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[Specter]

Enphase has been around for a while for inverters, specifically their Micro Inverters which essentially were a game changer.  For batteries now, they are a johnny come lately and a mee too operation that is not doing very well.

They have had some financial issues in the past and the battery thing is an attempt to try to mitigate that.

Their micro inverters are decent equipment, pretty bullet proof, but their whole system thing, so far has been a train wreck from what I have seen.

I can not speak much on Tesla as I have not had a ton of experience with their equipment, however they will be around a lot longer than Enphase I am betting.

It always comes down to finger pointing whenever there is a problem with their stuff.  One of the biggest problems with their inverters, and yes, unfortunately their micro inverters too, is they use zero point modulation to communicate.  It's a shitty way to talk to equipment, and nobody has really gotten it right yet.  Most gave up because it's a shit way for stuff to talk to each other.   They also use freq shifting to try to reduce output when  batteries start to top off, but since each inverter operates independently, that can cause problems from time to time, especially if you try to use their 'packed package' system as the freq master for an islanded system, ie no grid available.

As for installing, the inverters are literally plug and play, they mount on the back of the panels.  For their battery systems now, and a centralized house inverter, which is really 10 of their units stacked with the battery or however many they use, it's a whole twisted world of aggravation.  The only network connection you should need is wifi to  talk to the internet to talk to their main server to give you the stats.

Im waiting for the hacker to take down a section of the grid with one of these systems.  It's stupid easy to do, everyone KNOWS it too, but pretend it's not a real threat.   California has already learned a few times what happens when the grid burps and megs of these inverters just go poof and dump offline.  Now all the sudden, a shit ton of generation is gone, that's an instability,  so they hurry and cover it,  now approx 5 minutes later,  woof. it's ALL back within a few seconds,  now you have to shed that extra generation, and are giving it away for free, while you ramp down your spinners, pissing everyone off, PAYING the customer for something you have to turn around and now give for free, because it was not properly dispatched...  I'll leave it at that. 

Aaron

[Richard230]

In case you are interested here is a picture of the Enphase panel at the side of their home. My daughter tells me that two workmen have been at her home this afternoon trying to get the Enphase system working with no results so far. She is not a happy camper. Their solar power system was finally repaired yesterday by the Enphase crew after 4 hours of investigation. It required a new part and reprogramming the system to get it to work again.

[Specter]

that sounds about par.  Wait for the warranty period to wear off and see what that 'visit' will cost her now.

My friend, against my advice had one of these installed on his house with a bunch of panels, a central thingamabob in the house etc.
Within a month, it messed up.  the tech did not have a clue and told him 10 of the 12 microinverters were bad, they failed an update or something and needed to be replaced.  The tech replaced all 10 of the modules, and just threw the other ones in the trash at his house!

I told him, GIVE ME THOSE INVERTERS !!.   I asked if he wanted money he said yes what would they go for in the junkyard, i was generous and told him 50 cent a pound, which was high for dirty aluminum.  he said just buy dinner tonight, we were getting together for our monthly get together and we're even.  DEAL.

The tech was clueless and I knew it,  I have all 10 of those, plugged them in and they are absolutely fine.  I'll never let them on the internet they don't need to go there, but i basically got 10 - 250 watt inverters to use on my toyz.  throw a 300 ish watt panel on it and literally just plug it into a 240 outlet.  I have them in my back yard, just laying on top of my water jugs, feeding into my sub panel, im getting about 12 kilowatt free juice a day.  The panels were toss outs as well, some of the cells were bad so i worked around them, with an mppt tracker, a bad cell or two is meaningless to be honest.

if your sister, can, tell her to tell them SHE wants the bad parts, whatever it is, afterall SHE paid for it right?  and handsomely too I bet.

aaron

[Richard230]

My daughter was also told that her router was not up to par and she needed a new one, which she ordered yesterday from Amazon. But is was less than $40 delivered, so I guess that couldn't hurt. But why would her in-home router cause issues with the Enphase system? I think those "technicians" were clueless about the issue and were just grasping at straws.

[Specter]

The Enphase systems, use your power lines to communicate to their in home hub.  That hub, uses your wifi to hook to the internet to send all the data to enphase so they can then make you goto their webpage to see how your system is performing.  I can not see how a router less than 10 years old would be any type of problem really.  WiFi really has not changed that much in the past decade or so, they don't need anything fancy,just a connection really.

aaron

[Richard230]

The Enphase systems, use your power lines to communicate to their in home hub.  That hub, uses your wifi to hook to the internet to send all the data to enphase so they can then make you goto their webpage to see how your system is performing.  I can not see how a router less than 10 years old would be any type of problem really.  WiFi really has not changed that much in the past decade or so, they don't need anything fancy,just a connection really.

aaron

I think they were just trying to blame something else for their problem.