how are those pop style breakers holding up? How much current have they seen?
They seem to be fine. They are only 150A. I don't have anything over-rated. Four each, two pairs of two 150A feed each inverter on 1/0 feed wires. Very short runs ,maybe 5 feet, all the wire lengths are as identical as I could get them. There is a 300A fuse on each battery feed line. That gives me ~600A or 30KW. The inverters only do 24KW, they feed a 100A panel with a 100A breaker. Those small brown boxes on the wall are all sensors, two on each of the RED/BLACK, then on various high output loads, A/C HWH, etc.
I'm polling 5 second intervals, got a spike of a very short duration before I got the Magic Start for the HVAC. It occured during a phase shift switching from battery to the grid. The most I've ever pulled from the batteries is around 18KW, a fairly short duration as well, less than 30 minutes, then I turned the car charger off. Reality is I really tuned my setup to handle my demand, first and foremost. The highest demand I've actually ever recorded:
myhouse=> select max(pwm_amps) from power_monitor where pwm_sensor = 10;
max
----------
108.6070
(1 row)
This did not trip the breaker, nor did it last long. I think it caught the HVAC at startup before the Magic Start, numbers were low 80's just before, and my control system kicked in and shut off the car charger, and flipped the oven range over to the grid. At which point the threshold fell way below 60A, and 5 minutes later it turned everything back on.
Once I tripped the 100A main breaker from my main panel to the transfer switch when the inverter started acting up over an edge condition. This has been corrected in the firmware, but I had the inverter set to turn off when the batteries hit 0% (I normally have 5, now 3). At the time there was still a modicum of solar output, just below the threshold needed to run the load, ~ 5KW at the time, and instead of turning off and staying off until it got back up to 5% over the shutdown (like at 5% it comes back on at 10%) it flipped back on as soon as it hit 1%, then back off, then... Since I was not synced to the grid it made a lot of noises and popped the grid feed due to sync error spikes I'm sure. I changed the threshold to 5, flipped the grid back on, relay kicked and I was back to normal.
Never caused any issues on the battery/breaker side.
Since I don't charge my cars from battery generally peak demand has been is around 12KW when I'm on batteries. That means the oven/range HVAC and HWH are all kicking. Add in the microwave, coffee pot, toaster oven, maybe get up to 14-15KW from time to time right at 5. So reality is I built everything out to pretty much be able to run my house and charge 1 car, and still have plenty of headroom.
All my breakers are at the max rating I want to allow period. Frankly, if anything ever trips I screwed up somewhere, or something bad is happening. I really don't understand why all the recommendations tell you to put larger fuses/breakers than the wire... For example "165A" for the 1/0 cable runs, 450A on the 4/0 runs. The problem is breakers will actually RUN for a while significantly over their rated capacity, and fuses generally will as well. I want the thing to blow if I'm over what I think I should be for any length of time.
