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Planning a 15K solark install with 10Kw of Solar on Enphase Inverters that will be AC coupled to the inverter

12kw_2021

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Hello

I have done some investigating of the various hybrid inverters that support AC coming from micro inverters on solar panels.
I have 10-12Kw of AC solar coming into home and grid tied and net-metered.

The 15Kw Sol-ark will accept 100% of that AC solar power as input to the generator, and will allow me to charge batteries for backup, and sell back to grid any excess power. If I went with some other vendor I would need two inverters , or be willing to turn off 1/3 of my solar in a grid down situation since the 12Kw Solark will only support 8 or 9kw of AC coupled solar.

My grid is pretty reliable, and so I would like to have an installation that is "normal" and operates normally when grid is up.
Solar operates and meets home power needs, and any excess is sold back to the grid. Minimize power usage.

One concern is the 90w of standby power consumed by the 15kw Solark. Assuming that is a 24/7 power consumption , I would like to see if it is possible to turn "off " the inverter when the grid is up, and the battery bank is fully charged. I see that Solark has a "pass through" feature, that you can setup and use, but I assume that the inverter standby power draw is still present.

Question for group.. if I want to be able to turn off the 15kw inverter to avoid the 90W standby power draw, could I just install some kind of switch that switches the incoming AC solar power from the generator input on the solark to my main panel.

This switch would be used when the grid is up, and the batteries are fully charged. In that situation, why do I need to inverter
"at the ready" running and consuming 90w?

I could then think of the Solark and fully charged batteries as a solar powered backup generator for use if/when needed.
If not needed it is ready and waiting, but not consuming power.
Yes I understand that when the grid goes down, and the inverter is off, my house would go dark, in the "normal manner" that grid tied solar operated.

Of course if I go on vacation, or am away from home for several days, I would flip the AC solar switch, too allow AC couple to the Solark, and leaves the Solark on 24/7 for power backup that is recharged from the AC coupled solar when I am away, and as long as the loads were small enough, and the battery big enough, all would be fine .

90w standby*24 hours is 2.16 KWh and that is about 5% of my daily solar production with 4 or 5 hours of sun on my 10Kw solar setup.

If grid is down this loss is fully understood and acceptable, but if grid is up, and batteries are full I would like to remove that loss.

Feel free to tell me I am overthinking this, and should just install the Solark 15Kw, connect my full 10-11kw Array and be done with it.

I have contacted Solark and they essentially said "try it" it might work. Does anyone here have a better understanding.

Thanks in advance for any education in this area.

CPU

I copied and pasted the steps to get the 12kw Solark Pass Through from a different thread to operate below: (Assume it is still drawing 90w in this mode)
==================================================================
The sequence to put the Sol-Ark 12K into pass-through mode is below. This may be handy in the future (hope I never need to do this. Probably good idea to print and put into the User Manual since I don't think its in there);
  1. Turn ON grid from utility
  2. Turn on grid breaker and load breaker in the inverter
  3. Set battery setup into "NO battery"
  4. Work mode as "grid sell"
  5. Turn off the Sol-Ark "central button"-turn off grid and load breaker.
  6. Wait 10 sec and turn ON grid and load breaker in the inverter.
  7. The inverter will have no lights but it will do passthrough;
==================================================================
 
I have a similar setup. You are way overthinking it. The idle current draw is worth it for the data logging alone. The sol-ark records a ton of power data and sends it to powerview app. For example, you can see exactly what happens if the power goes out - you see L1 and L2 drop to zero volts. It also records your consumption, import, export, inverter and battery temps, etc. Literally hundreds of items. The Enphase app shows you production and maybe consumption if you have consumption CTs. The sol-Ark shows you everything. want to see current on l1 and inverter DC temperature at the same time? ok! You can choose multiple parameters and put them all on one “custom” graph if you like. There is a nice one called “grid” that only graphs watts coming or going to the grid without a bunch of other noise. The sol-ark is capable of “set it and forget it” with tons of features. No need to fiddle with switches, settings, breakers, or other manual devices. Once it is set up it just works. I see tons of posts where people are manually switching all kinds of things taking their system off-grid until my battery runs down then I’ll put is back on grid. What is the point of that? In your case what is your utility rate plan? Are you trying to minimize exported power or are you looking at time of use rates or do you want the battery only for backup? You can combine these things in the settings like limit to home but maintain X% of battery power for outages. You can do so many things with the sol-ark. No way I would turn it off.
 
I see tons of posts where people are manually switching all kinds of things taking their system off-grid until my battery runs down then I’ll put is back on grid. What is the point of that?
Well one potential bonus from being off the grid, minimizing CME risks/exposure. But I get what you're saying, the SA inverters are extremely flexible and automate the process well.
 
Yes, that's way too much effort to avoid a 90w load.
Especially when it's coming from the sun for free.
 
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