Enphase IQ8 intentional islanding

bill von novak

Apparently the IQ8 inverters from Enphase will have the ability to intentionally island and run loads on a home with no grid power.

Anyone heard anything about this?  The only way I can see this working is with a "gateway" to the grid including an isolating breaker/relay - which would be a fairly big modification to a home system.  Especially given that the meter + load panel is a common monolithic component in many home systems.

https://runonsun.com/~runons5/blogs/blog1.php/residential-solar/what-i-saw-at-enphase-mind-blown

jonr

I agree - technically this has been doable for a long time.  But getting safety approvals might be a show stopper

Also nice would be if they produced a compatible super capacitor inverter that could provide a few seconds of startup current - so you could start and run your standard 1KW well pump with ~1KW of solar panels (but no batteries).

bill von novak

jonr said:

I agree - technically this has been doable for a long time.  But getting safety approvals might be a show stopper

Also nice would be if they produced a compatible super capacitor inverter that could provide a few seconds of startup current - so you could start and run your standard 1KW well pump with ~1KW of solar panels (but no batteries).

Enphase does have very small, very expensive AC coupled batteries (~1kwhr) - perhaps this was the application they were looking for.  (Because 1kwhr isn't really useful for anything else.)