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Yes, a lot has gone to India. Schneider and OutBack Power, too. They do OK, mostly. I'm sure they use a lot of Chinese parts. We all have to. We are all dependent on China for a lot of parts but there are other problems with building products here in the US... Mainly, the 25% tariffs...

China is getting very good at building this stuff ! There are still some concepts that they just don't "get" yet. They may eventually pick up on all that. HandyBob... I remember him and the main issue that was happening back then. That was Classic's going into EQ seemingly on their own...

I was going to let this go but I need to mention something about manufacturing electronics in America. The US is not very electronic manufacturer friendly these days. Tariffs that are imposed on us and the cost of manufacturing in the US make it impossible to be as inexpensive as something...

Merry New Year ! The term "high frequency" can be confusing. 99.999% of sinewave power inverters these days switch at high frequency. HF Sinewave inverters that use the big heavy 50/60 Hz transformers are usually referred to as LF inverters. Inverters like Victron, Magnum, OutBack...

Here is what I replied with on the MidNite forum.... You are correct in that everything except those couple of DIY units are all made in Arlington, WA USA However, parts come from all over. Raw PCBs come from China or Taiwan. Aluminum castings come from China and Thailand. FETs come from...

At Xantrex (Schneider), when someone was fired or was laid off, the president would say "he/she went to spend more time with their family" Always got a chuckle out of that till this day. boB

It can work but not guaranteed to work if too far below freezing and too much snow piled up on the array. It does take a lot of power and energy unless a light dusting. As for how much current, just do not exceed the series fuse rating of the panel, typically 15A or 20A. Here is an animated...

We are working on this kind of stuff in more than one way. The ULTIMATE MN Solar AIO will be the B17, if we'd finish it. Had to take a little detour on that unit :) boB

I would just like to re-iterate that this whole industry does not have enough technical people ! boB

Maybe we can open one of those up and take pictures ? I will see. boB

We don't give away our IP. China makes these inverters themselves now. We guide certain manufacturers is all. We still design and make our own products strictly in the US. With the help of parts that come from all over the world. Custom and off the shelf. boB

Hi guys. Sometimes there is a misconception about how regular lightning protection with SPDs (MOVs) work. An SPD does NOT protect the voltage across the PV+ and PV- lines (differential). This CAN be done but not with a lightning arrestor/SPD. Most electronic devices have what's known as a...

There can definitely be a difference in sound depending on if the 60 Hz line has sharp edges that might get into the audio signal. In my experience, the worst offender is a modified-square-wave inverter. These have sharp edges that you might hear through your system. In the early 1990s when I...

Clipping = output current limiting OR Clipping = maxed out The term I'm pretty sure comes from the audio/hi-fi industry which means the amplifier is putting out all of the voltage it can supply. That's all it is. boB

Sounds like you have done well here ! Remember that adding a LOT of turns through the toroid can increase the capacitance from one side of that filter to the other side and possibly have diminishing returns. From S8 to S1 is significant I would say ! Maybe we need to have a DIY ham net some...

Well, we didn't exactly START Trace... BUT Robin's and my relationship with companies, as well as Magnum Energy, OutBack Power, Heart Interface and some other PNW companies go back to the early 1970s when Bob Carver and Steve Johnston started Phase Linear making high power stereo amplifiers...

We are WAY slower than the bigger and off shore companies. Mostly because there is so little engineering and electronic manufacturing talent in the US. When they are found, we try to get them and a lot of them are very pricey. The ones that we do have are very appreciated Merry Christmas and...

The Trace SW inverters were hybrid then also. Of course the same guy that design that designed the outback FX

That particular SPD will not help at all. They are 3 wires put into some sand, basically. Here is a comparison of a MOV based SPD lightning arrestor and a Delta. boB

Yeah, Midnite BT is just one our biggest fans and does well with his own business, selling generator parts. Six years ago he helped me BIG time when my wife of 30 years passed away suddenly. He had not even met Penny, my wife. Just a super nice guy with an interest in this stuff and a big...

That video, although still relevant is a bit old now as there are many more breakers available. Polarized breakers are fine for use in a PV combiner box with 3 or more strings in parallel for their intended operation. In this case, the intended use is so that when one or more panels are...

Are you referring to this drawing ? (below, hopefully) The green SPD wire is GND and is connected to the GND bus bar. The DC negative is connected to the battery and PV negative but is not connected to GND at all in this drawing. The PV negative and PV positive are connected to the two...

wsaharem what a NICE job of wiring ! Especially without the E-panels. We try to always have decent support. We know that support is a big thing. boB

Yes, here is a very quick history... I started at Trace in 1994 after working in pro and consumer audio and a few years in medical electronics.... Electronics part of those. Brother Robin started at Trace in 1990 after designing audio gear and then military flight power supply system stuff for...

For the B17-5 (5 modules), the first two (2) modules can be either inverter/charger or a 600V input charge controller module. Each inverter/charger module is at least 3kW (maybe 3.5kW ?) 120/240 VAC inverter and also charger. It is sort of a large Rosie in that the underlying power circuitry...

A typical buck converter MPPT controller will automatically and intrinsically have reverse polarity protection due to the topology of a buck converter. The top FET has an internal diode with its cathode pointing to the PV+ input. And the bottom FET or diode will have its cathode pointing...

Remember also that the typical all in one PV connected to inverter DC HV rail does not normally give you full power output from battery. That must be done during the day with the addition of solar/PV input, such as the Sol-Ark and I think, most of the other AIO's. They also only usually allow...

You know.... If you are careful, a PV panel can be turned into a space heater and melt snow on it *IF* it is not too cold and/or if the snow is not TOO thick... Here is the first time I ever tried this somewhere around 2005. One module is powered. The other is not. This one took about 3...

As Home Power Magazine used to say, Gorilla Solar. Don't ask don't tell... Just press SELL !! That was in the 1990s

And now Biden is adding to it and never did help US manufacturers by changing the original Trump tariff lists. It's bipartisan now. It might have been a nice idea with good intent originally but was not thought through by either party. The presidents do not understand how American...

A lot of times the idle/tare will depend on the present battery voltage... Usually a higher Vbatt = higher idle but not necessarily.

Rosie does actually do grid support (gen support coming) as well as AC coupling with frequency-shift for micro-inverters

The Rosie is rated at 7kW but can put out slightly more indefinitely. Anything more or at high ambient temperatures will eventually bring Rosie's temperatures too high and it will shut down then. Rosie can handle higher output powers for quite a while as it is. Yes, the CTs are for the main...

We discuss HV batteries once in a while but not a lot in regard to Rosie. Her topology would have to be changed some to tap into the HV link rail to do that. It would be easier to tap her HV rail for something like an all in one though. We have a Rosie breaker box. That can also come that...

Heart Interface is probably who you were thinking of. Heart Ackerman and Steve Johnston started Heart. Then about a year later, Steve started Trace Engineering with a few others. Those others also worked at Phase Linear (Bob Carver) in the very early 1970s which was the "seed" basically for...

"...making it impossible for the US to be a leader in producing anything here! They are regulating everything so much we can’t make batteries here, solar panels here. " So much truth to this ! And also excessive tariffs on parts from China that can not be bought here or anywhere else, so we...

"When the button is pushed, there'll be no running away" From an old song some of you may remember. boB

I agree about not having politics here. Just remember, and I think you know, Aridom82, that the tariffs we have today are nothing new. 25%+ tariffs on Chinese goods started a few years ago. It really effects our production costs because so many components come from China. Gee, MidNite paid...

The DIY inverter/charger is no different than whatever SRNE makes and sells for this unit except for the name on the front so I would imagine you were going to find the same thing here. Only difference is what we add externally to make it communicate with the outside world better and the...

Yes, by finishing, we mean the balancing. That is where it would be done.... Where the current is less and time can be longer I think is the reason. I understand what you mean by the CC drawing power when the charging is done. That is because the idle power comes from the battery side and...

This is not all that surprising to me since the inverter and PV MPPT sections are not galvanically isolated in most of these AIO units. Just have to be extra careful. Ungrounded PV systems ground-fault have required both positive and negative lines to be disconnected for a while now (pretty...

Schneider and Victron are made in India. I'm sure parts are from worldwide sources including China. MidNite uses some parts from China too but we definitely try and do use parts locally such as sheet metal and bus bars, connectors, etc. We also build a lot of parts in house. Most inductors...

Stacking works on Rosie now. That was just software. But comparably easy software.

Yes. That's just software if they are just +60Hz- frequency shifting operated. So far, this is fairly standard practice so not much difference from one micro-inverter to another. Thank you SMA (I think) for making this standard practice. The old Sunny Boys had to have some kind of RS485...

Tariffs also hurt American manufacturers competing with China because we use parts that are made in China and nowhere else. boB

Yes, it is VERY hard (or impossible) to debug a problem without sufficient data. In this particular and VERY long thread, (46 pages as of now), I have a strong feeling that this could have been figured out by using an oscilloscope reading the battery voltage as the Schneider inverter tried to...

What kind of rapid shutdown are you using ? There may be a PV input discharge resistor switched in ? Are you sure that the RSD transmitter is sending an ON signal ? I know you say things are working normally but would like to know what normal actually means since we aren't there to look for...

Ooops ! Will see about this. It is possible that both are true, in a way. I am pretty happy with the 15 kVA rating but we have definitely seen 20+ watts output. Surge has been a slight moving target for specifications. Also, surging for a time can be interpreted differently at different...

Yep It was a great inverter/charger ! I did do some design on the SW series. Mainly re-designing transformers. I also made the option to make 3 phase by using 3 SW inverters. That was done by using the stacking connector and just shifting the phase by 120 degrees. I can't remember now how I...

All the better reason not to over-panel. Better to use the energy yourself boB

Yeah, it's OK. Just noisy and connected to a load it should not be hooked up to without a slave Rosie connected. Try that with any other similarly rated inverter. Not sure how long they all wait until they turn off ? The Rosie turned off because it let the output current go too high for too...

WoW ! So you have SMA's German controller they sell there ? I saw one years ago. Are you in Europe ? SMA didn't want to sell their controller in the US, which I believe was something they did not actually make, so they were working with us anyway with the E-PANEL so we did the interface...

Rosie and B17 are bidirectional HV to LV DC to DC converters. That is, the battery to HV side circuitry. The All In One, Hybrid Chinese-ish inverters can be bidirectional or not. The first one I looked at a few years ago, in particular the Taiwanese (I think) MPP-Solar, was definitely...

Yes, that exactly ! He forgot the units so it was confusing. I need to have the multiple choices stated correctly. I would have chosen 1 or 2 seconds. Forgot the exact length he had. RF and physics people know this stuff pretty much already.

RCinFLA has said it pretty well and touched on the battery cable L-C resonance issue which is a very real issue, especially in the large 60 Hz transformer inverters. I would add capacitance if the electrolytics are heating up more than you would like due to ESR. They say that for every 10...

nofear72784, your scope is clipping. Will need to re-capture this with a higher voltage range.

There will always be SOME amount of power draw unless you turn off the battery breaker switch. This is because the internal auxiliary power supply powering the processor requires something to operate looking at the on/off switch and reporting or logging battery voltage data or whatever. This...

Devil's advocate... SOME installations really need to be done correctly and not all DIYers can install to be really safe. Some oversight is needed. Otherwise, insurance companies would be their own judge and jury on even more fires caused by sloppy installation. NEC requirements used to be...

WoW ! I like AIMS but 200 watts ?!? Too high (for me) At 200 watts idle, it will cut into the peak efficiency some. Usually the idle (like 40 watts) would be more of an issue with low power efficiency only. Can't they turn off the second inverter when it is not needed ? Or, is each...

The reason that manufacturers rarely publish an input current maximum is that it does not make a lot of sense. It is the output to the battery and DC loads that are the highest current and the approximate input current can be calculated (as shown above by Mr. Eggo) from the battery output...

Not being able to mount the bottom of that inverter was kind of weird. I don't know if there is supposed to be some kind of bracket for those side holes on the bottom I see though ? Maybe the MidNite DIY will have holes to mount the bottom at least. I don't know if they do or not. The 145...

I know this is kind of an old post... The Delta arrestors that have been sold to the industry for maybe 30+ years have always been wires stuck in sand that do nothing to clamp voltage. This is the whole reason that Midnite Solar made their arrestors (SPD). There is a video somewhere on the...

I would say to check or re-tighten once more after the first install. Wait 1 or 2 hours (while you're there thinking about it) should be good enough. I had not seen the "once a month" part but I know that re-tightening/torqueing an hour later is sometimes necessary with the CBI breakers...

B17 is still coming. Time and resources have been moved around temporarily to improve production and testing of Rosie inverters and the two 600V MPPT charge controllers. If these were being manufactured in China, we would have more time for engineering itself. Having said all that, the B17...

Is it possible that the email just went to a spam folder maybe ?

Yes and that is to be expected. Personally, I would get a second controller which will also mean higher reliability overall and less wasting of the PV. boB

I'm sure that all of this blatant drug use does have at least some impact on the state of manufacturing and general laziness in the US. boB

The problem happens when the PV input to the MPPT controller is higher than the battery voltage by quite a bit and lots of current is going out of the controller and all of a sudden the battery load goes away. The input side of the MPPT controller can go WAY up in voltage before it has time to...

Main Issue I have is with the multiple choice answer of 1/C which could have been specified a bit clearer. 1/~300,000,000 meters per second over the length of the wires that is. BTW, take the wire away and see how far/fast the energy from the battery gets from A to B. ?

Great ideas and thanks for the article links too ! As far as supporting MANY different CANBUS BMS's, (Steve_S) I don't think that they all use a "standard" for making them work. Please enlighten me if this is not the case. It would be quite a feat to incorporate every single protocol that we...

At least the PV efficiency is a bit better than it was 20 years ago so that space is a wee bit better used. And we still can't put enough solar on an electric car to power it, even if you drive where the sun shines. boB

Regarding that GIF file... Those are Kyocera 125 watt 12V modules. About 21V Voc at 25C ambient but of course this was in the -5C or so ambient. Yes, backfeeding the panels but NOT reverse polarity. That would just bias the bypass diodes. Used a variable bench power supply. What you have...

Are these batteries made to be able to put 4 in series to make 48V nominal ? The BMS's have a maximum voltage they can say, turn off at with other batteries in series. 36V + 12V = 48V so maybe there is something wrong with only one of those BMS/batteries ? boB

The DIY 5048 is 500 volts solar input And they will be ETL listed MidNite is working on a combox and web server so that the MNSDIY inverter can get on the internet. They already work but are not quite ready for sale yet.

That one is probably a 200--300 watt turbine. Certainly not 8kW ! And even then, it's probably 200 watts at say, 25 MPH of wind. Yes, it's crap. Small wind like these are notorious for bad advertising. Yes, they can work pretty well on boats. There can be lots of wind there. Just nothing...

Dinky, why don't you come down to MidNite and take the nickel tour ? We'll even take you to lunch ! Email me and/or Robin at robin@ and/or bob@ (@midnitesolar.com) boB

Yes, we have our factory in the US but use parts from all over the world, including China so we cannot put "Made in the USA" on the products anymore. A certain percentage of the product has to come from the US. That is pretty hard to do a significant part of the product with parts made in the...

We never would have thought that putting power electronics on a HOT roof was a great idea... Hot and cold and hot and cold etc... But somehow, it works OK.... Typically. And I understand that there are actually some batteries along with microinverter that are located on the roof. Just...

I was really lucky that my dad was in Electronics and knew a lot of technical stuff. Including radio and music and photography that he taught me. I owe most of my interest and skills to him. But there were other mentors along the way, too. We all need mentors to help us complete our skills...

FYI, to add to your list of possibilities, there is a company that makes DC (and AC) fans for greenhouses etc. That will run off of solar and batteries. We have used them and worked with this company years ago. They are not cheap though. https://fogco.com/snap-fan/ Not sure of their highest...

With self consumption mode, you should be able to allow some power from the grid to power the home. In fact, that is kind of the way to go because whatever inverter is doing the self consumption and looking at the current into/out of the main breaker panel may not be able to be perfectly...

You can see the power at least which is logged (along with other things) and graphed. From the main STATUS screen, press the STATUS button about 3 times to get to the log graph that shows POWER over the last few hours. It updates every 5 or 10 minutes... Can't remember exactly... The current...

You need to connect each mainframe with to the other with cables. Not sure if there will be some kind of common box for multiple stacked B17s. There is also a stacking cable between mainframes for Canbus and synchronization. boB

Depends on how much one or both of those 2 Classics are being over-powered and limiting their output. How often do you see current limit come up or that current limit LED on the MNGP display remote ? If not very much, then you are most likely fine with what you have. If they are limiting...

A HF inverter can handle LPF loads fine if it is bi-directional. Most of the typical HF inverter/chargers may not do it this way. An example of bi-directional HF inverters would be the new MidNite Solar B17 and Rosie inverters and also the Sol-Ark (I think) boB

If I was living somewhere where it gets Hot a LOT like Vegas in the summer, and I had free reign over my land, I would get one of those concrete bunkers they put underground for utility purposes and put my batteries and inverters and controllers in there. That way they stay a bit more even in...

Guessing here but maybe the eg4 lifepower BMS is momentarily opening up due to over-current and so checking to see if the instantaneous battery terminal voltage is dropping might be something to check. Some volt meters have a minimum voltage feature that, if fast enough, could catch the...

As far as I am aware, most controllers and inverters will limit based on the output current into the batteries. They could also limit based on the input current. The Classic can do this but that adjustment is mainly for micro-hydro so that the turbine doesn't bog down. If a SCC/MPPT is...