Z.A.P.
Zion's Amalgamated Power
(There's a TLDR at the bottom if you want to skip to it.)
When an experience is so sooo bad that you start an account just to shout it from the mountain tops as a cautionary tale...
Note: This ongoing issue with MPP has moved into litigation.
Context: I own/manage 10 arrays, in 3 states, utilizing inverters from 5 different companies.
THE PROJECT IN QUESTION
Purchased a property in 2019, with a 9kW Outback Radian system, 15kWh worth of Trojan FLAs which had completely failed by end of 2020, so they got replaced with 60kWh of LFP directly imported from iParwa.
The project: 13 acre off-grid (miles from any utility) citadel style property; the kind you restart civilization from - unlimited artisanal spring water (gravity not pumped), land for crops, abundant wildlife (elk, salmon, black bear). It is on the west flanks of the North Cascades, inland from the coast, so there is a ton of bad weather and poor solar conditions; my thought is if I can make solar work there, I can do it anywhere.
As we know there are a few general no-no’s in the off-gridding space: no electric water heaters, no air conditioning, and certainly no EV charging. We are doing all 3, no generator (we have, but no longer use)
20,000sq' of new pole building to mount on (technically a "solar membrane structure" for tax purposes lol), there is a lot of roof to mount to. About half of it has good solar potential; the other half overly shaded – potential candidates for future microinverted AC coupling.
Thought was to have multiple independent power stations that with the flip of a breaker (or tap of an app) could power the whole of the property.
As it sits today:
The house’s 9kW array with 200kWh LFP
Re-fitted DC Solar trailer with 16kW array and 40kWh LFP
46kW array with 180kWh LFP
51kW array with 200kWh LFP
All the LFP is custom and directly imported from iParwa in Shenzen.
Part of pointing this out is to demonstrate that I am familiar with the import/export process and have been doing it for years; this will come up later.
ALL THAT SAID
Back in 2021-2022 when this was all coming together and the 20,000sq’ of roof was going up, it was readily apparent I would be in need of a lot of off grid capable inverters. Having been not-too-impressed with the house’s Outback Radian system, and having had a very poor experience with my Utah home’s Enphase system (it’s never fully functioned in the 4 years since installed), I sought products elsewhere.
At the time MPP was comparable to several of the top products, but at a reasonable cost. So I bought an LVX6048WP (‘6048’), and stress tested the hell out of it; running it at 110% of labeled output for days at a time (we have a fleet of Tesla Model 3’s that are really handy for load testing) and that thing just chugged right along – it would throw up a warning alarm, but would keep outputting.
Having had that experience I figured I had found the right product for the massive upcoming projects. But always on the lookout to save some $, I reached out to MPP directly in Taiwan. Bulk pricing, negotiated down to $1200 per unit. Ordered 30 for the WA projects and 20 for the UT projects, in December 2022. They took a trip on a boat and arrived in January 2023, where in WA they sat palletized in my climate controlled warehouse.
June of 2023 I migrated from my southern Utah (Zion) home to the project in the Cascades to continue the buildout of the off-grid basecamp, and get the MPP’s installed. Prior to my arrival in June, on the roof had been installed 12 strings of 8x Silfab 490 panels, with the plan of 2 strings per each of the 6x 6048’s
We built an insulated and climate controlled battery box on a pallet with 18x 10kWh LFP battery packs wired in parallel. The packs are the same design as I had used to replace the house’s FLA; they are of good sturdy construction and had served me well for the 18 months at the house before making this giant battery box - this is to point out that at no point in time was the battery the problem.
One by one we mounted the 6x 6048s, wired them, attached the paralleled battery array to breakers, attached the breakers to the inverters, ran their paralleling communication cat5’s between them, and after a couple days of me plinking away on the install, were finally ready to go live. 6x 25A 240V inverters, with an ultimate potential of making 150A of AC power (36kW).
Fired them up one by one with no loads, no problem.
Was time for a load test.
Attached small load (industrial fan), no problem. Added larger load (1x 32A tesla charger), no problem. Added 2x more 32A chargers (total 96A), no problem. Added additional 32A charger (total 128), after 20-30 seconds inverter #4 failed and stopped outputting which overloaded the other 5 inverters so they all shut themselves off.
Thought it was maybe a fluke, so rebooted everything, same procedure, turned the industrial fan off, added a 32A load one at a time, #3 failed, then the whole string. Worth noting that on this second round was paying closer attention to their AC outputs, and none of them across the 6 were close to eachother, and they were varying pretty wildly.
Tried it again, it was steady for about 5 minutes when a large BANG from inside of inverter #2, the smell of burning electrical, and streams of magic smoke.
After procuring a fire extinguisher, reset everything, left #2 off, and put a load of 100A (without #2 the system should be able to do 125A); it worked for 3-4 minutes, then #4 failed (which should be fine as the other four inverters should be able to handle 100A), then 30 seconds later #3 failed, then the rest of the system.
Rest of that part of the story short, was never able to get the system to output more than 70% of what it’s advertised rating was.
Contacted MPP about the asploded #2 and the poor performance; they said replace it with one of the other 24 remaining from the warehouse, update all their firmwares, and see if the output improves.
So that was done. During firmware updates, 2 of the installs failed turning the units to bricks. Contacted MPP about the brick’d units, they said to replace them with some of the 23 warehoused units and they would deal with it once the system was operational.
That was done.
Note at this point 3 of the 9 units had failed.
Load tested again, same issue, any time we got above ~105-110A (of the rated 150A), after a certain period of time, one of the 6 would throw a fault code (usually F72 “Current Sharing Fault”, but also sometimes F80, F81, or F82), turn itself off, and the rest of the bank would fail.
After a week of regular operation (no loads more than ~50A), individual inverters would randomly throw up fault code F32 “DC/DC OverCurrent” and would be permanently bricked, no firmware updates or anything would un-brick it. After this happened to 3 of the inverters, MPP sent out replacement parts, asking me to do field repairs; which is really annoying because it’s a full month after I arrived on-site and other aspects of the basecamp buildout are suffering due to my having to put so much time and attention into this bank of inverters.
But whatever, the parts that arrived were 5 sets of the main PCB (think motherboard), “Grid” PCB, and “Control” PCB. I swap them into one of the inverters, fired it up, update the firmware, during the update it went BANG inside the box (glad I put the faceplate back on), more magic smoke. Swapped it for another of the stockpile at the warehouse, swapped parts on 24other inverters (takes about 2-3 hours each, really annoying), updated their firmware, one of the updates failed making yet another permanent brick, swapped it for a fresh one and this one was permanently F32 right out of the box.
After about a dozen units overall, and literal months of going back and forth with both MPP and Voltronic (MPP roped them into the exchanges), they did a remote view of my laptop during a load test in late October 2023, 4 full months since I started reporting the issues with them. They concluded the following:
“1) The Tesla charger is a type of PFC load that can result in the inverters being incapable of powering a full load in parallel. Therefore if an EV charger is the main type of load you use, then it's important to allocate buffer and run only up to ~80% of the inverter rating to prevent overload.”
(Nowhere in the advertising or the manual does it say that these inverters can only power certain loads; and recall from above we were NEVER able to sustain a load higher than 70%, not once not ever. Also recall that a single 6048 had no issue running at 110% load for days at a time)
"2) Per the test last night / this morning unit 3's behavior of sudden voltage drop still indicates a strong possibility due to a connection issue from battery to inverter. At your own convenience, we recommend still checking battery connection to this inverter for impedance, and seeing if a swap test can be done to confirm shifting of the problem.”
(There was absolutely nothing wrong with the connection to the battery)
… basically they passed the buck and said “too bad, pack sand.”
Now, that doesn’t address the dozen failed units, which were well within their 5 year warranty; they refused to refund or replace them.
Come November I had 6 units more or less operating by the time I had to migrate back to my place in Utah for the winter. I say more or less, because it was really only 5 units making AC power and the 6th was a glorified charge controller because every time I turned on it’s AC output it would crash the whole bank. By the time I returned the following June 2024, 2 more had permanently F32’d (meaning bricked). So 3 making AC and the 4th a glorified charge controller; and the 3 did not have anywhere near stable output; one would regularly crash out leaving only the other two supplying loads.
Long story longer, in a last-ditch effort to make the system work before abandoning them entirely and going with a different inverter/company, June 2024 did a daily swap of failed units. Eventually got through 20 failed units, most F32 permanently on boot up.
I gave up, dismounted them all (with only 2 of the 6 working at all), and replaced the 6 of them with 3x EG4 18KPV’s; it was a logical swap, as the 4 PV inputs on an 18K could take the place of 2 of the 6048’s handily without me having to get on the roof and rewire 96 panels. Sure, could have saved some $ and gone with a stack of EG4 6000XP’s, but who knows maybe one day down the road PSE brings grid power around; the other reason was the second as-yet-mounted array was installed with the 18KPVs in mind, and felt it made sense to have one type of system twice, so that it would be easier for employees to learn how to operate them – they already had to learn their way around the Outback Radian’s wonky control scheme / programmability with its Mate3 gateway.
With the swap to the 18K’s, didn’t have to cut any new wires, and as mentioned it demonstrated that there was absolutely no issue with the connection to the battery.
TLDR
Their products suck
Their interface sucks
Their software sucks
Their customer service is hot garbage
Voltronic who is their OEM tried to help and even they failed to fix the issue or offer any recourse.
It’s been nearly 3 years since the issue started, well within warranty, and most of them have blocked my email address.
My associates at iParwa have taken it upon themselves to sue MPP on my behalf; I’m paying for it ($6,000 so far), but really I just want to make MPP suffer.
All told I spent probably 120 hours trying to get the system to work. Weeks of my life, gone.
What a garbage company staffed with garbage people.
Corrupt.
Evil.
I have receipts, can provide upon request.
Attached document is the list of failed units, and details of their failure
As well as layout of the property detailing how we “closed the loops” to lower line loss if anybody was curious (we're sending 240V AC over 1500 linear feet and staying above 230V even with large loads like EV charging)
When an experience is so sooo bad that you start an account just to shout it from the mountain tops as a cautionary tale...
Note: This ongoing issue with MPP has moved into litigation.
Context: I own/manage 10 arrays, in 3 states, utilizing inverters from 5 different companies.
THE PROJECT IN QUESTION
Purchased a property in 2019, with a 9kW Outback Radian system, 15kWh worth of Trojan FLAs which had completely failed by end of 2020, so they got replaced with 60kWh of LFP directly imported from iParwa.
The project: 13 acre off-grid (miles from any utility) citadel style property; the kind you restart civilization from - unlimited artisanal spring water (gravity not pumped), land for crops, abundant wildlife (elk, salmon, black bear). It is on the west flanks of the North Cascades, inland from the coast, so there is a ton of bad weather and poor solar conditions; my thought is if I can make solar work there, I can do it anywhere.
As we know there are a few general no-no’s in the off-gridding space: no electric water heaters, no air conditioning, and certainly no EV charging. We are doing all 3, no generator (we have, but no longer use)
20,000sq' of new pole building to mount on (technically a "solar membrane structure" for tax purposes lol), there is a lot of roof to mount to. About half of it has good solar potential; the other half overly shaded – potential candidates for future microinverted AC coupling.
Thought was to have multiple independent power stations that with the flip of a breaker (or tap of an app) could power the whole of the property.
As it sits today:
The house’s 9kW array with 200kWh LFP
Re-fitted DC Solar trailer with 16kW array and 40kWh LFP
46kW array with 180kWh LFP
51kW array with 200kWh LFP
All the LFP is custom and directly imported from iParwa in Shenzen.
Part of pointing this out is to demonstrate that I am familiar with the import/export process and have been doing it for years; this will come up later.
ALL THAT SAID
Back in 2021-2022 when this was all coming together and the 20,000sq’ of roof was going up, it was readily apparent I would be in need of a lot of off grid capable inverters. Having been not-too-impressed with the house’s Outback Radian system, and having had a very poor experience with my Utah home’s Enphase system (it’s never fully functioned in the 4 years since installed), I sought products elsewhere.
At the time MPP was comparable to several of the top products, but at a reasonable cost. So I bought an LVX6048WP (‘6048’), and stress tested the hell out of it; running it at 110% of labeled output for days at a time (we have a fleet of Tesla Model 3’s that are really handy for load testing) and that thing just chugged right along – it would throw up a warning alarm, but would keep outputting.
Having had that experience I figured I had found the right product for the massive upcoming projects. But always on the lookout to save some $, I reached out to MPP directly in Taiwan. Bulk pricing, negotiated down to $1200 per unit. Ordered 30 for the WA projects and 20 for the UT projects, in December 2022. They took a trip on a boat and arrived in January 2023, where in WA they sat palletized in my climate controlled warehouse.
June of 2023 I migrated from my southern Utah (Zion) home to the project in the Cascades to continue the buildout of the off-grid basecamp, and get the MPP’s installed. Prior to my arrival in June, on the roof had been installed 12 strings of 8x Silfab 490 panels, with the plan of 2 strings per each of the 6x 6048’s
We built an insulated and climate controlled battery box on a pallet with 18x 10kWh LFP battery packs wired in parallel. The packs are the same design as I had used to replace the house’s FLA; they are of good sturdy construction and had served me well for the 18 months at the house before making this giant battery box - this is to point out that at no point in time was the battery the problem.
One by one we mounted the 6x 6048s, wired them, attached the paralleled battery array to breakers, attached the breakers to the inverters, ran their paralleling communication cat5’s between them, and after a couple days of me plinking away on the install, were finally ready to go live. 6x 25A 240V inverters, with an ultimate potential of making 150A of AC power (36kW).
Fired them up one by one with no loads, no problem.
Was time for a load test.
Attached small load (industrial fan), no problem. Added larger load (1x 32A tesla charger), no problem. Added 2x more 32A chargers (total 96A), no problem. Added additional 32A charger (total 128), after 20-30 seconds inverter #4 failed and stopped outputting which overloaded the other 5 inverters so they all shut themselves off.
Thought it was maybe a fluke, so rebooted everything, same procedure, turned the industrial fan off, added a 32A load one at a time, #3 failed, then the whole string. Worth noting that on this second round was paying closer attention to their AC outputs, and none of them across the 6 were close to eachother, and they were varying pretty wildly.
Tried it again, it was steady for about 5 minutes when a large BANG from inside of inverter #2, the smell of burning electrical, and streams of magic smoke.
After procuring a fire extinguisher, reset everything, left #2 off, and put a load of 100A (without #2 the system should be able to do 125A); it worked for 3-4 minutes, then #4 failed (which should be fine as the other four inverters should be able to handle 100A), then 30 seconds later #3 failed, then the rest of the system.
Rest of that part of the story short, was never able to get the system to output more than 70% of what it’s advertised rating was.
Contacted MPP about the asploded #2 and the poor performance; they said replace it with one of the other 24 remaining from the warehouse, update all their firmwares, and see if the output improves.
So that was done. During firmware updates, 2 of the installs failed turning the units to bricks. Contacted MPP about the brick’d units, they said to replace them with some of the 23 warehoused units and they would deal with it once the system was operational.
That was done.
Note at this point 3 of the 9 units had failed.
Load tested again, same issue, any time we got above ~105-110A (of the rated 150A), after a certain period of time, one of the 6 would throw a fault code (usually F72 “Current Sharing Fault”, but also sometimes F80, F81, or F82), turn itself off, and the rest of the bank would fail.
After a week of regular operation (no loads more than ~50A), individual inverters would randomly throw up fault code F32 “DC/DC OverCurrent” and would be permanently bricked, no firmware updates or anything would un-brick it. After this happened to 3 of the inverters, MPP sent out replacement parts, asking me to do field repairs; which is really annoying because it’s a full month after I arrived on-site and other aspects of the basecamp buildout are suffering due to my having to put so much time and attention into this bank of inverters.
But whatever, the parts that arrived were 5 sets of the main PCB (think motherboard), “Grid” PCB, and “Control” PCB. I swap them into one of the inverters, fired it up, update the firmware, during the update it went BANG inside the box (glad I put the faceplate back on), more magic smoke. Swapped it for another of the stockpile at the warehouse, swapped parts on 24other inverters (takes about 2-3 hours each, really annoying), updated their firmware, one of the updates failed making yet another permanent brick, swapped it for a fresh one and this one was permanently F32 right out of the box.
After about a dozen units overall, and literal months of going back and forth with both MPP and Voltronic (MPP roped them into the exchanges), they did a remote view of my laptop during a load test in late October 2023, 4 full months since I started reporting the issues with them. They concluded the following:
“1) The Tesla charger is a type of PFC load that can result in the inverters being incapable of powering a full load in parallel. Therefore if an EV charger is the main type of load you use, then it's important to allocate buffer and run only up to ~80% of the inverter rating to prevent overload.”
(Nowhere in the advertising or the manual does it say that these inverters can only power certain loads; and recall from above we were NEVER able to sustain a load higher than 70%, not once not ever. Also recall that a single 6048 had no issue running at 110% load for days at a time)
"2) Per the test last night / this morning unit 3's behavior of sudden voltage drop still indicates a strong possibility due to a connection issue from battery to inverter. At your own convenience, we recommend still checking battery connection to this inverter for impedance, and seeing if a swap test can be done to confirm shifting of the problem.”
(There was absolutely nothing wrong with the connection to the battery)
… basically they passed the buck and said “too bad, pack sand.”
Now, that doesn’t address the dozen failed units, which were well within their 5 year warranty; they refused to refund or replace them.
Come November I had 6 units more or less operating by the time I had to migrate back to my place in Utah for the winter. I say more or less, because it was really only 5 units making AC power and the 6th was a glorified charge controller because every time I turned on it’s AC output it would crash the whole bank. By the time I returned the following June 2024, 2 more had permanently F32’d (meaning bricked). So 3 making AC and the 4th a glorified charge controller; and the 3 did not have anywhere near stable output; one would regularly crash out leaving only the other two supplying loads.
Long story longer, in a last-ditch effort to make the system work before abandoning them entirely and going with a different inverter/company, June 2024 did a daily swap of failed units. Eventually got through 20 failed units, most F32 permanently on boot up.
I gave up, dismounted them all (with only 2 of the 6 working at all), and replaced the 6 of them with 3x EG4 18KPV’s; it was a logical swap, as the 4 PV inputs on an 18K could take the place of 2 of the 6048’s handily without me having to get on the roof and rewire 96 panels. Sure, could have saved some $ and gone with a stack of EG4 6000XP’s, but who knows maybe one day down the road PSE brings grid power around; the other reason was the second as-yet-mounted array was installed with the 18KPVs in mind, and felt it made sense to have one type of system twice, so that it would be easier for employees to learn how to operate them – they already had to learn their way around the Outback Radian’s wonky control scheme / programmability with its Mate3 gateway.
With the swap to the 18K’s, didn’t have to cut any new wires, and as mentioned it demonstrated that there was absolutely no issue with the connection to the battery.
TLDR
Their products suck
Their interface sucks
Their software sucks
Their customer service is hot garbage
Voltronic who is their OEM tried to help and even they failed to fix the issue or offer any recourse.
It’s been nearly 3 years since the issue started, well within warranty, and most of them have blocked my email address.
My associates at iParwa have taken it upon themselves to sue MPP on my behalf; I’m paying for it ($6,000 so far), but really I just want to make MPP suffer.
All told I spent probably 120 hours trying to get the system to work. Weeks of my life, gone.
What a garbage company staffed with garbage people.
Corrupt.
Evil.
I have receipts, can provide upon request.
Attached document is the list of failed units, and details of their failure
As well as layout of the property detailing how we “closed the loops” to lower line loss if anybody was curious (we're sending 240V AC over 1500 linear feet and staying above 230V even with large loads like EV charging)
