Re: [RE-wrenches] Corrective EQ questions
Is the electrolyte temperature elevated above 78f? Sent via BlackBerry by ATT -Original Message- From: Allan Sindelar al...@positiveenergysolar.com Sender: re-wrenches-boun...@lists.re-wrenches.orgDate: Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:28:51 To: RE-wrenchesre-wrenches@lists.re-wrenches.org Reply-To: al...@positiveenergysolar.com, RE-wrenches re-wrenches@lists.re-wrenches.org Subject: [RE-wrenches] Corrective EQ question ___ 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 ___ 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
Re: [RE-wrenches] NABCEP
Hi Chris, et al, As I remember, at least one of our colleagues on this list signs his email with the UL solar certification. I hope I don't put him on the spot, but I would be interested in his comments on the subject. As I remember, the UL blessing requires an electrician license, (as I remember, that detail is absent from the NABCEP blessing) wouldn't that also lend just a bit of competency to the conversation, too. I note (again) the absence of any official NABCEP commentary on the subject. I thought having vendors on the list for prompt response was the major reason for their inclusion. Respectfully, Bill Loesch Solar 1 - Saint Louis Solar 314 631 1094 On 01-Jun-12 7:14 AM, Chris Mason wrote: I really appreciate the effort that NABCEP takes to ensure the certification has value. Being in the Caribbean, I find that having a NABCEP PV certification ends the conversation on competency before it begins, as no international company expects to find capable people here. Being NABCEP certified makes a hugh impression on investors and clients -- Chris Mason President, Comet Systems Ltd www.cometenergysystems.com http://www.cometenergysystems.com Cell: 264.235.5670 Skype: netconcepts ___ 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 No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.2171 / Virus Database: 2425/5038 - Release Date: 06/01/12 ___ 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
Re: [RE-wrenches] Corrective EQ question
It might matter if they are high capacity batteries, some run a stronger electrolyte to get more out of the batteries, this results in a lower cycle life. Ie: 350 cycle life v/s 400 cycles. I have seen factory cells that are fully charged at 1.315 - 1.325 To give them an EQ charge they have to finish the bulk and absorb before they will go into an eq charge normally the control box may say eq but until the conditions are met it will not actually happen. Then it can easily take 8 to 10 hours or longer to give them a full eq charge. Typically they have to drive the voltage to the top of the eq range then hold it there till the sg in the cells stop increasing. You usually can't give it 3 hours charge 1 day then 3 the next day. I am betting the voltage is not getting to the top of the eq range with such a short charge time. I doubt that 3 hours a day will not even get the battery to a full charge, much less start an equalize charge with them that low to start with, especially with loads on the battery at the same time. Just my usual .02 worth, Bob From: re-wrenches-boun...@lists.re-wrenches.org [mailto:re-wrenches-boun...@lists.re-wrenches.org] On Behalf Of Kent Osterberg Sent: Friday, June 01, 2012 11:36 PM To: al...@positiveenergysolar.com; RE-wrenches Subject: Re: [RE-wrenches] Corrective EQ question Allan, My first thought about the high s.g. measurements is that the electrolyte level may have been low when the measurements were made. When full, there is about a liter of electrolyte above the plates in a L16. The s.g. will rise by 0.03 if the electrolyte level is at the top of the plates. Kent Osterberg Blue Mountain Solar, Inc. www.bluemountainsolar.com t: 541-568-4882 On 6/1/2012 1:28 PM, Allan Sindelar wrote: Wrenches, A long-time off grid client has a 48V Outback VFX system, with 1,680 watts of PV and two strings (16 batteries total) of Deka L16s, installed last October. The array is undersized, as the system is running three households; one efficient home and two single-person tiny homes, but still too much for the system. We learned a few weeks ago that the system had apparently stayed at 30-50% SOC for the entire winter (this is approximate, as her TriMetric monitors would eventually drift away from % accuracy if never allowed to get full and reset). Eventually the batteries became sufficiently sulfated that the system began shutting down. As the batteries were nearly new, we figured that the sulfation had not yet become permanently crystallized, and they could recover. We initiated a long corrective equalization from her combined generator (45A DC from the single inverter) and MX60 controller, for a maximum C/12.5 charge rate; less in proportion to any loads that were on while charging. She ran this procedure for three hours/day for five days, and when that offered only partial recovery (as measured by specific gravity measured with a refractometer), ran for six hours/day for five days. During this time the MX60 was also manually set to EQ each morning, with a 62V EQ voltage and 3 hour EQ time, so that the array would add its amperage to the gennie until the batteries had been above this setting for three hours. We went out there yesterday, arriving while the EQ was in process. All of the cells had recovered, as measured by SG. SG readings were all in the 1.280 - 1.300 range, with most above 1.290. We had never seen SG readings this high before. Given the situation and the back story, should we have any concern about the high SG readings? Thank you, Allan -- Allan Sindelar mailto:al...@positiveenergysolar.com al...@positiveenergysolar.com NABCEP Certified Photovoltaic Installer NABCEP Certified Technical Sales Professional New Mexico EE98J Journeyman Electrician Founder and Chief Technology Officer Positive Energy, Inc. 3209 Richards Lane (note new address) Santa Fe, New Mexico 87507 505 424-1112 www.positiveenergysolar.com http://www.positiveenergysolar.com/ ___ 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 ___ 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
Re: [RE-wrenches] NABCEP
Sorry, William. You have to be the Executive Director of a non-profit or similar to get a month vacation. If you¹re a NABCEP Certified Installer, it is catch as catch can. (I can attest to that.) However, there probably aren¹t a lot of out of work NABCEP Certified Installers. In all seriousness, one thing that gets lost in some of these discussions is that the relative value of ANY certification varies depending upon where one is in the food chain, so to speak. I¹ve worked in distribution, in design and integration, and now in technical publishing. As an employee, I¹ve found NABCEP certification super valuable. It has distinguished my resume from others. It sets a floor for my value in terms of compensation. In fact, when I worked for an installation firm, we had automatic pay raises for NABCEP Certification. If you¹re an owner of an installation firm, I think it¹s a very different scenario. Your past work is the best part of your resume. It¹s a lot easier to sell your company to future customers based on your long list of past happy customers than it is to explain to them what in the world NABCEP stands for and why they should care. I think it can be a selling point, but if your not an employee the value in NABCEP is definitely more symbolic and intangible. We all see a lot of mistakes that get made in our line of work. NABCEP represents the industry¹s own desire to set and strive for a higher standard. It¹s not the boogey man. It¹s not ³The Man.² It¹s your well intentioned colleagues. That¹s my experience and my 2 cents, David Brearley, Senior Technical Editor SolarPro magazine NABCEP Certified PV Installer On 6/2/12 9:34 AM, William Miller will...@millersolar.com wrote: Colleagues: I have been debating in my own mind the merits and demerits of applying for NABCEP. I see below the conclusive evidence that I should become certified. If NAPCEP installers get to take month long vacations, I'm all in. William Miller At 07:17 AM 6/2/2012, you wrote: The only person who would officially respond to Wrenches posts about NABCEP would be Ezra Auerbach, the Executive Director. That's part of his job, to be the public face for the organization. I have forwarded a few of these posts to him, and have gotten back a robo-response that he and his wife are away on vacation and will respond to emails upon return, I think around the end of June. ___ 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
Re: [RE-wrenches] NABCEP
I'm in the process of NABCEP re-certification and I have two complaints about their process: 1. In the last year, NABCEP added a requirement for 3 customer surveys as documentation of projects completed. This was released just after I had left a job doing installations to do consulting overseas over the winter. I had all the permitting documentation, but having just returned to the US this spring, now I have to go back and try to get surveys filled out from projects that were done sometime ago. It has, for various reasons, has been a real hassle. I appreciate that NABCEP wants some customer feedback on NABCEP installers, and it would have been no problem to do this had it been an expectation from the beginning. However I feel that they changed the rules of the game midway through, and that's not fair. The moment you get certified, the re-certification process should be fixed until the next round. 2. There are three categories of continuing education credits. There has been no indication from the course-offerers or from NABCEP about how these courses fulfill the categories. I mostly took classes from inverter manufacturers that specifically list the number of NABCEP credits the class is worth -- so there clearly was some kind specific NABCEP accreditation involved. The onus shouldn't be on me to guess which requirements class X fulfills, especially when NABCEP has been involved in determining the number of credits it is worth (as opposed to, say, taking an OSHA course that is outside the PV industry), and when I've paid for these classes partly towards maintaining my NABCEP certification. If NABCEP is going to have specific guidelines about such things, following the guidelines shouldn't be such a guessing game. Jeffrey Quackenbush. From: Andrew Truitt atru...@gmail.com To: RE-wrenches re-wrenches@lists.re-wrenches.org Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2012 6:15 PM Subject: Re: [RE-wrenches] NABCEP Wrenches - I'd like to address some of the aforementioned concerns about NABCEP. I do not claim to present the official NABCEP company line, but I have been a certificant since 2007, have been involved with a few programmatic committees, and currently sit on the board of directors. * I certainly sympathize with Dana's frustration with having to drive a full day to get to a testing center. There are many others in a similar situation and it is one of the complaints about NABCEP that I hear most often (along with exam frequency). Unfortunately NABCEP is still a very small certification body relative to trade licensing and, as a voluntary certification, we just don't have the resources that states do. * Allan is correct about the processes the Exam Committees have to undergo in order to follow defensible psychometric principles and maintain NABCEP's ANSI accreditation. * What additional resources would people like to use at the exam? I would be happy to take suggestions to the Board. * I think most certificants would agree that there would be a value in multiple, specialized NABCEP PV certifications. If fact there has been numerous internal discussions about exactly that and I think the next certification that NABCEP develops will fall into this category. However, certification development takes time and money, and some of the programs that NABCEP has developed have not received the interest that was anticipated, so we need to perform our due diligence before committing the sizable resources that it takes to create a new certification. As the PV Installer certification stands now, it is intended to test a broad variety of knowledge, largely because historically companies were smaller and employees were more likely to be generalists. The industry has obviously grown very rapidly with one result being increased specialization and NABCEP does intend to keep up with this trend. With all that in mind NABCEP welcomes targeted donations for developing new credentials. * Certification certainly is a business, though I think that its worth noting that NABCEP was created by installers who were concerned with the workmanship of RE system installations and didn't want to see a repeat of what happened to the solar water heating industry in the '70s. Since its inception NABCEP has been a volunteer-driven non-profit entity, guided by some of the most knowledgeable and dedicated people in the industry (many of whom are on this list-serve). * We are well aware of the fact that NABCEP certs often get promoted off the roof and find themselves in design, sales or managerial rolls. Obviously this reflects well on NABCEP certificants, but it is a problem for a program that requires ongoing field work for re-certification. This is yet another challenge that we hope to address with future, more specialized certifications. Note that it takes somewhere between 12 and 18 months to
Re: [RE-wrenches] NABCEP
Jeff, these are legitimate complaints, well and clearly stated. I have forwarded them on to Ezra and others at NABCEP. (I'll forward others too.) Allan Allan Sindelar al...@positiveenergysolar.com NABCEP Certified Photovoltaic Installer NABCEP Certified Technical Sales Professional New Mexico EE98J Journeyman Electrician Founder and Chief Technology Officer Positive Energy, Inc. 3209 Richards Lane (note new address) Santa Fe, New Mexico 87507 505 424-1112 www.positiveenergysolar.com On 6/2/2012 4:48 PM, JRQ wrote: I'm in the process of NABCEP re-certification and I have two complaints about their process: 1. In the last year, NABCEP added a requirement for 3 customer surveys as documentation of projects completed. This was released just after I had left a job doing installations to do consulting overseas over the winter. I had all the permitting documentation, but having just returned to the US this spring, now I have to go back and try to get surveys filled out from projects that were done sometime ago. It has, for various reasons, has been a real hassle. I appreciate that NABCEP wants some customer feedback on NABCEP installers, and it would have been no problem to do this had it been an expectation from the beginning. However I feel that they changed the rules of the game midway through, and that's not fair. The moment you get certified, the re-certification process should be fixed until the next round. 2. There are three categories of continuing education credits. There has been no indication from the course-offerers or from NABCEP about how these courses fulfill the categories. I mostly took classes from inverter manufacturers that specifically list the number of NABCEP credits the class is worth -- so there clearly was some kind specific NABCEP accreditation involved. The onus shouldn't be on me to guess which requirements class X fulfills, especially when NABCEP has been involved in determining the number of credits it is worth (as opposed to, say, taking an OSHA course that is outside the PV industry), and when I've paid for these classes partly towards maintaining my NABCEP certification. If NABCEP is going to have specific guidelines about such things, following the guidelines shouldn't be such a guessing game. Jeffrey Quackenbush. From: Andrew Truitt atru...@gmail.com To: RE-wrenches re-wrenches@lists.re-wrenches.org Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2012 6:15 PM Subject: Re: [RE-wrenches] NABCEP Wrenches - I'd like to address some of the aforementioned concerns about NABCEP. I do not claim to present the official NABCEP "company line", but I have been a certificant since 2007, have been involved with a fewprogrammaticcommittees, and currently sit on the board of directors. I certainly sympathize with Dana's frustration with having to drive a full day to get to a testing center. There are many others in a similar situation and it is one of the complaints about NABCEP that I hear most often (along with exam frequency). Unfortunately NABCEP is still a very small certification body relative to trade licensing and, as a voluntary certification, we just don't have the resources that states do. Allan is correct about the processes the ExamCommitteeshave to undergo in order to follow defensiblepsychometricprinciples and maintain NABCEP's ANSI accreditation. What additional resources would people like to use at the exam? I would be happy to take suggestions to the Board. I think mostcertificantswould agree that there would be a value in multiple, specialized NABCEP PV
