Just at 4-years of service our solar panel inverter died. I received an email from the installing company that our solar panels stopped producing power on Dec 20, 2023. He said they could send someone out January 2, 2024 to replace the inverter under warranty replacement.
Today Ari came and spent 2 hours replacing the approximately $5,000 inverter and the remainder of the day trying to get the remote monitoring to work for us so we can see how much power we are producing. The solar panels and inverter are on the garage so it takes a somewhat powerful RF monitoring system. The new system that came with the new inverter did not seem to work, nor did the old one which worked with the bad inverter. He eventually got a system that uses the power lines to send the frequency containing the monitor information from the inverter to our computer. He did say it was a little intermittent however. The power company reads a meter which records the total power we create so we still get credit even if this monitoring system fails.
Ari says we can just check inverters the green light is on to ensure we are creating power. The failed inverter had a window and one could check how it was working at the inverter. It was a little clumsy for the owner to use however.
Our system has been flawless for 4 years so this failure came as a surprise. Maybe I should have suspected an issue as it is normal for us to pay only $7.50 a month for power for 5 of the summer months but the bill was only $7.50 in October and October was not that sunny. The system was working so well I had stopped monitoring after our last big trip. The company really was nice to work with and as far as I know we will owe them nothing. I am surprised our inverter failed. Maybe they are making them too fancy. Robust first, fancy second, I say.
