Remote Power
>  • SunFlow Systems Cathodic Protection
> maverick at mavericksolar.com
> 512-460-9825
>
>
>
> On Oct 11, 2024, at 1:39 PM, Jason Szumlanski via RE-wrenches <
> re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org> wrote:
>
> 
> By shutting off the PV disconnects on the two affected inverters we were
> able to make the system work successfully today. As I mentioned, we will
> dig into the actual faults on Monday. From the historical data, I found
> that this issue has actually been going on for a week before the faults
> started happening in the inverters. I'm not sure why the faults took so
> long to cause a shutdown of the inverters. Maybe it just "got worse" and
> finally triggered a fault. The first faults would have been  during the
> early band of rain from Hurricane Milton, so possibly water or wind put the
> issue over the top.
>
> Before the shutdown, each of the two affected inverters had one MPPT with
> voltages out of the expected range for the last week.
>
> All MPPT strings are 14 modules with 7 in series, 2 in parallel. Each
> string Voc is 342V and Vmp is 297V.
>
> On the first affected inverter, I was able to observe the bad string
> operating consistently around 370V to 400V+, which is obviously well above
> the Voc (and it's hot here in Florida). The good string on this inverter
> operated around 260-270V during the same time, which is the expected range.
>
> On the second affected inverter, I observed the bad string operating
> consistently around 100V to 130V+. The good string on this inverter
> operated around 260-270V during the same time, which again is the expected
> range.
>
> Graphs are attached for those of you who like that kind of stuff. These
> show a typical day after the issue started to occur, but before the
> inverter faults occurred.
>
> Incidentally, the average voltage of the two bad strings seems to be
> pretty close to the normal strings, so that is a good clue.
>
> Jason Szumlanski
> Principal Solar Designer | Florida Solar Design Group
> NABCEP Certified Solar Professional (PVIP)
> Florida State Certified Solar Contractor CVC56956
> Florida Certified Electrical Contractor EC13013208
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2024 at 6:55 AM Jason Szumlanski <
> jason at floridasolardesigngroup.com> wrote:
>
>> More interesting information... When the sun went down last night, the
>> fault cleared and the inverters started producing power again, drawing from
>> the batteries, and restarting the generator. The master inverter
>> "remembered" the generator was in it's charging cycle and hadn't reached
>> full battery yet.
>>
>> It's good that the inverters started inverting again. That's a plus. I
>> actually wish the generator hadn't started because it was unnecessary based
>> on battery voltage, which was near full anyway.
>>
>> Which brings me to another annoying behavior of the Sol-Arks that I
>> discovered in how the GEN Charge and GRID Charge parameters work with
>> signaling the two-wire start. If the battery voltage is 50V and the charge
>> parameter is set to 49V, the generator signal will not kick on of course –
>> the generator start relay is open. However, if you change the charge
>> parameter setpoint to, say 51V, the generator should start because the
>> battery voltage is below the setpoint. But that does not happen. The
>> battery voltage must "fall through" the parameter setting for the charging
>> to be triggered and the relay to close. If you are in a situation where you
>> need to get the generator on a charge cycle and then leave the site, the
>> only way I have found to do this is to set it to something very close to
>> the battery voltage, say 49.9V, put a heavy load on to drop the voltage
>> below the setpoint, let the generator start, then change the setpoint to
>> the desired 51V.
>>
>>
>> Back to the original issue – I dug into the string voltage data history
>> remotely and narrowed down the fault to two of the four inverters. I am
>> sending someone to shut down the PV DC switches on these two inverters
>> today in hopes that we can keep the power flowing during the day and
>> through the weekend. I'm planning on a Monday boat ride out there to see
>> what caused the fault(s). I will report back.
>>
>> Jason Szumlanski
>> Principal Solar Designer | Florida Solar Design Group
>> NABCEP Certified Solar Professional (PVIP)
>> Florida State Certified Solar Contractor CVC56956
>> Florida Certified Electrical Contractor EC13013208
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 6:00 PM Lou Russo via RE-wrenches <
>> re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Aloha All,
>>>
>>> Thank you Jason. This is a huge and surprising issue. So much so that I
>>> dropped what I was doing and called Sol-Ark to confirm. Mind you this was
>>> level 1 support, but I was told this is what the Sol-Arks are supposed to
>>> do and it is a feature not a bug. Their take is if there is any fault on
>>> any one string, the Sol-Ark assumes the worst and shuts everything down.
>>>
>>> I wonder what solutions could be implemented on future installs to
>>> prevent this from happening?
>>>
>>> Aloha,
>>>
>>> Lou Russo
>>> Owner
>>> lou at spreesolarsystems.com
>>> Office - 808 345 6762
>>> Spree Solar Systems LLC
>>> CT-34322
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 11:45 AM Jason Szumlanski via RE-wrenches <
>>> re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think it's more likely water in a J-box or possibly physical damage,
>>>> but someone passed by the property and did not observe any physical damage
>>>> to the array.
>>>>
>>>> Jason Szumlanski
>>>> Principal Solar Designer | Florida Solar Design Group
>>>> NABCEP Certified Solar Professional (PVIP)
>>>> Florida State Certified Solar Contractor CVC56956
>>>> Florida Certified Electrical Contractor EC13013208
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 5:41 PM Jay <jay.peltz at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Jason
>>>>> What’s the possibllity it was a lighting strike?
>>>>>
>>>>> Jay
>>>>>
>>>>> On Oct 10, 2024, at 2:57 PM, Jason Szumlanski via RE-wrenches <
>>>>> re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> 
>>>>> We have been talking a lot recently about all-in-ones. I just had a
>>>>> massive fail during Hurricane Milton with a quad Sol-Ark 15K off-grid
>>>>> system that deserves some discussion about whether AIO is a good idea if it
>>>>> can't build in some resilience to errors. I'm not sure if the new Midnite
>>>>> unit is better in this respect, but this is what happened to the Sol-Ark
>>>>> system...
>>>>>
>>>>> Four inverters, each with 4 strings of PV paralleled to 2 MPPT per
>>>>> inverter. One of the slave units developed some sort of PV DC fault during
>>>>> the storm. This caused the slave inverter to shut down and throw an error,
>>>>> which in turn caused a parallel fault across all four inverters. Power
>>>>> output ceases at that point. Apparently the system keeps resetting because
>>>>> I have a cell modem that uploads data to Sol-Ark, but that cell modem is
>>>>> powered by the inverter outputs, so it must be getting power at least
>>>>> intermittently. The rest of the loads are basically flatlined according to
>>>>> the Sol-Ark data. It's mostly air conditioners, so they probably can't turn
>>>>> on fast enough before the PV fault causes another shutdown.
>>>>>
>>>>> So, in essence, one of 16 strings of PV develops a fault, and that
>>>>> causes all four inverters to malfunction? What is the point of redundancy
>>>>> if a fault of one results in a fault of all?! If there is a true PV input
>>>>> fault, shouldn't that just shut down that MPPT, or perhaps all of the PV DC
>>>>> input to that inverter? And why can't this inverter continue to invert
>>>>> power from the batteries and charge from a generator when there is a DC
>>>>> input fault that could be programmatically isolated and ignored?
>>>>>
>>>>> This is a bad design in my opinion, and something I hadn't considered.
>>>>> If the faulted inverter can't function with a DC input fault, it should
>>>>> just take itself out of the game. (This is 120/240 split phase, BTW). Is
>>>>> this how all AIO inverters work? One inverter fault on the DC side kills
>>>>> all paralleled units' AC output? Not good.
>>>>>
>>>>> This is a completely off-grid system on a remote island with no
>>>>> vehicle access, so it's not exactly easy to do a "truck roll" on this one,
>>>>> especially post-hurricane. To make matters worse, the generator was running
>>>>> at the time of the fault, as it was being signaled to run because the
>>>>> battery had reached the assigned charge voltage. The fault also killed the
>>>>> 2-wire start signal from the master, so the system also stopped passing
>>>>> through generator power to the loads. The house is dark.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Jason Szumlanski
>>>>> Florida Solar Design Group
>>>>>
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>>> <Slave 2.jpg>
> <Slave 1.jpg>
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