Today’s the day we become either heros or zeros.
If we can get this big expensive mess to power up and make electricity-we’re heros.
If there are issues three weeks worth of work comes to only frustration today.
And there are often issues.
First, as you can see, there are a lot of components we’ve had our hands on over the course of the last weeks, and at any stage of the installation process, we can make a mistake. We have a lot of little tricks and processes in place all designed to prevent mistakes from happening, or to catch them before they become a problem-but we are human, and this is, after all, construction, and sometimes shit just happens.
One of the processes we have in place is checking, double checking, and double checking some more all of the different systems wiring as we go. Even though this is one power system, it actually has four distinct and separate power systems within it-the solar power system at about 500 volts DC maximum, the battery power system at about 56 volts maximum, the generator power system at 120/240 AC volts, and the inverter output system at 120/240 volts AC.
We have methods of installing and checking each of these systems to insure they are connected correctly-but there always comes that nerve wracking point where you checked everything you can, and it’s time to throw the switches and hope you didn’t miss something that’s going to let the magic smoke out of a bunch of expensive components. 😬
At this point, the solar and battery systems were fully installed, checked, and a go for liftoff. And we could power up those systems and test for functionality.
But we decided we at least wanted to complete the AC wiring between the inverters and combiners first, so that was the first order of the day.
Here’s the wiring getting installed in all its messy glory.
Well, that looks terrible, and it’s hard to work on, so a little zip tie magic is in order.
It’s at this point of one of these installs that I start to like what I see. The plan is coming together, everything is starting to look nice, the parts pile is finally getting small, and the successful end of a job well done is near.
That is, if it all works.
And so it was time to quit delaying and start flipping switches.
We start with the batteries.
In this case, the batteries are kinda complicated.
First, there are 30 batteries total.
They are divided into groups of three for the high current DC wiring-every three batteries has a home run 2/0 positive and negative cable that go to the 48 volt buss bar system for a total of 10 groups of batteries.
But these batteries all have to talk to each other and to the inverters too, and for that the batteries are connected in groups of six, with each group of six batteries consisting of five slave batteries that communicate to one master battery, for a total of five communication groups.
Each master battery controls its slaves, and communicates to a data hub that manages communications between the five master batteries, and communicates to the master inverter, which itself has two slaves.
By my math, there are 34 computers in this system that all have to talk to each and get along, and if one computer isn’t happy, chances are, none of them are happy and nothing works.
What could possibly go wrong?😄😄🤷♂️
We go through the process of starting the first stack of batteries-and one by one they go through their self check like they are supposed to-and all go into alarm and shutdown mode.
Shit.
They keep self checking, but won’t come out of alarm mode.
Not a great start to getting this system to run.
Tired of six separate alarm piezos screaming in our ears, we imitate the shutdown sequence and start going over everything to see if we can figure out what’s wrong.
Denise and I dig into the manuals again which are thin on any real information and written in “Chinglish” as seems to be the norm these days.
After going over everything with a fine tooth comb, we can’t find anything wrong.
Well, shit. These are computers, after all, maybe they just wanted a power cycle?🤷♂️
So we initiated the startup sequence again and…
Success!!
All the batteries in the first stack self checked and powered up just fine.
And after that, the other four stacks powered up without incident.
Woo!!
Then we powered up the inverters, which went as expected, and programmed them to run in parallel with each other. That requires a power cycle of the inverters…and they all powered back up and running in a parallel configuration just like they should be.
Woo!!
Now it was time to do some more programming and get them set up online for remote monitoring and control.
Once we verified battery charge settings and that the batteries were indeed talking to the inverters like they were supposed to, it was time to energize the solar circuits.
Those all energized without issue and began charging the batteries.
While I worked on some other stuff, Denise-who is a certified Solark installer by the way, worked on getting the inverters connected to the internet and monitoring cloud.
Once she had that done, we could look at the system as a whole to see what it’s doing.
Here it is ingesting an impressive 40,472 watts of solar, which translates into about 697 amps of power going into and charging the batteries.
Yeah baby!
At this point, the better part of Friday was behind us, and it was time to roll it up and head home before our dogs began to think we had abandoned them.
We left most of our gear under the roof of this large pavilion and hit the road.
Next week-tying this solar power system into the camps power distribution system and making sure all that works properly.