Good Morning Solar Friends,
I moved to a new home in Washington DC in 2016 and first "project" I wanted to do was to add solar panels to my house. I installed my system in Dec. 2016 and its been AWESOME!!!
My system is installed on a flat roof with 5% incline as follows:
17 Panasonic VBHN325 panels
17 SolarEdge P-400 optimizers
1 SolaEdge SE5000 inverter
Originally my system was installed with 15 panels in one string then in Apr. 2017 I had the solar installed comeback to install two more panels since there was room. During this installation, my panels were split into two strings; string #1 has 8 panels and string #2 has 9 panels. Everything was great and during the summer my panels were cranking so much power.
However, in Sept 2017 something went wrong and string #1 stopped producing properly. I attached a photo of my layout with a snapshot of the peak this week so you can see string #1 at the top not producing much.
Back in Sept. when I saw something was wrong, I went to check my inverter and it was in German. I put it back in English and wanted to check to see if there were any fault and everything checked out. I called SolarEdge to see if they could check things on their end and they said everything looked fine. They suggested I reach out to my installer to see if they could do an inspection to find this issue. Finally my installer was able to get to my house and we both tired to figure out what was wrong but still could not pin point the issue.
Here are some hypothesis:
- Optimizer 1.1.8 may need to be replaced as it could be the issue. Since this is the first optimizer in the string, if it was not working could this take the whole string down? Since the minimum optimizers per string is 8 and this string has 8 could this be why its offline?
- Possibly the inverter could be malfunctioning? We are going to test to putting all optimizers on the same string next week to see if this could be a fix. To me it is weird that two strings in series connected in parallel to the inverter that the inverter is causing this... However, the reset to German is suspect.
Here is my SolarEdge Portal if you want to look at my system.
I also attached snapshots form the days of issue and from this summer to compare. The voltage vs time shows hat something happened and changed the string in September.
Anyone have any similar issues with your systems?
Taylor
I moved to a new home in Washington DC in 2016 and first "project" I wanted to do was to add solar panels to my house. I installed my system in Dec. 2016 and its been AWESOME!!!
My system is installed on a flat roof with 5% incline as follows:
17 Panasonic VBHN325 panels
17 SolarEdge P-400 optimizers
1 SolaEdge SE5000 inverter
Originally my system was installed with 15 panels in one string then in Apr. 2017 I had the solar installed comeback to install two more panels since there was room. During this installation, my panels were split into two strings; string #1 has 8 panels and string #2 has 9 panels. Everything was great and during the summer my panels were cranking so much power.
However, in Sept 2017 something went wrong and string #1 stopped producing properly. I attached a photo of my layout with a snapshot of the peak this week so you can see string #1 at the top not producing much.
Back in Sept. when I saw something was wrong, I went to check my inverter and it was in German. I put it back in English and wanted to check to see if there were any fault and everything checked out. I called SolarEdge to see if they could check things on their end and they said everything looked fine. They suggested I reach out to my installer to see if they could do an inspection to find this issue. Finally my installer was able to get to my house and we both tired to figure out what was wrong but still could not pin point the issue.
Here are some hypothesis:
- Optimizer 1.1.8 may need to be replaced as it could be the issue. Since this is the first optimizer in the string, if it was not working could this take the whole string down? Since the minimum optimizers per string is 8 and this string has 8 could this be why its offline?
- Possibly the inverter could be malfunctioning? We are going to test to putting all optimizers on the same string next week to see if this could be a fix. To me it is weird that two strings in series connected in parallel to the inverter that the inverter is causing this... However, the reset to German is suspect.
Here is my SolarEdge Portal if you want to look at my system.
I also attached snapshots form the days of issue and from this summer to compare. The voltage vs time shows hat something happened and changed the string in September.
Anyone have any similar issues with your systems?
Taylor
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