Thoughts on purchasing a 200 KWH system

[chcrest]

Our farm is looking to install a 200 KWH system and we're coming down to the wire. We need to make a decision this week as funding is limited for the grants we are looking at.

We have narrowed it down to 2 systems and would hugely appreciate anyone's thoughts on this project.

Sharp 225 modules with SMA inverters & a Sunny webbox.

OR

ET 210 modules with Fronius inverters with Fronius 1G web interface.

As a bit of background, we've talked with several different installers and narrowed it down to one of these to systems for our farm. The systems will be installed on the rooves of 2 of our barns. Our farm's current usage is 260KWH, which is why we are going with such a large system.

We'd really like thoughts on any successes or problems anyone has encountered with any of these components. Thank you!

[Mike90250]

Commercial Grade PV is solid. But, Sharp had a line recently come out, that was made from extra thin wafers, durability has not been proven with them yet. You should have a nearly un-conditional 25 year warranty. (except for giant hail, golf ball size hail , it's supposed to take 1 at a time.)

Look at the monitoring options. Discard the one that requires you pay the inverter vendor to host your data.

Discard the internal fan cooled inverter. (for this scale, you will likely have racks with an external blower)

Do you have 1 phase service, or 3 phase service?

Do you have a "Preliminary Letter Of Agreement" with your power company, to allow a large system in the area ?

Which vendor will be responsive in 2 years, when you WILL have a couple module failures?

If the landscape is flat, does this include a Lighting Protection System, with real Franklin Rods (not ES terminals) on the 2 buildings?

[chcrest]

Thanks for your thoughts. We will have a single phase system. And as for the power company, they have been talked to, but I don't know that we have anything official from them yet.

[greenHouse]

Go with the SMA.

And apropos the "discard the ones that charge for hosting your data", I beg to differ -- it costs money to run web servers. You can pay now, or pay later, but sooner or later, you pay.

[chcrest]

Thanks for your thoughts!

[Mike90250]

And apropos the "discard the ones that charge for hosting your data", I beg to differ -- it costs money to run web servers. You can pay now, or pay later, but sooner or later, you pay.

I disagree. Vendors with proprietary data formats (enphase comes to mind) that only allow you to get data, after you pay them, should be punished by lack of customers. Same with car dealers that charge you $100 to plug a $80 scan tool into the data jack under the steering wheel.

Nearly everyone with solar (except off gridders) will have an Internet account with an ISP. Nearly everyone of those, comes with some webhosting. I have a couple ad banners on my domain web page, via GoDaddy, the banners pay the hosting fee, which for 50MB, might be 1$ month. Hosting is really cheap, having to pay the inverter vendor to see your own data (unless you are leasing the inverter) is scum marketing.

Some vendors (Xantrex, Morningstar) have a data port you can access freely. Then Solar Guppy comes along, and releases some nifty freeware, and it even FTP's your data to a web page. ( You still have to make your own webpage )
I like Johns example: http://solar.johnjan.com/screen/index.htm

Riverland Farm used to have a nice monitor page, but it got neglected when their site was updated http://www.riverlandfarm.com/solar and others

http://isisbio.com/dd/solar.html

There is also a live solar network, for the more ambitious, to allow a lot of folks with arrays, to monitor, and log data, freely http://livesolar.net/sumpage.htm

[greenHouse]

If what you want is a free application that isn't going to provide all the information you might need (and often provides very little actual functionality besides providing numbers) -- sure. Go with those applications and free products and free web hosting.

But I don't see how someone who is going to spend a fairly large amount of money on a commercial scale system is going to benefit from an application that can only tell them what the system DID and not what it SHOULD do.

The other problem with hobbyist software is that it is often tied to the particular hobbyist's system or vendor. Without a revenue stream to pay for hardware needed to support multiple vendor's systems, you wind up with ABC freeware monitoring one system and XYZ freeware monitoring another, and they don't talk to each other.

So ... with hobbyist software you get what you pay for.

[chcrest]

Well, we decided to go with the ET panels & the Fronius inverters. Thanks to everyone for their thoughts. We'll start instillation of some panels in March & a second set in July. I'm sure we'll have questions along the way.

[Robert Creamer]

What were the criteria you used to choose the company you're working with? Insight on the company?