Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Inverter!

Our PV system is back online! After being down for 20 days, we are now up and running again. 

On April 9th our inverter died after a brief power outage. Busy with other things, I ignored it for over a week, hoping it would just come back. A couple attempts to reboot the system did not work, so we called the pros. 

Sarah came out looked at it and ordered a replacement. The replacement arrived (at no cost) and today was install day. 

Sarah removed the serial card from the old inverter and plugged it into the new one so that the web box could monitor the inverter and publish the data to the Internet here.

We are back online, let the sunshine!

I talked to Sarah about inverter failures. Her experience was that about 5% of them fail within the first couple years. Her company now uses SMA and one other brand for inverters because they are, anecdotally, the most reliable. She mentioned a couple other brands that they had used, but they resulted in too many service calls.