[RE-wrenches] Sol-Ark parallel 8k and 12k

[Dave Tedeyan]

Hi All,

I have just gotten myself into a pickle and so am posting this both as a
note/warning too all, as well as seeing if anyone has tried this.

I installed a small system with a Sol-Ark 12k a few years ago. The customer
recently asked us to add some more power. An 8k was more than enough, so we
went with that. It turns out that Sol-Ark will not support paralleling two
of their inverters that are different sizes. They say that the firmware
needs to be exactly the same, and you cannot put the same firmware on an 8k
and a 12k.

In this instance, I would be fine effectively turning the 12k into an 8k if
that is even possible. I called tech support and once they noted the model
mismatch, they basically said that they cannot support the setup and would
not help me work with it. They would not even update the firmware on the
original 12k to see if it would play nicely with the 8k.

I am wondering if anyone here has run into something like this before? If I
were to get both inverters updated to the newest firmware, might they
actually talk okay? Barring that, it seems that there are two options.
First would be to take the inverters out of parallel and have them each run
their own set of loads. Unfortunately that is not possible on this site due
to where the loads are in relation to the inverters. The other option is to
buy a new 12k inverter and try to sell the "very lightly" used 8k.

It seems that the two inverters share the same box. Is it possible to just
swap out a board in the inverters to turn the 8k to a 12k (or the other way
around).

I'd appreciate any info folks have out there about this situation.

Cheers,
Dave
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