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Greetings all!
We had a localized power outage in my rural neighborhood a couple days ago; A junction near us was invaded by a squirrel and a fuse got shorted out. The power went out, but our solar batteries kicked right in as intended. Hooray! Minutes later, the power went out again for a few seconds, then came back on, so I figured that was just a little transition from batteries back to grid. A few minutes later, it went off again, and then "sort of" came back on again. But this time we were in 'brown-out' mode -- power from the grid was feeble. PG&E (I live in California, USA) came out after a few hours and fixed their part of the problem so our grid power supply was back to normal.
However, about the time of the 'brown-out' phase, our solar panel/battery system went down. I am guessing the "on...now off...now sort-of on" circumstances triggered our less-than-robust solar system to shut down. We contacted our installer yesterday, but, given our sad history with this company (don't ask!), I assume we won't get any response for at least a week and when that day comes, they will say "Gee, we are backed up, but we might be able to get to your house in about 2 months." Seriously, they are that bad; I have had to complain about them to a state consumer protection agency in the past to get any action from them.
So we want to try to reboot the system ourselves. The original installer of the batteries and inverter gave us some instructions for rebooting the system which we followed to the letter and which did not get rid of the red "system failure" light. But, yes, as been hinted at in the previous paragraph, it is possible that our installer had absolutely no idea what the heck he was talking about.
I am including a picture of our Solaredge set-up. Here is what we did:
(1) Moved the toggle switch "A" to the right, off position, indicated by an "O"
(2) Removed the hex screws on the unit at left, and shut off the blue breaker within ("B")
(3) Turned off the big "C" switch to off, and waited two minutes
(4) Turned blue breaker back on
(5) Put toggle switch back to the middle position, indicated by an "I"
(6) Turned the big "C" switch back to on
When that didn't work, we checked out an online video that seemed to match our system, and repeated our attempt with two changes (based on what we saw in the video):
We reversed steps 5 and 6 above, and instead of just moving the "C" switch from off to on, we held the toggle swith in the far left position indicated by a "P" for a couple seconds before releasing it back to the middle "on" position.
Still no luck; red system failure light persists.
Can someone give us some guidance as to what we did wrong and what we can do to succesfully reboot the system? Whole-house electrics are not my strong suit, so feel free to dumb this down and explain it to us to us in terms a 12-year old could understand; I won't be offended!
Thanks SO MUCH for any suggestions!
Otherchuck
solaredge reboot2.jpg
We had a localized power outage in my rural neighborhood a couple days ago; A junction near us was invaded by a squirrel and a fuse got shorted out. The power went out, but our solar batteries kicked right in as intended. Hooray! Minutes later, the power went out again for a few seconds, then came back on, so I figured that was just a little transition from batteries back to grid. A few minutes later, it went off again, and then "sort of" came back on again. But this time we were in 'brown-out' mode -- power from the grid was feeble. PG&E (I live in California, USA) came out after a few hours and fixed their part of the problem so our grid power supply was back to normal.
However, about the time of the 'brown-out' phase, our solar panel/battery system went down. I am guessing the "on...now off...now sort-of on" circumstances triggered our less-than-robust solar system to shut down. We contacted our installer yesterday, but, given our sad history with this company (don't ask!), I assume we won't get any response for at least a week and when that day comes, they will say "Gee, we are backed up, but we might be able to get to your house in about 2 months." Seriously, they are that bad; I have had to complain about them to a state consumer protection agency in the past to get any action from them.
So we want to try to reboot the system ourselves. The original installer of the batteries and inverter gave us some instructions for rebooting the system which we followed to the letter and which did not get rid of the red "system failure" light. But, yes, as been hinted at in the previous paragraph, it is possible that our installer had absolutely no idea what the heck he was talking about.
I am including a picture of our Solaredge set-up. Here is what we did:
(1) Moved the toggle switch "A" to the right, off position, indicated by an "O"
(2) Removed the hex screws on the unit at left, and shut off the blue breaker within ("B")
(3) Turned off the big "C" switch to off, and waited two minutes
(4) Turned blue breaker back on
(5) Put toggle switch back to the middle position, indicated by an "I"
(6) Turned the big "C" switch back to on
When that didn't work, we checked out an online video that seemed to match our system, and repeated our attempt with two changes (based on what we saw in the video):
We reversed steps 5 and 6 above, and instead of just moving the "C" switch from off to on, we held the toggle swith in the far left position indicated by a "P" for a couple seconds before releasing it back to the middle "on" position.
Still no luck; red system failure light persists.
Can someone give us some guidance as to what we did wrong and what we can do to succesfully reboot the system? Whole-house electrics are not my strong suit, so feel free to dumb this down and explain it to us to us in terms a 12-year old could understand; I won't be offended!
Thanks SO MUCH for any suggestions!
Otherchuck
solaredge reboot2.jpg
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