Shunt trip breaker XW Pro grid ideas?

Investigating methods to open a breaker remotely.
All the solar electronics are installed in a shed, 200 ft. behind the house.

There is 60A 2P Square D QO breaker in the shed that provides grid power to the
Schneider XW Pro inverters for "Grid Support".

I need to open this breaker from the house, to disconnect the grid from the inverters when big storms are in the area.

When the grid experiences an interruption from a lightning hit, the house heat pump being run by the inverters goes off line,
when the inverters switch over to battery.
(Guessing that the XW Pro contactor operation switching time is the cause.)

SWMBO is unhappy w/o air conditioning.

There is an Ethernet network in the house, connected to the shed Ethernet via fiber.
The Juniper Networks switch in the shed has POE available.

I want to replace the 60A QO breaker in the shed grid power panel w/ a Square D QOU 60A 2P shunt trip breaker.



Found some sources for relays w/ POE Ethernet connections / built in web server that would let me activate the relay / shunt trip over the network.
Example:

Any other ideas / suggestions would be great!

pvdude said:

When the grid experiences an interruption from a lightning hit, the house heat pump being run by the inverters goes off line,
when the inverters switch over to battery.

Click to expand...

Isn't opening the breaker the same as the grid going away?

I don't understand why that fixes the problem.

Can the inverter be programmed to ignore the grid input in some way? Or to better switch when grid fails? Or to make the heat pump more tolerant?

Mike C.

mciholas said:

Isn't opening the breaker the same as the grid going away?

Click to expand...

Yes. When the heat pump is running.
I plan to open the breaker w/ the heat pump turned off, then start the heat pump afterwards .
For some reason, this procedure does not effect the heat pump.

Why not just set tight tolerances in the AC1 Grid Settings?

You can trip a shunt trip breaker remotely, but you can't reset it. That takes being there physically. If that's the case, then you could turn it off physically, too.

What about using a QO260PL, the "powerlink" version which has a remote control for both on and off?


You apply 24 VDC on one wire, it opens, on the other, it closes.

Mike C.

mciholas said:

a remote control for both on and off

Click to expand...

WOW, thanks, that is a really nice solution, I'll learn more about it!

I just use an AC contactor.

Or wait, just manually disqualify grid? It already has contactors in the XW for this. No need to duplicate the functionality.