Swapping out 11 year old AGM's for Trophy Lithium batteries and adding a 3rd array to my old Schneider XW grid tied inverter.

[Philip53]

Eleven years ago I installed a 2 array, 5.6kw grid tied system on my home. Since my home was not ideally situated, I ended up with SE and SW roof mounted arrays. The original system was close to net zero at the time, but as the years went by, my usage increased. Looking at either a ground mount, or replacing a 35 year old outbuilding, and using it as another roof mount, I decided to have double use, and replace the old lawn & garden storage building. With a true south roof orientation, of course.

My 11 year old Concorde Lifeline batteries (256ah) were showing their age. On our infrequent outages, they simply had little ability to power our critical loads for any appreciable time. So, I decided to replace them with two 220ah lithiums from Trophy battery. While I am still working on the building for the new 4kw array, I decided to go ahead and replace the old AGM's. After much research, I decided on the Trophy batteries from trophybattery.com. Talking to the owner, Dan, cinched the deal. So far I have been very pleased with the new batteries. Dan answers his calls himself, or will return the call in short order if he is busy, and has helped me program my older Schneider XW to work with his batteries. The new batteries are sold as 220ah, but as Dan said, they would be closer to 230ah. As promised, both of them show 230ah at 100% SOC. I now have approximately 3 times the usable battery back up than with the old AGM's.

With the added 4kw array during the midday sun, I will be overpaneled, but that will help keep my production curve flatter than it would normally be by catching some rays early and late, adding to the SE & SW production . I am sure I will max out my 6kw XW output, for a decent portion of the day. To that end, I also installed a twin computer type fan on top of the inverter to assist in cooling.

 

[kundip]

Really really nice work.
Great article.
Much appreciated.

 

[629658]

Those are great batteries but they are heavy as hell!!!

 

[Philip53]

Yep, they really are - and you should know, you bought a bunch!

Just finished the roof metal today - yay! But still need some other work done before mounting the 3rd array panels.

 

[Philip53]

Finally got the 3rd array up and working. I have had some health issues and getting all this together has taken much longer than originally planned. And as you can see from the pics, still looking for a stone mason to put the stone around the building.

With the two existing 2.8kw SE & SW facing arrays, the addition of the 4.8kw south facing array has my XW6048 humming at near max during a large portion or the day now - sending a good bit of kw's back to the grid. My biggest day since completion has been about 55kwh. Before, the largest single day production was around 27kwh. I had figured that I would double production, and so far that looks about right. On a yearly basis I should be net zero for the house. You can see from the above pics that I have all three SCC's and the inverter inside the house. There has been a considerable increase in heat from all of the components, which I also had expected. As stated above, I had already added a double computer fan to the inverter. That 3rd SCC got up to 150 degrees (F) during the first day of operation! I found a small desk fan & aimed it at that SCC and dropped the temp almost 30 degrees. I have since ordered a 7" wall mounted fan that I will put on a timer to take care of all of that extra heat, so all should be OK there.

 

[faccnator]

Love Zip system sheeting. Great stuff