Enecsys micro-inverters - experience so far

[craigski]

I'm making a decision this week on which design/installer to go for. Its looking like enecsys with Sanyo panels, not the cheapest, but not the most expensive either. I do have some partial shading early morning/late afternoon on my south facing roof, due to dormers.

The installer did give me a reference customer I could call, and when I phoned the customer he allowed me to login into his system and see the enecsys 'eye candy' monitoring software. His system has 28 panels and 28 enecsys inverters, more inverters than I was expecting. Avg 19kWh per day for past 2.5 months, best day 34kWh. I did zoom in on this day, and I cant see any peaks due to broadband or similar outages, and the software playing catchup, so it looks real.

The lifetime for individual panel output shows a variance of 7.6% between lowest and highest lifetime panel output, this could be due to shading, and/or difference with panel efficiencies.

I just hope I have been give a 'real' live system username, and not just a simulation

Question - if an inverter is replaced, does the data start again from zero, or is the data from old inverter transferred to new?

[AidyB]

We installed 4 enecsys systems and three have had problems.

We have not installed any since, though I hear that we had a bad batch.

AB

[Wickham]

I disagree that the data system is poor, it provides more information than most will need. My only criticism is that the raw data is not available to play with.

Agreed. All that is absolutely necessary is the current output to check if anything is wrong. The hourly/daily/weekly/monthly totals are indicative but useful as a guide. You can check if one day was much less than another, or a morning's output less than an afternoon, but that's just interesting and doesn't tell you anything important. The generation meter gives you the actual total.

Wickham
Is your 3.9% AC loss due to the size and lenght of link cable to the generation meter?
I have 15 meters of 4mm which was oversized to reduce losses.

My cable length is about 30 metres. I don't know the core sizes but it's the black armoured three core cable often used for septic tank pumps, probably 15A rated. The 3.9% difference between the Enecsys total and the generation meter might be due to the Enecsys data recording being inaccurate as well as the cable and equipment losses.

Question - if an inverter is replaced, does the data start again from zero, or is the data from old inverter transferred to new?

I'll tell you when I get the replacement. It's true that each micro-inverter is registered separately with Enecsys so the new one would normally start at zero, so they could either leave the old one still registered but not ever increasing or add the old total to the start of the new one and I expect they can do this.

[BORIS]

Further update on Enecsys inverters.
Data collection on my 8 inverter system started to go wrong on August 10th - since then the information system has become less reliable which has been diagnosed as a fault on inverter no 7. There have been a couple of occassions when this inverter has not produced any power, once for a whole day. Today the system claims to have generated 1.0 MWh, unfortunately the generation meter does not agree. I am waiting for Inverter no 7 to be replaced.

So that's a 12.5% failure rate on my system. Apologies to clockmanFR.

[series530]

I hope to be joining this little group of Enecsys users quite soon. The panels are up but the inverters aren't here as yet. I have been promised a commissioning next week subject to availability. In fairness, our installer seems to be able to source reasonable quantities of them even while Enecsys re-ramp following their holiday quality control improvement.

I am hoping that the product re-evaluation together with the sourcing of material from a different supplier will result in a more reliable product. Luckily, a 10 year independent warranty and the 20 Enecsys warranty should give some peace of mind.

Being an engineer by profession, I suspect that I will be analysing the system and the harvest to death. Get ready .... 

 

[clockmanFR]

BORIS, Accepted.

But it is a damn shame, because the concept is good.

Oh i wish for better manufacturing Quality, what on earth are their own engineers doing. ??
Unfortunately i have seen this before, keep the commercial folk, but to save costs dump the good engineers, then rush to market.

I despair, ...but hang on, ...any chance of getting hold of a couple of units and peek inside to see what is going on, i feel a cunning plan may be on its way.

[Wickham]

I've resurrected this topic because I have finally received my replacement micro-inverter (free under guarantee).

One of 16 failed on 22nd June, replacement fitted yesterday 1st November!!

Enecsys have had problems. The CEO and one other person, the Chief Financial Officer I think, left the company around June. There must have been a boardroom row.

They then stopped production with their Polish supplier after they found that the supplier had made unauthorised specification changes. Enecsys said they would restart production within a month, using a Chinese supplier. I thought at the time that getting a new supplier up and running in a month was impossible. The supplier would have to get his suppliers geared up and there would be a testing programme.

In October Enecsys told me that the Chinese supplier was not yet suppliying micro-inverters, so I suppose I got mine from Poland and that they have patched up their differences with the Polish supplier or they have used one of their other suppliers somewhere else in the world.

I was never too worried as I reckoned that I was losing about £7 a month and the precise total was £20.90. One of the advantages of micro-inverters is that the 15 others continued to generate.

I had another problem in September that all the micro-inverters switched off at about 9am. I didn't notice until lunch time; it was only because it was the last day of the month that I had a look at the generation meter which had a steady red light indicating no generation. I phoned my installer who phoned Enecsys. The installer asked me to have another look at the generation meter which still had a red light so I switched some contact breakers off and on again, which didn't seem to make any difference and I went immediately back to my phone.

However, half an hour later they were working again. Micro-inverters are supposed to restart automatically after about four minutes after a power cut, but I had no power cut (my clocks were still showing the correct time.) I have been told by Enecsys that they can't restart micro-inverters via the broadband link, they can only look at an error log, but they still don't know what turned them off. My installer thinks that a power surge might have tripped them. As there was no power cut, there was no trigger of the power coming back on to trigger a restart. I think it was my action switching contact breakers off and on that restarted them a few minutes later.

Meanwhile I haven't been paid by SSE. My contract arrived on 29th June and I sent it back the same day. SSE later said that they received it on 30th June but hadn't processed it that day so it missed insertion in the end of June database, so my end of June meter reading would be carried over to the end of September - and I'm still waiting for that to be paid! (Did SSE deliberately send my contract at the end of June knowing that it would miss the June database?)

[Allen]

Everyone,

I have just had an 11 panel system fitted with the Enecsys micro-inverters together with the 'Gateway' monitoring device.
Being a 'C+' programmer, I wanted to write my own monitoring interface and data logs to be stored on my computer, and fully expected the monitoring device to come with some details of its data output format.  I was very suprised to find that it came with nothing, and so contacted Enecsys requesting an 'ICD' (interface command dictionary).  Their reply is below:

****************************************************************************************************************
Dear Allen
Regrettably this request cannot be granted. Enecsys as a business have a clear policy that the data captured is not to be made available to anyone outside our own organisation.

Sorry that we are unable to provide you with this access. Hope you can understand the sensitivity around the control of data. Data Protect Act

****************************************************************************************************************

Can anyone please explain why I cannot have access to the data from MY panels, mounted on MY roof, through MY monitoring device?

They state that the people at Enecsys will have access to MY data - so where does the 'Data Protection Act' come into force?

Everyone's comments would be appreciated,

Allen

[series530]

I can appreciate your frustration and your wish to intercept the data and do separate analysis. 99% of users will find the monitor on the Enecsys site more than adequate for their needs. I can fully understand why Enecsys would not be willing to provide and maintain a customer interface to intercept the data given that so few people would feel the need to use it.

How were you planning to access the data? There is no external port aside from the ethernet jack. Or were you planning to hack into the zigbee transmission?

As a programmer myself, the concept of analysing my own data interests me but, in all honesty, the Enecsys tools are pretty good and I would rather focus attention on something that provides a less robust analysis medium.

[Wickham]

I can understand Enecsys' point of view. They have spent money developing the software and hardware so it is protected commercial information. Even if you made your own gateway unit and developed your own software you would still have to work out what data was being sent by each micro-inverter and how it was coded and taking that data would still breach copyright or some other law.

[Other-Power]

You must have signed Enecsys data release sheet.  In there I am sure it says you sign away the right to the data as an end user.

Cheers

Jon

[tc847]

You must have signed Enecsys data release sheet.  In there I am sure it says you sign away the right to the data as an end user.

Not that I can see.  All I ever expected was a "download to csv" option so that I could do my own analysis on the data without having to re-key it.

I have one other criticism of the Enecsys monitoring software.  It insists on rounding results to nearest 0.1kWh but then shows Wh with 1 decimal place in the result.

So, for example, today it says I have produced:
200.0Wh
500.0Wh
0.0Wh
Total generation 0.7kWh

But I can see from the graph that the actuals are more like 195Wh, 450ishWh and 30ishWh.  Why would they collect data with such accuracy and then re-display it with such misleading inaccuracy?

[jez54]

In case anyone reads this, who we haven't heard from on the *big* thread, or who like me is here for a bit of rest and relaxation, may I ask a question that I asked a page or so ago over on that thread:

What about intercepting the Enecsys zigbee radio messages and redirecting the data-stream coming from individual inverters to a PC running an SQL database and some real-time logging software?  The second half (logging to the database) is easy, I've already got that running for my boiler system control which is measuring and logging 6 sensors (via RS-485) and could be expanded to add more.  Anyone ever tried looking at zigbee data streams?

Think I'll talk to my boiler people (they were just starting to look at zigbee to turn each radiator TRV effectively into an individual zone valve under programmable control).

[jez54]

Other-Power:     # 25       "You must have signed Enecsys data release sheet."
tc847:               # 26       "Not that I can see"

Gentlemen, what data release sheet?  Is this yet another aspect of my installation where my installer hasn't quite done the job right?  (but maybe to my advantage in this case, as if I haven't seen it and didn't get asked to sign it, I cannot bound by it can I? - on with my investigation of the datastream ....)

If either of you kind gents, or indeed anyone else, would mind emailing me a copy, *for information purposes only* I'd be grateful to have a look at what I've managed to avoid being bound by.  If the file's too big to attach to a PM here, let me know and I'll give you an external email address.

[series530]

I had to sign one.

As I am away I cannot send it to you today. If you haven't received one by tomorrow night then please send me an email and I'll send a copy to you.