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Extant Artiodactyl posted:never saw it in action but enphase does have a way to do "sunlight backup" in iq8 systems without batteries to power circuits through a relay that kicks on and off with available power. i think it was limited to 1/10th or 1/6th of the system's continuous current. something like that. Yea, my installer explained the same thing to me and suggested just doing the battery, which seems like the better idea. The battery itself is like $3k retail, but all the supporting setup is like $10k (which you need for sunlight backup even without the battery)
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 01:19 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 00:00 |
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Extant Artiodactyl posted:never saw it in action but enphase does have a way to do "sunlight backup" in iq8 systems without batteries to power circuits through a relay that kicks on and off with available power. i think it was limited to 1/10th or 1/6th of the system's continuous current. something like that. Yeah, so still basically useless for my desired use case, which is "gently caress PG&E Imma be my own grid". Whatever, I had ruled out Enphase anyway and committed to dealing with having an extra-spicy high voltage DC run to big inverters.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 01:50 |
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Extant Artiodactyl posted:too far along in the process to not put some blame on the electricians. Welp I take back a good portion of my defense of the electricians. H110Hawk posted:found out my spectrum modem is fried out And my oven and my whole home humidifier and the garage door motor is blinking an error state. They missed a neutral hookup. They owned up to it immediately and did a site walk to touch all the active electronics, and already have people scheduled to fix the various things and "I owe you an oven, you guys let me know what matches your current one and we'll take it off the invoice and install it for you." Everyone is insanely glad that we weren't moved in yet, beyond the base safety issue or "whoops don't touch anything metal" that could have easily eaten 10k more electronics. I made a joke with him about not touching the water heater, it's hot. He laughed.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 14:54 |
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Probably happy that you're not touching/claiming against his insurance coverage. He'd be paying for that for years afterwards if you did.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 18:17 |
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Yeah I don't have a reason to, if someone had been injured I wouldn't be talking about it here but with an attorney. Handing them my copy of their proof of insurance I have on file.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 18:30 |
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that's a big gently caress-up. it probably cascaded from the equipment mistake leading to redoing all the connections of the system controller. it's easy to sit here and go "i never did that" but any time i touch service equipment and especially with these systems i am putting the meter on everything, taking pictures, physically touching each wire after the torquing to see if there's something to miss on the insulation or the way the lugs lined up ... two things i remember slipping through these checks: 1) a lug on the main breaker was crossthreaded from the first day it was installed, in 1989. only found out when it came time to land its new feeders. somehow lucked out on a replacement breaker, power only stayed off for a couple more hours 2) an exhaust fan circuit was fed from two breakers in the original main panel and the coin flip worked out in the hack's favor, the breakers were on the same phase causing no perceivable issues. when i moved the circuits to a protected loads panel, the coin flip did not work out in my favor, the breakers were on different phases so all the switches got 240v. 4 devices replaced, only a smart timer died, the fan was fine
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 18:41 |
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Extant Artiodactyl posted:that's a big gently caress-up. it probably cascaded from the equipment mistake leading to redoing all the connections of the system controller. it's easy to sit here and go "i never did that" but any time i touch service equipment and especially with these systems i am putting the meter on everything, taking pictures, physically touching each wire after the torquing to see if there's something to miss on the insulation or the way the lugs lined up ... My biggest gently caress up so far was the time I didn't remember to pull the jumper tab off of a dual SPST switch fed from two breakers. Two 20A breakers. On separate phases, as luck would have it. ... In the panel run off of an absolute UNIT of a 208V 3 phase transformer in a big building downtown. Maybe a total of 6-8 feet of 12awg between the breakers and my switch, which was still hanging out of the box as I wanted to make sure I'd put the right lights on the right switches before buttoning it all up. The arc was, shall we say, impressive. Concussive, even. It turned that little tab into a large bright cloud of brass vapor in half a cycle flat and tripped both breakers. I was lucky and all I had to replace was the switches, not because they broke but because they were supposed to be white, not white-black-gold camo pattern.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 20:03 |
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Been having a bunch of equipment installed at work. Reinstalled, actually. We had some equipment that we were using, then took it out, and now are putting it back. The people who demo'd it out, took out the wire from the disconnect to the unit. No worries. Well, some worries. Because they only pulled out the neutrals and grounds, and left all the phases. SO the electricians come to wire it up, and think to themselves "hey, there's no ground here, better run one." So they run one from the disconnect. The equipment is cord-and-plug connected, and the cord is 5w (3ph + neutral + gnd). Anyway, we get the thing hooked up and turn it on and the panel lights are going crazy. The neutral is ONLY for some indicator lights on the panel, which are now floating between 208 and 0V depending on ?????. We shut it off, figure out that that tiny tiny tiny lug is for neutral, and everything's good. Just very confusing. It's a 200A 3phase 5w cord with big 1/4" lugs for the phases and ground yet a #6 lug for the neutral. Engineers figured it's only 200mA max on the lights, no need for a full-size lug for all of that. Ok guys, then how are we supposed to land the #0 wire that comes in the premade cord? Split bolts, apparently. Other fun thing was the attached picture. A new piece of equipment was shipped with the motor incoming power leads all landed on the shorting bar instead of on, like, the incoming phase lugs. This made the motor starter unhappy.
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# ? Mar 15, 2024 00:03 |
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Extant Artiodactyl posted:that's a big gently caress-up. it probably cascaded from the equipment mistake leading to redoing all the connections of the system controller. 100% that's when it happened. Thankfully they're just making it right (so far) without any prodding on my part. It's all words at this point, but if they can't source the board on my KitchenAid KEBK276SSS 27" double oven with bread proofing, hidden element, and other interesting features it's going to be what's at a glance looking like a $4000-4400 retail writeoff. Plus the humdifier control board. Plus the garage door opener which is currently TBD. If they balk I'll remind them how lucky they got to not have my house of Not to mention if anything dies in the coming 12 months I'm giving them a call. (Dishwasher, microwave, fridge, pool pump.) Extant Artiodactyl posted:it's easy to sit here and go "i never did that" but any time i touch service equipment And this is why they're not getting a free pass, this is some sloppy work. Someone should have been double checking the big wires. Or at least come back after lunch and go "hot, hot, neutral" to every segment with a jiggle before firing it up. Unlike the gen2 vs gen3 thing which like, something something cast the first stone. That being said... H110Hawk fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Mar 15, 2024 |
# ? Mar 15, 2024 01:53 |
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Double oven with bread proofing? drat.
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# ? Mar 15, 2024 05:10 |
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This never gets old. It was cold out so I flipped on the heater for "free" this morning for the 2hrs I'm going to be here. Fire inspection and presuming that passes city final this week. City has already verbally approved it but they changed some SOP stuff in the past month to re-order some things so their final is after FD signature, which makes sense.
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# ? Mar 25, 2024 18:00 |
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that's putting the self-consumption mode to good use! only ever dealt with flat rate markets on battery systems here and while it was definitely not my job to properly communicate how ineffective discharging and charging the battery is when it's xx cents buying or selling at any time, i'd still have to answer calls asking why the battery "isn't doing anything". some sales guys absolutely did not understand this and just gave the customer the expectations of time of use markets so in turn they did not listen to anything i said and would just empty the battery at night and fill it during the day as if it was doing anything to their bill that letting the battery sit charged wouldn't. as an incentive here, you participate in utility programs where they will discharge the battery to the grid during predicted high demand times and cut you a check (or credits? i mainly saw the checks) at the end of the season (between and 1 and 2 thousand with maximum participation)i get the idea but i'd have to see more research about how effective this is at actually reducing enough strain on the grid to justify the checks as anything other than manufacturer and installer subsidies
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# ? Mar 25, 2024 21:58 |
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Yeah I don't know yet what I am going to be doing in average usage so I will need to tweak it potentially. I do not have grid sale mode enabled yet but around here it should in theory help prevent rolling blackouts with enough participation. I downloaded the export pricing spreadsheet but can't make heads nor tails of it. Plus I can't tell if they actually cut me checks with nem3 because of all the bullshit. But I do know for a few hours a day in August / September I see like $2/kwh export rates. Ironically when it's most likely above the operating temperature of the batteries... Right now I am consuming like 1-2kwh/day from the grid and exporting a ton. Once we move in that export number might flip. My daily generation on a cool sunny day is 70kwh. How much have you seen that reduced in hot summer months?
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# ? Mar 25, 2024 23:46 |
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Coincidentally enough I just enrolled in our utility's (PG&E) load reduction program, which yeah, pays out at $2/kwh when they pull from our batteries, which beats the $0.66 peak rate that grid power costs me during the same 4-9PM timeframe. Seems like a no brainer - only downside is it means that my batteries will hit their reserve level earlier in the evening than they otherwise would, which does provide a larger window where maybe I couldn't coast through an evening grid outage until the sun comes up in the morning. Our batteries already hit the reserve level every night we decide to charge a car, but that is usually around 1-2 in the morning, and the house only draws about 3-400W if everyone is asleep and we can easily coast on 30% battery till solar production starts up again. If we drained to 30% by 9PM, making it till sun-up the next day might be a little more challenging, but probably generally workable. I dunno, we'll see how it goes!
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# ? Mar 26, 2024 21:40 |
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H110Hawk posted:
in this area, summer always beats winter for production. enphase had specific training for installers in the cali market but i never took it. all our battery installs were in garages, outbuildings and basements except for exactly 1 where we had the customer sign a waiver. it just wouldn't charge below freezing and it wouldn't do much of anything below 0. it never got hot enough here for long enough to have any overtemp service calls
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# ? Mar 27, 2024 13:37 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 00:00 |
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Extant Artiodactyl posted:in this area, summer always beats winter for production. enphase had specific training for installers in the cali market but i never took it. I assume summer will be higher most days, but we get a few weeks of truly awful temps here. Just curious where we're going to wind up. Thankfully it's north facing and so should be out of direct sunlight by the worst hours. FD came by today and blessed the system. He said it was exactly how he likes to see them. I spoke with him briefly as he was saying this is how he would setup his system, all outside, away from everything. I told him how "I want it outside so I have a chance of escape before it burns the house down." "Exactly. Escape time is much higher outside." He said they generally only see them burn due to damage, they only see damage in garages/driveways, and 3ft of clearance does nothing against a modern SUV/Truck. Overall made me feel really good about my choices and insistence on design and location. Apparently there are some sketchy contractors who try to get all the shutoffs inside... right next to the batteries. Apparently he just came from a re-inspection where the job site looked identical to the initial inspection. I would not want the level of scrutiny that amount of disregard for a punch list would result in.
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# ? Mar 27, 2024 20:48 |