SolarEdge Monitoring network connectivity issues

[preilly44]

Hi, I'm new here (and new to solar). My installer said I paid for Zigbee wireless to connect to my home wifi but saw I had a wireless bridge next to the area the inverters were being installed. They said the Zigbee connection can be problematic and I was better off using the wifi bridge so I said that was fine (they said they would install the zigbee at any time if I wanted them to).

Anyway, I've noticed several times that my wifi bridge loses connectivity intermittently and it seems like the monitoring doesn't come back...sometimes for a day or sometimes for a few hours. Is there anyway to force the inverter to check for an Internet connection or something?

Any recommendations for the best way to avoid this from happening? Am I better off with the Zigbee wireless connection?

Thanks in advance.

[DanKegel]

You could consider a hardwired ethernet connection. That's what I'm using. It should be more reliable than either zigbee or wifi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyL67b7JMGk shows where the jack for ethernet is in the solaredge. The installer will have to open it up, thread the cable through the larger of the two 'glands', and plug it in. Should be easy unless he has to move something that was already in that 'gland'.

I'm moderately handy, so I installed ethernet jacks in my basement near the router and in the crawlspace near the SolarEdge, ran cat5 between them, and plugged the av200 into the ethernet jack in the basement.
Then I drilled a hole in the siding and ran a flexible ethernet cable from the ethernet jack to the solaredge, and verified it was live by plugging it into my laptop and making sure it could see the internet.
It's not especially pretty, but here's a picture:
https://goo.gl/photos/nCQQ49fvwAseaWN49

[preilly44]

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, hard wiring it with an Ethernet cable is not something that can be done because of the location of my router/cable modem and inverters. My options are wifi or zigbee. Is the Zigbee option usually worse than wifi? Can I easily switch back and forth if I didn't like the zigbee?

[sensij]

Switching back and forth is not hard, just a setting or two on the inverter display. In general, Wifi should be more reliable than what SolarEdge's implementation of Zigbee seems to be. I switched my system from Zigbee to wireless after a couple months and haven't lost the connection in close to a year. Before investing a couple hundred in the Zigbee system, I'd suggest buying another Wifi client for ~$20 or less, or trying to troubleshoot why the connection is dropping. The problem is more likely to be in your network than in the inverter.

[DanKegel]

fwiw, I don't trust wifi bridges all that much.
When the solaredge starts having trouble, can you verify the wifi bridge is working (say, with a laptop)?

You might also consider a cheap poweline networking wallwart pair to get internet closer to the solaredge. That can be reliable... depends on the house, just like wireless, but sometimes one is better than the other.

A pair of av200 nano's costs $30.