Inherited Trace Engineering System

[SouthernIllinois]

I inherited a whole house system originally put in in 1999.
It includes dual Trace Engineering SW5548's, dual Trace Engineering C40 Charge Controllers, a Trace Engineering DC Disconnect / Overcurrent Module and 16 Trojan Pacer 6 V batteries.
One of the battery's started smoking a couple of years into the placement, and the whole system was turned off, and it's just been sitting there ever since.
I'm assuming the battery's are no good, but is the rest of the equipment an OK place to start for building a whole house system?

 

[Keith C]

From your description I'd expect the likely possibility of any electrolytic capacitors now being 'unformed' and needing to be re-formed or replaced. It would likely be easier to just replace them.

So what, is this like a pile of equipment in the back of a pickup now or do you have the whole place and this stuff is still wired up?

 

[Fred S]

Don't know a thing about this equipment. What comes to mind:
Did you turn stuff on to see if it works? Some of those batteries may be fine, for testing purposes.
If the electronics seem to be quality made, e.g. the boards are conformal coated, and they work, why not use them? (To Keith's point, you can open the units up and look for swollen capacitors.) If the stuff does work, it is a cost vs efficiency thing. The panels and controller, and maybe the inverter, won't be as efficient as more modern versions, but they won't be terrible either. There may be no way to customize charge voltages, so you may be stuck with using lead acid batteries. Just make sure there's adequate fuses on everything, and a smoke detector.

 

[SouthernIllinois]

The entire system is still setup and wired together. There was a subpanel pulled off the main 200 amp service on the house, with a subset of the house breakers to be supported by the Trace system. This subpanel includes the 220 deep well, which is why they put in dual inverters.
There is a tie-in for a generator (which was never installed) and solar panels (which were never installed).
The initial system was to guarantee uninterrupted electricity if the grid ever went down. They say that when it was up and running, the Trace switched from charging the batteries to supplying the electricity so fast that the TVs wouldn't blink and the computers wouldn't power off.

 

[Fred S]

Bummer there's no panels, but I guess they'd be getting a little old by now anyway. Would be interesting to hear how things go, if you decide to make use of the system or the components.

 

[SouthernIllinois]

Oh, there are panels. They're just not installed. They were put out in the barn and are still there. I'll be looking at them shortly. There's also an 8K diesel generator out under the shed.
It looks like the only piece I need to replace is the battery bank

It's going to be quite interesting doing the testing and trying to put the thing together. Watching the videos on this site make me aware of how much I don't know:
How to put the solar array together to get the right kind size power to the system.
How to test all the components to make sure everything's working OK.
After watching Will's review of the TESLA battery pack, I'm very interested in how I might hook it up as the battery storage for this system.

 

[Keith C]

Will wouldn't be suggesting the Tesla battery anymore.

Electrolytic capacitors are the can type capacitors seen in equipment. If they have sat more than a few years un powered they become unformed as I mentioned. If that's occurred and you hit them with full power they will leak internally so much current that they will heat up excessively and typically explode (called grenading). That would be one way to check - just turn them on and do they explode or do they not. The down side is that often when they explode the electronics supplying them are damaged at the same time.

This can be avoided by slowly powering up the equipment over about a day. Some equipment allows this and some doesn't. Sometimes you can disconnect the big capacitors by unwiring them and manually applying voltage to them over time so they can re-form and be happy. If you don't understand this though and aren't comfortable with digging around in power equipment you should not attempt this. You may be forced to try it and if they explode buy new equipment.

You could possibly pull the covers and give us some good pictures and we all could figure out what to do.

 

[Fred S]

Thanks Keith, that technique is a good thing to know!