All breakers have tripped. Uh oh!

[Jeff from Ontario]

Hi there, first time user on this forum, and first post. I apologize for my newbieness here, but I appreciate all your help!

Here's the story.... I'm on a microFIT program, which means I get paid to make electricity. Last month my cheque was zero dollars Canadian, which works out to zero dollars US. haha. Obviously something was wrong. I don't have a monitoring system, so I can't really pinpoint the problem. First I checked the breaker panel for the system and noticed that all 4 banks had a tripped breaker. The main breaker was not tripped and the lightning arrester breaker was also not tripped. I attempted to re-set each breaker and was unsuccessful. Each time I switched the breaker, it immediately tripped again. Then I waited until night time and this time I was able to re-set each breaker. Over the next few days, I kept checking the generation meter and the reading did not appear to change. I have 40 panels, each made by heliene. Each panel has it's own microinverter, made by enecsys. I'm not sure where to start my troubleshooting. One person suggested putting a clamp style ammeter on the output of each microinverter and look for current flow. I checked for chewed wires by a squirrel and didn't find any. My guess is a dead short somewhere.
Your comments would be greatly appreciated!
Jeff

 

[BentleyJ]

The microinverters should have some onboard diagnostics maybe will help narrow down where the failure is if there is a warning or fault code.
You said "4 banks had a tripped breaker" are you referring to 4 x 2 pole breakers in a solar combiner box or in your main panel, but only one leg was tripped on each one? Not getting a picture in my mind of your set up.
Please give some additional detail so we can help.

 

[Jeff from Ontario]

 

[Jeff from Ontario]

Microinverters are in a hard aluminum case, with no LED's flashing or anything. It did come with a monitoring system 10 years ago, but that was back when I had dial up, and couldn't get it to work, so I threw out the monitoring system. oops. Yesterday I tried again to reset the breakers. They all turned back on except for string one. I'm going to check the meter on the side of my house and see if there were any changes. Still not sure how to test the inverters and still not sure why it's tripping.

 

[BentleyJ]

Seems like with 4 separate strings, the other 3 good strings would still produce. If it turns out to just be one bad microinverter in string 1 maybe you can remove it and the remainder will keep working for a few more years.

 

[Quattrohead]

Enecsys – Support for Enecsys-Monitoring

www.enecsys.com

 

[OffGridForGood]

It did come with a monitoring system 10 years ago,

Ten year-old string inverters - could have failed, internal short perhaps? Or the PV have been damaged?

I apologize for my newbieness here, but I appreciate all your help!

We all start there Jeff, and there are a lot of very experienced people on the forum, everyone is super helpful.

I'm on a microFIT program, which means I get paid to make electricity.

I assume your system was installed for you, ten years ago - was there a warranty on the equipment, do you have a contract with warranty information?
With no obvious damage to the wires that you could find, it would seem the microinverters could be the problem, or a short in a PV panel. That said, why would all four drop out at once after 10-years of operation? Was there a hail storm lately down south that could have damaged several PV panels leading to short circuits all four strings at the same time? Other types of damage possible recently?
I wonder if you can tell from the monthly payments if the inverters may have dropped out one by one over a period of time - ie the payments dropped a bit at a time until the zero caught your attention?
Is the original installer in your area?
Are they still in business?
Can they trouble shoot this for you?

 

[400bird]

Hi there, first time user on this forum, and first post. I apologize for my newbieness here, but I appreciate all your help!

Here's the story.... I'm on a microFIT program, which means I get paid to make electricity. Last month my cheque was zero dollars Canadian, which works out to zero dollars US.

Welcome and thank you for converting that for those of us that can't do Canadian math!

Is there any connection between the 4 different strings, seems odd that all 4 were tripped.

On the one that tripped, I'd put a clamp amp meter in there to make sure it isn't just a worn out breaker and that it is tripped for a reason. If there is a shorted micro inverter, just keep disconnecting more inverters, one at a time, until you find the short.

 

[Jeff from Ontario]

After some contemplating, I've decided to switch out all the inverters. I got a good deal ( I hope) on some used Enphase Micro-inverters. I am getting 42 of them including the Envoy monitoring system for $1,000 CDN. I will be installing them one at a time and monitoring them as I connect them. My next issue is that the cabling is different than my current system. I assume (please correct me if I'm wrong) that the Enphase Microinverters can be daisy chained together. The one image shows the Enphase connector on the left and the Enecsys (my old system) on the right. I wonder if I can make up an adapter cable so that I can use most of my old cabling. The 3rd image shows a junction for my old system where 3 inverters would be linked together. If I can simply daisy chain all the Enphase inverters, I assume I won't need a junction. The only thing left to figure out would be how to connect to my panel. The guy that sold me the used inverters didn't supply used cabling. I would like to use as much of my old cabling as possible. Any suggestions?
Thanks!