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

[Michael Morningstar]

I once did an install with eight 12Ks. Upon commissioning the system would
throw a parallel fault and shut everything down. After a huge amount of
time spent, going round and round with Sol-Ark we figured out that three of
the inverters were 8Ks mislabeled as 12Ks. No worky!

On Thu, Mar 20, 2025 at 2:54 PM Dave Tedeyan via RE-wrenches <
re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org> wrote:

> 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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-- 

Michael Morningstar


Morningstar Electric Inc

PO Box 1494

Mount Shasta, CA 96067

530-921-0560

CSLB 1116835

mjmorningstar at gmail.com
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