Fellow Wrenches, I would welcome some feedback on this one:
I may be "adopting" an eleven year old, Y2K, grid tie with battery back-up system. It consists of 12 - Astro-Power 120 modules, installed in 2000, 12 - Evergreen EC-110 modules installed in 2004, only one MX60, which controls BOTH sub-arrays, one SW4048 in SELL mode through a dedicated load sub-panel. Existing, seven year old battery is shot (8-Trojan L-16). Initial bank of unknown batteries was replaced after only four years. Recent long, nearby, utility outages have the client requesting a proposal to include a new back-up generator and to restore the system selling to the grid. Client may decide go straight grid tie to eliminate the batteries. They have found the maintenance to be a hassle. My thoughts so far: 1)To take advantage of most of the existing hardware, I wonder if it makes sense to try to improve the system efficiency by relegating the SW to a manual back-up mode only, where, say, by means of a timer controlling grid availability through AC1, it would only charge a smaller battery bank, once a week. The bank would be a single string of either, sealed gel units or T-105s with the new Trojan watering system. 2) Provide new grid-tie inverter/s to handle the net metering. 3) Provide a way to AC couple the new inverter/s to the SW in the event of an outage. 4) Provide a new Honda 3000 inverter type generator connected to AC2 in the SW. 5)Provide a way to lockout the grid tie inverter/s when the generator is operating. I think a few of you are still running your original SW inverters in grid tie mode. Any upgrades? Am I going off the deep end here? Dick Ratico Solarwind Electric Bradford, VT _______________________________________________ List sponsored by Home Power magazine List Address: RE-wrenches@lists.re-wrenches.org Options & settings: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/options.cgi/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org List-Archive: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/pipermail/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org List rules & etiquette: www.re-wrenches.org/etiquette.htm Check out participant bios: www.members.re-wrenches.org
