diy solar

diy solar

An Enphase Ensemble Installation

Hedges said:
(But that doesn't mean California wouldn't decommission them anyway.)
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Most of the peakers I have seen were owned by third parties and sold power into the spot market. Perhaps they got some standby payments from CAISO for being available. I don't know the correct terminology but my only point is that decommission sounds like a policy decision and not an economic one.
 
Ampster said:
Most of the peakers I have seen were owned by third parties and sold power into the spot market. Perhaps they got some standby payments from CAISO for being available. I don't know the correct terminology but my only point is that decommission sounds like a policy decision and not an economic one.
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?? They are adding natural gas power plants (see below.)

What you are hearing about is the _likely_ retirement of turbine peakers for several reasons.
1) Economics. Gas is expensive, and so are turbines. And if you only have to run them a few times a year, they take forever to repay their purchase cost - meanwhile taking money in O+M and real estate.
2) Economics again. Batteries are becoming cheaper very quickly - and they are charged with power that is essentially free (i.e. excess solar power at 10am when generation can exceed demand.) And even when not being used for peak shaving, they are useful for ancillary services - thus allowing more rapid repayment of investment.
3) Competition from fast startup natural gas CCS plants. These are 50 to 100% more efficient than gas turbine power plants, and fast startup plants avoid the problems with power lag that dogged older CCS plants.


www.powermag.com

California Will Add Gas-Fired Units to Increase Power Supply

The California Energy Commission (CEC) has approved licenses for gas-fired power units to help the state cope with continued electricity shortages. The
www.powermag.com www.powermag.com
 
solar8484 said:
Those are GTIL inverters made by Deye. How big is your battery bank?
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I suspected Deye just because they are OEM for so many inverters, but it's good to hear it confirmed.

The "old wheelchair batteries" bank is about 3.4kwhr. I will likely be switching over to 6kwhr worth of older Pylontech batteries that I got for very cheap. These are the old 15S batteries that don't pair well with other LFP batteries, but are no problem for this application.
 
billvon said:
3) Competition from fast startup natural gas CCS plants. These are 50 to 100% more efficient than gas turbine power plants, and fast startup plants
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When I lived near the Coast in Southern California I watch two nearby power plants convert from ocean cooling to CCS plants that offered the above advantages and allowed them to met requirements to eliminate ocean cooling.
 
Well this derailed alot. Tried to turn back on Storm Guard and it's still wanting to go into Full Backup because of a heat advisory. Well Storm Guard will be left off forever from now on. I will have plenty of time to put in full back up mode if a storm is coming.
 
kendive said:
Well this derailed alot. Tried to turn back on Storm Guard and it's still wanting to go into Full Backup because of a heat advisory. Well Storm Guard will be left off forever from now on. I will have plenty of time to put in full back up mode if a storm is coming.
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I figure brownouts are more likely during a heat advisory so I let Storm guard run it up to 100%.
 
svetz said:
I figure brownouts are more likely during a heat advisory so I let Storm guard run it up to 100%.
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The only time we loose power is if someone hits a pole, maintenance, or a storm. I find that the Enphase battery backup does not do well when the power goes out and then back on quickly. One reason I still run all my UPS's on the TV, NVR, Pfsense firewall and internet fiber modem.

I did finally separate all my IOT devices including the Enphase system to a VLAN so they do not have access to my network they only get internet as needed.


:)
 
Ran the battery down to 10% overnight to run a cycle test before hurricane season gets into full swing and learned something new. Normally my batteries are set to recharge only from sunshine. But the weather service sent out an advisory at 4:39 A.M. which not only kicked me back into full backup as expected, but unexpectedly started charging the batteries from the grid. The test had been completed by then and the math looks good so that's good news.

I reset it to Full Backup as I wanted it to balance the cells and found yet another surprise. After resetting the mode it stopped charging from the grid and went back to solar charging only. Not sure why, possibly there's a lower bound on it?

That led to the next not-so-shocking surprise. Enlighten shows the batteries at 48% on the main page, but Live Status shows them at 72%. From the amount of charging via Enlighten 48% recharged is the more accurate number. BUT, the device page shows the last data refresh for the batteries is from two hours ago...so I suspect the data just isn't getting to Enphase making the Enlighten data appear off (that is the Live Status screen is correct). Possibly the Enphase servers are very busy issuing heat advisories? I'm sure that eventually Enlighten will catch up with the actual data, but surprised it is taking so long.

A bonus surprise!

Saw the service shown to the right while I was rooting around in the Enlighten
tool. Thought it odd as Enlighten is typically turned up as the last step, so
seems a really bad place to put a link in for it.

Enphase has a website for a similar service: https://designandpermit.enphase.com/.
I clicked it expecting to go to that website, but it didn't seem to go anywhere.
So possibly something new and busted or old/discontinued & I just never noticed it.
1688817226587.png​
 
Last edited:

Updates!​

Based on the changes noted above it occurred to me I might finally have gotten a software update, and I did!

IQ Gateway (Envoy): D7.3.121 → D7.3.517
IQ System Controller (Enpower): 1.5.4813_rel/22.95 → 1.5.5229_rel/22.13
IQ Battery (Encharge): 2.0.5441_rel/22.10 → 2.0.5663_rel/22.13
Microinverters:
  • 540-00142-r01-v04.28.03 → 540-00142-r01-v04.40.04
  • 520-00095-r01-v04.28.07 → 520-00082-r01-v04.40.40.01
    Profile Set (IEEE 1547:2015-WHB)
 
I was looking at @GXMnow's post about five day's of heat wave and realized I lost count here of how many days we'd had. But, Enphase logs the national weather service alerts for me and the days they issued heat advisories were:

June 14th, 16th, 17th, 20th, 24th, 25th.
July: 6th, 7th, 8th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, & 18th

So 18 days of alerts. From my weather station in the last 30 days we've had 20 days that broke a heat index of 110°F.

Panel efficiency looks like it's at worst 80-90%, but we've also had a lot of clouds so it's hard to say. The panels look to have been most efficient in the early morning, starting downhill around 9:30 and recovering a little after 5.

That got me to thinking.... the reason the heat index is high isn't because of dry-bulb temperature, but because of wet-bulb. So, if there's more moisture in the air there's more mass, shouldn't there be higher thermal conductivity and more heat transfer? That is, a 116°F in Las Vegas should affect production a lot more than a heat index of 116°F here. Of course, higher air mass is also less solar energy.

So, how hot are the microinverters might be getting? Picking one at random it looks like the peak was been 145°F:
1689780053955.png​

Sadly, Enlighten doesn't store temperature data for last year, but I did happen to take a snapshopt back in post #440, where the maximum temperature in August was 149°F.

If you're wondering where the heck that data can be found, the inverter S/N seems to be munged so I can't provide a direct URL. To navigate bring up Enlighten Manager, then go to the devices tab, click on a microinverter, then click the Graph tab, at the bottom of the graph click on "Temperature".

You can do the same thing for the microinverters in the batteries. The big difference with the rooftop microinverters is at night they don't go down to ambient. Even though they're always in the shade, mine are currently between 116°F and 131°F. Storms have caused a few power outages in the last few days, but I don't see any anomalous temperature spikes.
1689781239966.png​
 
"Heat Index" and "Wind Chill" are more about how it feels to a human than the real temperature. It does not truly effect electronics or even car engines the same as real temperature can. From growing up near Chicago, I learned a lot about wind chill. It has to do with how quickly heat is removed from your skin. If I understand it correctly, the heat index is essentially the opposite. Moist air can't remove heat from your skin as effectively as dry air, so it fells hotter as your body can't cool as effectively through sweating.

If you have an electronic device that is trying to dissipate 100 watts of power into the air with a heat sink. Then "Wind Chill" can help as the faster the air is moving, it can carry away heat a little faster. But would the humidity in that air change the rate of heat removal? I know for wind chill, once an object is no longer producing heat, it makes no real difference. An engine block will only cool down to the actual air temperature. It will never cool to lower, even if the wind chill was 20 degrees lower. But the wind chill factor will make a hot engine cool faster to the actual air temperature. Does the same effects happen to hot devices with the heat index? Or does it only effect things that sweat like a human?
 
GXMnow said:
"Heat Index" and "Wind Chill" are more about how it feels to a human than the real temperature.
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That was my assumption as well about heat index. Also depending on the color and composition of the roof material it could affect the temperature at which the panels are operating at. I have no idea about wind chill, except wind may the roof and the panels to approach ambient air temperature.
 
For something hotter than ambient, I would expect higher air density and humidity to improve heat transfer.
Not like humans or swamp coolers that work from evaporation. Or old engines with open tank cooling system!

A little air flow goes a long way!
 
Had some storms roll through this morning, lots of power flickers and brownouts for some reason my Enpower never automatically switched over to my Encharge batteries. I finally went out and threw the Utility Grid breaker in the Enpower and after about 5 seconds it finally clicked over and started powering the house from the batteries. After the storms passed and I flipped the grid breaker back on it switched off of batteries and back to grid within probably 60 seconds.

When I had the system installed a few years ago, I seem to recall it would stay on batteries until the grid had been stable for around 5 minutes, and a half-second outage would cause it to switch over to batteries. Not sure what's changed but that doesn't give me a lot of confidence.

Interestingly enough, each time the power flickered the load control relays would toggle.

Has anyone else seen similar issues with the system not automatically switching over to battery?
 
Yes, it was initially caused when the transformer outside my house was shorted, causing my house to disconnect from the transformer. After bringing everything back online, the AC Transfer to the battery didn't work the same, as you described. I called Enphase support and he ran diagnostics, we checked a few voltages, and then he reset it. Now it works normally again. Call tech support.
 
A couple of weeks ago when the internet came back up, for some reason, the modem did a factory reset. Never seen that behavior before. Anyway, it caused the IP addresses to change and I just now realized I don't report an error on that in the Enphase monitoring program...so lost a couple weeks of local data. I use the IP address over envoy.local as it's generally more reliable (not sure why, but occasionally the name fails to resolve). Probably the biggest downside is the monthly update to the OP has numbers from Enphase rather than the monitoring system as the hit occurred across a monthly boundary. I'll spend this morning fixing that.

Power went out last night for a while. I only know about it as I noticed the batteries were down to 70% this morning. Very overcast this morning, the solar array is only pumping out about 1 kW, so at least we're charging a bit.
 
Just got the upgraded version of Enlighten that changes the battery profile. Basically, it seems to have just shuffled things around a bit and added an export electricity rate.
 
Update the OP with October's production numbers, 2nd best October to date!
 
My October numbers were also excellent. Too bad my SCE billing is in the middle of the month, it makes it a bit harder to line it up. But in the last 2 weeks of Oct. there was only one day I imported any power, the rest of the time has been export only.
 
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