[RE-wrenches] [EXTERNAL] 208V residential service

[White, Will]

I've seen this issue with a condo building. A competitor had installed a set of Outback inverters that wouldn't work because of low AC voltage. They had to swap them out for an inverter that would work at 208.
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From: RE-wrenches <re-wrenches-bounces at lists.re-wrenches.org> on behalf of Dave Tedeyan via RE-wrenches <re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2024 8:26 AM
To: RE-wrenches <re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org>
Cc: Dave Tedeyan <dave at sungineersolar.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [RE-wrenches] 208V residential service


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Hi All,

I was just out of town installing a system for a friend just North of NYC. I was confused when checking phase for consumption CT's when I found that there was 120V L-N, but 206V L-L. I went and found the transformer, and there was in fact one transformer for all the houses that I could see. It had 4 wires coming out of it, and each house was tapped onto 3 of them. So they actually are just using two legs of a 3 phase 208/120V distribution system.

Has anyone seen this sort of thing before? I was amazed that a bunch of houses there all have 208V L-L, and it seems to not be causing problems. Granted my friend says his A/C is really weak and that they have had some funky problems with their electric oven. But they also just moved in last year, don't have many 240V (or 208V) appliances, and are not very electrical savvy, so they were clueless about this.

Unfortunately this means that all the Enphase IQ8A's I just put on their roof are useless, unless I go back to put in a transformer or get the utility to do something about it. I am going to call the utility (Con Ed), but I was just curious if anyone has had a similar experience and whether their utility was open to changing it to 240V.

Cheers,
Dave

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