Jacks PV grid tie system

[inetdog]

It is possible to set up a purely passive RF repeater in the form of back to back directional antennas pointed at each of the two end points from a point which has line of sight to both. It does not necessarily have to be a powered active repeater. (Of course this works best if you can put directional antennas at each end point.

[GRickard]

Why not try Ethernet (Cat 6)? Yeah, it's 70 feet past the 330' max, but your not pushing a high volume of data through it. I've had instances like this that I tried Ethernet and never had a problem. You would need an outdoor rated cable.

Another option would be to buy a couple of cheap fiber optic/Ethernet transceivers (multi-mode) with a section of 2 fiber cable between them. Not as expensive as you might think and plug and play.

Greg

[ButchDeal]

If you set the one side to 10megabit it should have zero problem with that distance

[tyab]

In term of any wired solution - I do not have any available conduit. I'm kicking myself for not burying an empty 1-1/4" conduit all the way from the house down there when I had those trenches open. I actually have a 1-1/4" conduit empty under the driveway - that would help but its hard to describe how hard digging a new trench will be in this area all the way down there the remaining 370'. Not impossible - just hard and time consuming

I went and ordered a couple of Homeplug AV2 units and when they get here I'll try that out first - if they work that is the lowest cost and easiest solution.

I have never done any passive RF repeating. I'll look into that if the AV2's don't work.

[DanS26]

In term of any wired solution - I do not have any available conduit. I'm kicking myself for not burying an empty 1-1/4" conduit all the way from the house down there when I had those trenches open. I actually have a 1-1/4" conduit empty under the driveway - that would help but its hard to describe how hard digging a new trench will be in this area all the way down there the remaining 370'. Not impossible - just hard and time consuming

I went and ordered a couple of Homeplug AV2 units and when they get here I'll try that out first - if they work that is the lowest cost and easiest solution.

I have never done any passive RF repeating. I'll look into that if the AV2's don't work.

Check out a "ground saw".......maybe just the tool you need.

[foo1bar]

... its hard to describe how hard digging a new trench will be in this area all the way down there the remaining 370'. Not impossible - just hard and time consuming.

Probably wouldn't be nearly as bad as digging a new trench. You would be able to dig in the backfill of your existing trench.
370' would be a long way to trench, but you wouldn't have to go very deep for burying CAT6.

And if you can't get good enough signal over that distance, you could put an ethernet switch using PoE halfway down - just would want to put it inside something weathertight - like one of those fake rocks.

[bcroe]

There are a few auxiliary antennas around here to make things work reliably at extended range. A decent one at the house end ought
to do it if you get the frequency right and there are no obstructions.

I run Cat 5 direct burial here. There is one (12V powered) booster to cover my 400' range. Thats just a $10 switch, but it
does need to be dry and powered. It goes to WiFi at one end. Bruce Roe

[GRickard]

If a person has access to a small tractor, you can plow a Cat 6 in, as long as it's dirt and not rock. Here is a little gadget my dad & I put together for his cable. We buried 200' of cable in under five minutes. I already had the Reese hitch adapter for the three point hitch, we just had to build the hook. It was a knife off of an anhydrous ammonia applicator (corn fertilizer). You can plow right through the yard and hardly do any damage to the grass.

[bcroe]

It is possible to set up a purely passive RF repeater in the form of back to back directional antennas pointed at each
of the two end points from a point which has line of sight to both. It does not necessarily have to be a powered active repeater.

Does that really work, does it really give some gain; I have never seen it done? Yes I've seen a flat billboard thing used
many times to bounce a signal around a corner or an obstruction, but it didn't claim any gain (except negative). Bruce Roe

[sdold]

Does that really work, does it really give some gain

They have "gain" for the purposes of path calculations, but the amount of signal at the receive end is less than you'd get if it was a direct path.

[inetdog]

Does that really work, does it really give some gain; I have never seen it done? Yes I've seen a flat billboard thing used
many times to bounce a signal around a corner or an obstruction, but it didn't claim any gain (except negative). Bruce Roe

It may have no actual gain compared to a direct path but it can be far better than an obstructed path.
A flat passive reflector is the easiest to engineer and not particularly frequency sensitive. Bigger is better.
But you have to have a clear line of sight in each direction from the reflector.
With two antennas linked by coax you can separate the two to get a good line of sight to each end even if there is no single accessible point to put a reflector.

If you use a Fresnel zone plate (Google it) you can actually make a lens that refocuses the beam and has real gain.

[bcroe]

Someone needs to specify what frequency the micros operate on to do anything meaningful. I assumed there was no
obstruction problem here; perhaps a house end antenna could be mounted in a position to view all. That is also the
place to put all the gain, since there is only one (instead of one per panel). The focus would need to broad enough to
pretty much cover the whole array from the house.

Intuition tells me the point to point Fresnel would have to be too big to add enough gain, and then it would be too sharply
focused. A parabola at the house in a line of sight position should do it. If the frequency is below 1 GHZ, I have some designs
to recommend that are giving some 14 db gain at this plant. We used to sit outside the library with our PCs to use their WiFi
after hours, but the signal was pretty weak. The thought was to build a rough parabola and set the PC at the focal point to
beef it up. Later thought about doing it to check my neighbors, but never did it.

I think if a simple RF gain boost doesn't do it, a setup like my buried Cat 5 is a solid fix. The internet dish installer here just
used a straight edge shovel to get it some inches below the ground; the distance booster ($10 switch) is in my shed, and a
WiFi server at the array end could pick up the panels, if the number isn't limited. Bruce Roe

[sdold]

I don't think his radio path is to the inverters, I think it's to the Envoy.

I just did a back-of-napkin path loss calc with two 300 foot 5.8 GHz paths with back to back 30 dBi parabolas in the middle, and each end. It worked out to a total end to end (connector to connector) loss of only 26 dB plus whatever cable losses there are. That's better than I expected, it could work really well assuming my math is right. I used 73 dB for path loss for each 300 ft path.

[tyab]

I finally got my blog up-to-date, but still need to transfer them over to here. First I want to thank all of you for the ideas on how to get network down to the site. I went and ordered a TP Link AV2000 kit - it went on sale on Amazon briefly and I got that price by luck but now its back up to crazy prices. It is backordered and will be here in a few weeks. If that works - I'll be ecstatic - if not then I will be picking your brains. In the mean time I got my PG&E letter yesterday allowing me to generate - I was completely blown away how fast that was - hey this is PG&E and I expected them to drag forever but it was under a week from application filing. The Envoy-S is sort of communicating - every inverter is at 0 bars - but given enough time it seems to be reporting valid data - just delayed. I still can not get that one microinverter working so I will open up a ticket with Enphase to get it replaced.

I have an Enphase public URL for anyone to see the real time output - today is the first full day and it is actually sort of sunny with heavy rain expected starting late tonight (again) but I'm liking the output with the sun so far today.

https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/public/systems/BJ9X1094133

For PG&E rates when I did my application I spent quite a bit of time using the SAM emulator modeling the output and trying the two rates offered to me - ETOU-A (region R) and ETOU-B. I was on E6 region R but lost that when I missed the NEM 1.0 deadline a few weeks ago. Even though ETOU-B would give me a lower bill without solar, SAM made it really clear that ETOU-A is a far superior choice with solar and my historical usage. ETOU-A ROI comes up around 7.1 years, ETOU-B comes up at 10.9 years. Man I wish I had not lost E6 - what an amazing program that was for solar. Oh well.

[tyab]

Quick update. I called Enphase customer support and they quickly set me up for an RMA for the one microinverter not working. It was a quick and painless process - I was impressed with the customer service.

While on the phone he pulled up the system and saw how poor the Envoy-S communication was to the microinverters so I described to him that the Envoy was right behind the service panel on a dedicated circuit and the mounts were 400'+ away and like everyone has said - he stated I needed to get it on the solar subpanel and use whatever ethernet bridge I could get working down there to get better communication.

We have had nothing but heavy rains for the last couple of days - stopped a couple of hours ago but is expected to pick back up this evening.