Update 5 years later

Masterjoe · August 2023

Good afternoon all. We still have our same installer who now has broken off with his father who sold Off Grid By Design and started BushSolarEnergySolutions.com with his wife Samantha. I finally had it out with his father, and him and had a date and time we met with our regional electric guy to come to the house. Array was producing what it should and the Electric guy said the meter looked good, so again I said to Charles that it was the inverter that was not operating right. He proposed to take the 12 batteris and give me 6 more panels and a new inverter. I agreed knowing in a few years i will be replacing batteries. so from that point onward to now we are on our 4th inverter now. Every year we have issues when thunderstorms are around. This last one was a Growatt inverter which supposedly is the best on the market. well we got 8 months out of it and it went down. What pisses me off the most is since the son Chris is the only one installing it takes him 4 months to get out and repair this system. I dont know who waits that long to get anything repaired but its absurd. So what I am left with is knowing he knows nothing about what he is doing and i am continuing to pay the price for it. every monh its down im losing production and my bills are approaching $500 a month. The nice thing is he has an 80 panel system installed on his property. Isnt that nice. right now I am gathering all my info and taking him and his father to court because i am just tired of being jerked aroound. It costs $400 for him to come out and repair each time even more im losing, so don't tell me im going to have a pay off or this system is going to pay for itself cause its just a damn money pit at the moment. I am at the point i just want it gone since it isnt doing anything for me in the critical months of the year. It was down May to August last year too.

JRHill · August 2023

Masterjoe said:

This last one was a Growatt inverter which supposedly is the best on the market.

I'm not sure of the truth in the above statement. Regardless of the Growatt brand it is pretty obvious to me that there is a problem somewhere that is taking out the inverters. Even if in was due to lightning there are ways to help avoid that problem.

But overall it seems you are subject to yet another instance of a 'parts swapper' who throws replacements at a problem without diagnosing the root cause. You can find these folks in many trades. You HAVE to find someone who can get the root cause. Someone well familiar with both AC and DC systems. And that is not necessarily an electrician.

Masterjoe · August 2023

That's what he said lol. I said I ddin't care if it was the worst as long as it worked. I thin he and i=his father think im some kind of fool who is willing to keep throwing money their way. I have told them numerous times its a problem and the strike should not be coming back to the house and it is not grounded right. They don';t want to hear it. Now im going to court and have everthing. I know something is wrong who goes through 4 inverters. Apparently also a service call requires me to fill up his gas tank cause dieslel is more expensdive and he moved an hour further way from wher I live. As if thats my God damn problem. But he making it be by charging $400 to come out and tell me he has oto order freaking parts. Like duh an then schedules a time to come out only to cancel because they sent the wrong inverter and now i have to wait more. I am not freaking stupid and I am not made of money either.

BB. · August 2023

Many years ago, our (now retired) founder of this forum had said that most lightning induced off grid system failures was the AC output of the AC Inverter....

So, that goes back to questions about your installation--Specifically Surge Suppressors. The best ones (I have seen--But I am not in the business) are the ones from Midnite Solar:

https://www.midnitesolar.com/products.php?menuItem=products&productCat_ID=23 (Mfg. Site with spec sheets and test results)
https://www.solar-electric.com/lib/wind-sun/SPD-installation.pdf (installation instructions)
https://www.solar-electric.com/search/?q=mnspd (Our host's store for Surge Suppressors)

If you can remind us of of the (nearest major town) of your home--Perhaps somebody here can suggest alternative installer(s).

-Bill

PS: We can discuss grounding in detail--If you are interested... Not a simple subject. -BB

JRHill · August 2023

Years ago I had a service company for 100% on site service of equipment that were DC components - pretty simple stuff. We covered multiple brands. Our trucks had to be pre-stocked carefully so as not to create a return trip. But one employee, regardless of coaching, would pull a fresh, new part from his truck stock to see if that was the problem. If that didn't fix it, he would reason that the part was OK and it wasn't the problem and then put the old part in as 'new' stock. Then on another stop he might pull that 'not-so-new' part as a replacement and when that didn't work, it must be something he couldn't diagnose and I'd have to follow up. You have no idea how many times I insisted that he never return an experimental swap to new stock, let alone leave the new part installed and then restock the old part. Just but it back in the static bag and in a box marked 'unknown.'

I periodically checked his truck stock and it so irritated me that his new stock had marks on the spade connectors from having been previously installed or the boards were dusty and obviously not new. He was a wonderful guy but finally after almost two years I had to let him go. He was the consummate parts swapper. There was no fixing of that bad habit.

In your case you have no idea whether the father or son are installing new parts, let alone not finding the actual cause of failures. You might also be empathetic for the other the other of their customers. You see this in automotive repairs all the time by having to pay for parts/repair just to have your rig fail again with the same problem. Or the auto parts store that will NOT accept an electrical component return that has been installed. Finding a tech that is a thorough troubleshooter is extremely hard.

Lastly, I'm not sure how successful you will be in court as nobody really knows what the problem is except he can't fix the issue regardless that you keep paying him. How can you prove that the failure are his fault or an issue completely out of his control? I'd really appreciate it if you would follow up on this thread and how it comes out. Please!

Masterjoe · August 2023

JR I sure will I appreciate everyones advice and wisdom. Not sure how I would come out in court either. In this case he the son was the one who did all the electrical and installed everything and also insisted we needed no surge arrestors or lightning protection even at my request. So the problem therein lies with his lack of knowing what he is doing. Many other customers are experienceing problems or not getting follow up calls or repairs. his father is the salesman and as other complaints noted once they have that large iniotial deposit, good luck reaching them. The system wasn't even operational a full 2 weeks when we got hit the first time and it blew the 2 1000 amp fuses on the array and blew the 2 in the charge controller in the house. That inverter was definitely messed up,. But like you said I have no idea how much of the repairs or equipment aren't already previously used. it would not shock me if they were used stuff just to save money.

Dave Angelini · August 2023

I would say you need to know as much as the installer if you want to continue this.
Some people should not be doing RE if they are having this many problems. This may be you?

If you want to backwards failure analyze, please list what your surge protection is and where you live?

The XW 4024 you list was not sold new for around 13 years now.

You probably would never get to court as the installer will just go out of business. Very Common!

DanS26 · August 2023

Post how many ground rods or "things in the dirt" you have on the property and where they are located.

WaterWheel · August 2023

I live on a hilltop in a high lightning strike area so when I designed my system about 7 years ago using Conext equipment I did a lot of reading up on lightning and ground rod placement. There are several good threads on the topic on this site.

Since then while we've blown up numerous routers (the lightning comes in through the phone line) I've only once had equipment damage from lightning. Somehow a strike made some battery cells cook off and cooked the acid out of 3 cells in about 45 seconds but the inverter and controllers are still working well. It was quite a sight in the garage to see the acid spewing up in a cloud out of the battery vents. But that is the only lightning damage my solar system has had.

I have 3 Midnight Solar SPDs on the DC side of the system (2 sets of panels). One SPD on the grid feed in line and 1 SPD where the inverter feeds into the subpanel. These feed 2 separate grounding rods that are spaced about 100' apart. I've read that if you have 2 grounding rods too close together that can cause problems.
I agree with the others in that you've probably got a poor grounding problem but most people on this sight are more knowledgeable than I am on solar stuff..

DanS26 · August 2023

" These feed 2 separate grounding rods that are spaced about 100' apart. I've read that if you have 2 grounding rods too close together that can cause problems"

Well that's definitely a possibility if those two rods are not bonded together underground and serve the same structure.

Just about everyone has their lightning or high voltage event story.....here's mine......

Back a few decades I purchased a farm with house, two barns and a chicken house at the end of an REMC spur line. Prior owner did not say anything about lightning or high voltage events. Within six months I lost thousands of $ of appliances and equipment to lightning and incoming high voltage. Refrigerator, oven, microwave and much audio equipment along with blown out speakers.

I was at a loss to find out why. Then I realized what was happening.....the prior owner was also experiencing these problems but his solution was to drive multiple ground rods willy nilly all over the property. The house alone had four ground rods all independent of each other.

As we all know now, lightning is a strange beast....it does not strike the ground and go straight down...no...it creates a high voltage web of current that moves over the surface or just underneath. When it finds the first rod in this expanding high voltage circle it now finds a low impedance path to the second rod and third rod and so on. Electrical engineers call this step potential. This low impedance path was through my appliances and equipment in my house. Thank you to Mike Holt to explain this.

My solution was to remove the rods not needed and to bond underground all the others so that the high voltage events stayed out of my house.......and that was over 30 years ago.

Update 5 years later

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