byteharmony
Sunny side up please.
Hi All,
Last Friday, I put my Sol-Ark 15K into production. This was a retrofit into an existing 18kw grid-tied system. For now, I exclusively AC-coupled, but will reconfigure once my garage gets to a more palatable temperature to DC-couple the Sol-Ark with ~12kw of my capacity. I also got the 15K talking via MODBUS RTU. Here are my thoughts on installation/operation and some notes on speaking MODBUS.
View attachment 105985
INSTALLATION:
As mentioned, I AC-coupled for now, but will adapt in the future to allow myself the ability to preferentially choose what system I will use for PV inversion. With the 200-amp contactor, I ran my entire household through the 15K. This is teamed up with 5x SOK SK48v100 Rack Mount LiFePO4 batteries from the guys at CurrentConnected.
COMMUNICATION:
- I mounted the Sol-Ark (all 138 lbs of her) ~6" over a 12"x12"x60" wire trough. I paper-traced the knockouts and transferred those down to punch out. I used EMT with set screw connectors. Even with ample 1-1/2" knockouts and (currently) no PV wire connected, the connection area gets tight. The ground and neutral bars need either crimped on ring connectors or lugs (what I used) to land those. This makes the right-hand side of the unit pretty congested. Sol-Ark went with a 1" knockout instead of 1-1/2" for the communications, so plan ahead if you don't have a partial stick of that laying around.
- Some issues:
- The manual (as discussed at length here on the forum) is not well done. Upon first flipping the disconnect, you're kinda left at a loss for what to expect from the unit, especially when your loads don't immediately turn on.
- The protective film on the screen is amazingly hard to remove!
- The plastic cover to keep your conductive little fingers from getting where they shouldn't be does not have a large enough cutout for the battery breakers. That means you can't secure it flush and it bows out right around those breakers. How do you miss that??
- If you use 4/0 battery cable like me, getting both through the toroids was a little difficult.
- Adding the WiFi/Ethernet dongle and setting up the app is cumbersome at best. The app asks for your address and phone number and that's a big ole nope from me, especially noting that I had to allow previously blocked connections to/from China through my firewall to get the dongle to work.
- Updating firmware for the Sol-Ark was painless, but it's a weird process. You request it from their site and a nice support engineer reviews that request and pushes that firmware to you. I checked the box for automatic updates during that process before I realized that when the firmware update is applied, the inverter restarts and cuts power to your loads!
- The fan is louder than I expected. It also comes on randomly in my hot garage even though it is not performing any meaningful DC-to-AC conversion. It doesn't come on in the morning when the garage is cooler.
- My SOK batteries are awesome. They immediately communicated with the Sol-Ark with no fuss. Straight ethernet cable and one settings change, and you're speaking CanBus. As you can see in my picture, the battery lugs are not only prominently presented, but also uncovered. An errant brush with a shovel or weedeater shaft, and some sparkies will ensue. I've 3D-printed off some battery lug covers, but still tweaking a few dimensions on those.
- Overall, it's impressive what this hunk of electronics they call the 15K can do. Failover to battery involves the slightest flicker from your lights. Anything with capacitors will not even realize the power is no longer coming from the grid. It successfully started (albeit with some strain) my 4-ton upstairs A/C while running the downstairs heatpump and the rest of the house. Impressive indeed. Grid-tying was painless, although the 5-minute countdown from my Sunny Boys will get annoying.
Let me know if you guys have any questions or want to see anything else. Appreciate all the advice I got on here before embarking on this install. I've still more things to play with, but so far I'm pretty happy with what I've done.
- The PVPro app is better than I expected, but as mentioned several times before, being so reliant on the PRC for data/apps is a big turnoff. Politics aside, I'd rather have faith that even my seemingly innocuous data is staying safe. Yes, there is only a 5-minute refresh rate, but more on that in a second.
- With a lithium battery in place, you can speak MODBUS RTU over half-duplex RS-485. Since I already had a WattNode Modbus in my main panel, I can easily daisy chain the Sol-Ark with my WattNode and let the datalogger poll both of them. The Sol-Ark supposedly cannot change its address to anything other than 1 unless in a parallel application. Using the Modbus document posted on these forums, I was able to rapidly communicate and pull data from the Sol-Ark.
- Most parameters update every second, however, totals seem to update every 5 minutes which may tie to the app update interval.
- The Sol-Ark totals differ slightly from my SMA and WattNode readings. I've verified the SMA and WattNode to being damn-near revenue grade, so I'm thinking accuracy isn't the highest with the Sol-Ark, but time will tell when I get my analytics and dashboard built.
AMAZING REVIEW! The best one I've seen (perhaps @Will Prowse will do that follow up 15k video to his first work bench one and it will be amazing, perhaps he can just do your setup . My installation is going to look very similar to yours. Batteries far right feeding Sol ark 15k left feeding new 200 AMP panel middle (Wire size for sol ark grid 100 AMP service is just the right length so I can take the grid input to the sol ark and re route it into the new panel should the sol ark fail and need a trip to the warranty center) feeding the old existing wiring 125 A split panel.
Agree 15 k manual could be better. One thing I need right now that I'm sure I could ask support for but should be on the internet is the size of the conduit going into every sol ark hole. I think it's already answered but just to confirm:
2" EMT everywhere but COM which is 1".
Also I always see people using EMT, why not use PVC? It's cheaper? Especially if we are going to run a separate ground wire anyway? Or should we skip it?
I see mixed review, 6 AWG for ground vs 8 AWG (I'll use stranded) (actually, attached 12k manual says use 8 awg) why?
Neutral size, you can see 6 AWG for 12k, no recommendation in the 15k manual?