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Sol-Ark problems by David Poz.. anyone else?

He should have started the video with a full disclosure since you are selling a competing product and you are also his sponsor.
I saw no Head to Head comparison, what I saw was a Sol-Ark being crippled by a deliberate unbalanced load while just being used as a battery Inverter. If you wanted head to head comparison I would assume you would show the features of both Inverters which would then reveal why one cost a lot more than the other.

As for your statement about his battery bank capacity, that is irrelevant in this case and you should know that already.
The Sol-Ark has menu settings for the user to tell it what is the maximum Amp rate it can Charge and Discharge the battery pack that it is attached to. It is obvious in his video that he had the setting much lower than what his bank size actually is. So of course if he tells the Sol-Ark not to use more than 100 Amps it will trip if he goes a bit past 100 Amps. It is clear in the video that the indicator for maximum DC Amperage usage was flashing just before it tripped and then he goes in and removes several of the viewer comments on that subject from the video.

He had the Inverter hooked up and running for over a month and at the end of the day his review was simply one based on how well it handles an unbalanced load?

Well while your here trying to do a solid for David it's always a good idea to plug your own products.

Somehow based on Sol-Arks response I kind of doubt that.

How do your pre load an inverter that was sold 9 months ago with the latest firmware?
David's problem could be fixed by not putting all the 120V load on one leg! Do you guys not have your installers balance the load panel?


People already sent him info. I would rather see someone who actually has no skin in the game do a proper review.

Yes, and him telling the Truth behind who requested the review and supplied him with the product would have prevented this mess.
-read his video comments, it's clear he linked us,
-do you have any proof of removed comments? he says he never does that.
-are you saying by default the inverter is not set to the needed amps for max load?
-his one-month review was that it tripped often, pls watch the video again
-balancing is not perfect ever, the human factor causes issues
This is not a mess, it just ruffled some people because they look at as a full product review vs a narrow honest application scope, the guy ran for months on both and has the right to have an opinion that is not the same as a die-hard enthusiast.

also, pls name a charity youtuber over 100k subs that doesn't make money on their videos, we have found none so far.
 
-read his video comments, it's clear he linked us,
No it is not clear. I did not even realize it until someone pointed out that it is mentioned in his comment section when you click on more info. Clear is how Will Prowse does it. You announce at the start of the video that you paid for the product with your own money or it was sent to you free by company X for review.
BTW You do know that most streaming boxes do not even allow you to see YouTube comments.
-do you have any proof of removed comments? he says he never does that.
He removed two of mine, Sol-Ark states he removed 6 of theirs and I saw numerous other ones disappear over the first two days.
-are you saying by default the inverter is not set to the needed amps for max load?
How can it be set by the Inverter unless you have a closed loop battery connection. How would the inverter know how many AH of capacity you have connected? One of the features of the Sol-Ark is that you can run it with even a single 100Ah pack if you just let it know that it cannot draw above 60Amps from it or you can have it connected to the batteries on closed loop so it knows what it is connected to. In both cases it will then use the grid or generator to supplement the load if needed. In his "Review" he decided to have neither the Grid or Generator connected so it had no choice but to shutdown.

I guess Growatts just assume you have batteries to handle the Max load! So what happens if you only have batteries that can handle a quarter of the load? Do they start to draw so much power that they trip the batteries breaker or fuse?
-his one-month review was that it tripped often, pls watch the video again
That was not a review. It was just him making sure the Inverter trips for dramatic effect. He is not even using the Transformer that he already has wired into his panel box, why?
Also why not move the toaster and the stove onto opposite phases if the the wife was plagued with problems?
He is doing tutorial videos on using Solar equipment, one would expect he knows the basics!
-balancing is not perfect ever, the human factor causes issues
Balancing is simple. Every Solar installer knows to keep the Heavy 120V loads that are used often on different legs.
Especially things like a Toaster and an Electric Stove which are almost always used at the same time.
This is not a mess, it just ruffled some people because they look at as a full product review vs a narrow honest application scope, the guy ran for months on both and has the right to have an opinion that is not the same as a die-hard enthusiast.
If it's not a mess why are you here pleading his case?
also, pls name a charity youtuber over 100k subs that doesn't make money on their videos, we have found none so far.
You know I am not talking about money made from YouTube. I am talking about the money he gets back from you everytime someone uses the DAVIDPOZ code.

So let me ask you something. Am I to believe that David had Mrs. Poz dealing with constant blackouts six times a day for a month because he would not Grid tie the Inverter or use his Transformer or even call Sol-Ark to ask them for help?
 
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Would be interesting to know how hot the Sol-Ark was when he overloaded it. Sol-Ark says this inverter surges to some 20kW but that is most likely with the solar fully engaged as well. This video only overloaded the one leg by just over 100 watts and it tripped within just a couple seconds.

And if the battery voltage sags too low, it could either undervoltage OR draw more battery current to regulate its AC output voltage back to 120 VAC. So the battery voltage really needs to be good so that this 185 amps limit is not exceeded if that's what caused the trip.

Looks also like his Mpp Solar inverter did something similar with his Miter saw ?
 
No it is not clear. I did not even realize it until someone pointed out that it is mentioned in his comment section when you click on more info. Clear is how Will Prowse does it. You announce at the start of the video that you paid for the product with your own money or it was sent to you free by company X for review.
BTW You do know that most streaming boxes do not even allow you to see YouTube comments.

He removed two of mine, Sol-Ark states he removed 6 of theirs and I saw numerous other ones disappear over the first two days.

How can it be set by the Inverter unless you have a closed loop battery connection. How would the inverter know how many AH of capacity you have connected? One of the features of the Sol-Ark is that you can run it with even a single 100Ah pack if you just let it know that it cannot draw above 60Amps from it or you can have it connected to the batteries on closed loop so it knows what it is connected to. In both cases it will then use the grid or generator to supplement the load if needed. In his "Review" he decided to have neither the Grid or Generator connected so it had no choice but to shutdown.

I guess Growatts just assume you have batteries to handle the Max load! So what happens if you only have batteries that can handle a quarter of the load? Do they start to draw so much power that they trip the batteries breaker or fuse?

That was not a review. It was just him making sure the Inverter trips for dramatic effect. He is not even using the Transformer that he already has wired into his panel box, why?
Also why not move the toaster and the stove onto opposite phases if the the wife was plagued with problems?
He is doing tutorial videos on using Solar equipment, one would expect he knows the basics!

Balancing is simple. Every Solar installer knows to keep the Heavy 120V loads that are used often on different legs.
Especially things like a Toaster and an Electric Stove which are almost always used at the same time.

If it's not a mess why are you here pleading his case?

You know I am not talking about money made from YouTube. I am talking about the money he gets back from you everytime someone uses the DAVIDPOZ code.

So let me ask you something. Am I to believe that David had Mrs. Poz dealing with constant blackouts six times a day for a month because he would not Grid tie the Inverter or use his Transformer or even call Sol-Ark to ask them for help?
@robby he is an off-grid reviewer, his audience does not have the luxury of the grid
some of them don't have the luxury of 7k to burn either.

Also YouTube 101: all links are affiliate links, that's how others work, we and others track traffic from affiliates and they get credit with or without coupon codes.

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I think it was a sloppy review at best. It seems he did not go into the settings or read the manual.
A full review with all these short falls corrected is in order I feel.
As per any other subject I want to educate myself in, I google and learn, make my own conclusions.
Some people take the internet as gospel...it ain't LOL
 
Looking at 12K specs :
a) The stated continuous off-grid power is 9000 watts (240V*37.5A) . No promise of balancing across split phase.
b) Surge AC Power 10sec is stated to be 16,000 VA.
Based on these alone, a little over 4500 watt should be tolerable for 10s unless the starting current pushes the limits. Irrespective, I can't imagine why anyone would not balance their load. Not sure how other split phase systems cope with the imbalances. I got my beef with 12K unit as the name is a misnomer (12K PV input rather than an output !). It should have been named 9K and priced way lower for its underlying guts.
 
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It was a review of how the Sol*Ark worked for him and his family. Was that a full product review... NO! Was it a fair test? Maybe, but it could have been better. Could he have done things to make it work better for his situation? YES. Not sure any amount of trying to make it work better would have been enough for some of you here, though. You seem hell bent on "defending the righteous integrity of the Sol*Ark" and proving it was a rigged test.

The Sol*Ark is touchy. I think that has been pretty well documented by MANY people. It's not in question - it's a fact. Many add the mid-point transformer to make things better. Why should you have to for a box that costs that much?? That's not a fair ask in my opinion.

Why can't it compensate and NOT shut down better? It seems to give up at a moment's notice. For the price, it should behave better. I think that has been the opinion of a lot of people for a long time.

Is it still an amazing piece of equipment? Yes. I LOVE some of the features on this box. I can't justify spending that much for it though.
 
I think he explains that the unit is on loan in the first video. It helps a bit with the context. He also mentions some of the features like AC coupling. I watched the second video too, and I didn't think it made the Sol-Ark look bad. It just seemed like he needed more from one leg than it provided, and he was a bit surprised. I do wish he would have updated the firmware and removed the yellow warning light.

Honestly, I wish we had more videos like this in general. It's less about let me demonstrate these features that the company says are important, and more about "hey I hooked this up and tried to live my life and it didn't fit". Here are some things you should consider. Not necessarily broken or bad, just reality.
 
Oh, and balancing loads isn't an easy task. Especially if it's all 120v loads in the same room. Did you expect him to rewire his house to get a piece of equipment, on loan, to work correctly? Honestly, if you were talking to an installer they would recommend a bigger better unit before having you run a bunch of extra circuits.
 
One thing that @Engineer775 emphasizes is that SolArks are EMP hardened. Implying that off-grid diehards might survive an EMP attack with a running system. Is this true at all? or is more just a surge protector?

Sol-Arks are not all EMP hardened, they are ordered by customer with EMP hardening if you pay the extra cost for it. Looks like the one David Poz is using doesn't have the EMP-Hardened sticker on the front of the case, indicating to me that his is not a hardened one.
 
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It was a review of how the Sol*Ark worked for him and his family. Was that a full product review... NO! Was it a fair test? Maybe, but it could have been better. Could he have done things to make it work better for his situation? YES. Not sure any amount of trying to make it work better would have been enough for some of you here, though. You seem hell bent on "defending the righteous integrity of the Sol*Ark" and proving it was a rigged test.

The Sol*Ark is touchy. I think that has been pretty well documented by MANY people. It's not in question - it's a fact. Many add the mid-point transformer to make things better. Why should you have to for a box that costs that much?? That's not a fair ask in my opinion.

Why can't it compensate and NOT shut down better? It seems to give up at a moment's notice. For the price, it should behave better. I think that has been the opinion of a lot of people for a long time.

Is it still an amazing piece of equipment? Yes. I LOVE some of the features on this box. I can't justify spending that much for it though.
I'm just assuming anyone who has a backup system, knows the limitations of their system. Most of us on backups - just don't decide one day - hey let me add a space heater to my load and check if it works or not. Testing the limits of the system is one thing and expecting it to work on the limits is another is all I'm saying.
 
@robby he is an off-grid reviewer, his audience does not have the luxury of the grid
some of them don't have the luxury of 7k to burn either.
And yet he has the Grid available and he uses it with his Growatt system.
Your avoiding the question:
Am I to believe that David had Mrs. Poz dealing with constant blackouts six times a day for a month because he would not Grid tie the Inverter or use his Transformer or even call Sol-Ark to ask them for help?
Because bringing in the unhappy Wife at the end was either pure pander for clicks or he actually made her suffer for a month when he could have fixed the problem in 15 minutes.
Also YouTube 101: all links are affiliate links, that's how others work, we and others track traffic from affiliates and they get credit with or without coupon codes.

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I saw the first video and knew exactly how this was going to turn out. I knew he was just going to throw enough unbalanced load on it to keep tripping the unit. What he needed to do was simply balance his 120V loads so that they are not all on the same leg and creating a massive imbalance.

My Inverter has only tripped once and that was when I deliberately turned on almost everything in the house to get to 9.5KW. His first big issue was not moving his breakers around to distribute the high wattage 120V plugs evenly and the second is that he is running very old firmware that was very conservative. Before I updated mine it would cut out just about 9.5KW. After the update I tried back the same load and it did not trip out. My electric bill pre solar was 1600 KWh a month and KWh used per month has only gone up since we got solar and I have had zero problems.

Even his own test involves putting 4630W on L2 and only 2871W on L1 was flawed.. If he had plugged that second space heater into L1 the inverter would not have tripped and he could have even plugged in a third one into L1 without tripping the unit.
I started thinking that the fact that Growatt and Gyll sponsor his channel made it a bit suspicious but then when he would not tell people how or from whom he "borrowed" a $7K Inverter, I got even more suspicious.

Bottom line is that he probably needs a bigger inverter for his house than the Sol-Ark and number two is that he basically used a high end Inverter as nothing more than a simple battery Inverter. He did not demonstrate a single one of the many features that make the Sol-Ark so nice to own.

Yeah, let's tell the wife that, "honey don't plug this other heater in that room when the other one is on"... I mean, sure, you can shuffle the breakers around a bit and balance the load out for a time, until someone in the house decides to move things around again like a heater and turn it on, on the wrong leg when they shouldn't.

In my opinion this test isn't even fair. 2x Growatts, stacked (with an auto-transformer), and 2x SMA inverters stacked, vs. one Sol-Ark not stacked.

If it were me and I was in these shoes, and I really wanted to go with Sol-Ark brand and needed that level of capacity, I would pay double and stack 2x 12k Sol-Ark, just as Engineer775 tends to do a lot on the higher-end installs.

If I was on a budget like I am today, I will just do the same and stack a cheaper brand (like my 2x MPP LV6548). The system just needs to be sized properly like anything. Or just install a separate center-tap transformer so all loads will share both inverter legs off of the 240v at all times, never having any unbalanced loads...
 
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I've been following @David Poz for a couple of years now and while I agree I was a bit surprised by his surprise about 'legs'... but in his defense he's always done straight-forward youtubes that actually share what he's doing good or bad. I like 'hard info', even if its not my slant on things. For example, using that transformer for 120v out of 240v (only) Growatts is not how I think... but its a real solution and interesting. Or when he wired up the sense leads on that Chevy battery build or the LifePo4 stack - so much work! I don't think I'd do that myself... but it was interesting to see it work. Or the solar arrays that are basically weighted to stay in place rather than having concrete/poles in the ground - again interesting :)
 
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Oh, and balancing loads isn't an easy task. Especially if it's all 120v loads in the same room. Did you expect him to rewire his house to get a piece of equipment, on loan, to work correctly? Honestly, if you were talking to an installer they would recommend a bigger better unit before having you run a bunch of extra circuits.

He talked about turning on a stove burner. Who has a 120v stove? He doesn't mention it specifically. I would assume 240v stove, adding load to each leg, and then the toaster put it over the top with the other normal household loads going on at the same time.

edit: removed watt label on toaster. The stove top was the 3000w load, so I would guess 1500w per hot leg, plus toaster and normal loads that put them over the edge.
 
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He talked about turning on a stove burner. Who has a 120v stove? He doesn't mention it specifically. I would assume 240v stove, adding load to each leg, and then the 3000w toaster put it over the top with the other normal household loads going on at the same time.
If that's the case, then it wouldn't matter which leg the toaster was on. So there was no balancing that could have saved him. Either way, no one wants to run a system they have to micro manage. Especially when they have two others that worked for them.
 
Oh, and balancing loads isn't an easy task. Especially if it's all 120v loads in the same room. Did you expect him to rewire his house to get a piece of equipment, on loan, to work correctly? Honestly, if you were talking to an installer they would recommend a bigger better unit before having you run a bunch of extra circuits.
If your electrician has wired a 3000W burner which is 25 Amps onto the same breaker with a 4 slice toaster which is 20 Amps I think you need to get your house rewired ASAP. I have never seen a single pole 50A breaker in a panel box, they do exist but I have never seen one wired in.
Most electricians will not go past 30A breakers for a 120V load. In my Kitchen the Toaster outlet, Stove outlet and Microwave outlet are all on separate breakers.
 
And yet he has the Grid available and he uses it with his Growatt system.
Your avoiding the question:
Am I to believe that David had Mrs. Poz dealing with constant blackouts six times a day for a month because he would not Grid tie the Inverter or use his Transformer or even call Sol-Ark to ask them for help?
Because bringing in the unhappy Wife at the end was either pure pander for clicks or he actually made her suffer for a month when he could have fixed the problem in 15 minutes.
If you crank the math on a 200A house the probability of combinations that exceed 4500w (or even 5000w) on each leg is very high, the Growatt 12kw has no balance either and the sheer capacity increase tends to safeguard he risk better, maybe if Solark delivers a 12kw inverter in the 12kw unit it would address the issue going forward, or a balance transformer for that matter, they are cheap ya know.
As someone who dragged my family through the R+D mud going off grid I can say that is 100% believable and I have done worse in the name of science, not everybody has the luxury of buying a second inverter, the cobbler's kids never have shoes bro, -James
 
He talked about turning on a stove burner. Who has a 120v stove? He doesn't mention it specifically. I would assume 240v stove, adding load to each leg, and then the 3000w toaster put it over the top with the other normal household loads going on at the same time.
Yeah I was scratching my head about that 120V stove. They did make some back in the 80s but all the new ones are 240V. I gave that one a pass and just assumed he meant a single burner unit. He could not possibly be using a 4 burner 120v Electric stove if each burner is pulling 3000W. Kind of amazing that the guy has not switched to inductive heating. I guess he doesn't need to because the facade of him being an off grid guy is not a reality. He makes it clear that he does have Grid power.
 
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