Enphase IQ7 possible hardware flaw?

[peatmoss]

Hi, have 4 IQ7 inverters that quit putting out much power starting a week ago. The have been in service for about 10 months. They put out between 12-40 watts throughout the day. Visual inspection they look fine. We had 110F heat last week when it started. Also we had some lightning, not too close but you never know. I have replaced 2 of them and now production is back to where it was 220+ watts. I have 2 bad ones that Enphase wanted to fix with a firmware update.

Enphase pushed firmware 520-00082-r01-v04.20.03 to fix it. I was on 520-00082-r01-v04.18.02 before. It helped but the inverters still drop in power throughout the day. The one error in the log for the bad inverters is "high skip rate". If I had to guess I would say they are at 80% of the original output. If you watch the animation of panel production it looks like the panel is flickering. I suspect this is a hardware issue that they are trying to fix in firmware. Anyone else see this?

[Will792]

I do get the same event “High Skip Rate” for some IQ7s but it does not disable power production for long. My firmware version is v04.18.02 , that you had before. I find it very puzzling that Google search for High Skip Rate does not find anything, except your post.

May I ask which grid profile do you have? I set mine to ISO-NE2018 but do not remember any setting I can associate with Skip Rate, whatever it is.

[peatmoss]

Sorry for the delay. My grid profile is IEEE mainland alternate. It appears the firmware has made the issue better but I still see dropouts throughout the day. I won't know the impact until we get better weather. Its been smoky and hot so I can't see if it impacts my daily kwh much. I also searched google and could not find much at all? I do see a lot of issues posted on community.enphase.com.

[Will792]

I did a bit more research and based on what I found this event is related to communication between microinverter and Envoy. Sometimes I wonder if we can identify one microinverter production problem if it cannot talk to Envoy. Potentially it is fully functional but we just have no way of knowing.

[Ampster]

i only have four IQ-7s and haven"t experienced the drop out that you have. A guy on another forum has lost half of his and I directed him to that Enphase site. He is near Santa Clarita CA and has had some 110 degree days.

[peatmoss]

Wow its starting to sound like they have a problem with high heat. I'll be able to tell if I'm losing production as I have the production transformers in place but I'm still waiting for a sunny day.