Grid-tie Inverter Analysis

[doctorfuse007]

Always connect POSITIVE (+) first!

[stavrosfilip]

Hey, great job!!! I have a question for you. I have 4 DIY solar panels 120W, 20V each and I am using a 1200W 14-28V grid tie inverter. With a Kill-a-Watt meter I can measure 280W on the AC side but 10 minutes later it drops to 100W. If I disconnect the DC source for 1 sec and connect it back, I get 280W for some minutes and then it drops again. Can you tell me why is that happening . Thanks.

[hotsexybrownguy]

Hey, I commented on your video a little earlier. We have a smart meter hooked up to our house. Will this concept still work with a smart meter? Lots of people say it wont. I think I know how to test it. If someone out there has tried the grid tie inverter with a digital energy meter, which measures the instantaneous Kwh usage of the entire house (not kill a watt meter), it should show a net decrease in power consumption. I am looking for people who have tried this. Do you know?

[5j5estes]

How to improve GTI & PV PNL system. Home made pnl (72 3x6 cells Voc=36VDC; Vload=24vdc). PNL designed for 24vdc system .Industry suggest 150% volts cell design 36vdc. For 24vdc system. Pmax for PNL is @ 24vdc. Why will GTI shutdown causing voltage to go to 36v; not reverse process.Placing a 2sec short on PNL causes GTI to start work.

[tgsnuwan]

how to find a greedy meter before i buy grid tie inverter?

some one help me plz

[tgsnuwan]

how to find a greedy meter before i buy grid tie inverter?

[hotsexybrownguy]

Hey, I had a quick question about grid tie.

I have a 180 watt 36 V panel and a 85 watt 18 volt panel

A 300 watt grid tie can only handle 14 - 28 VOLTS

A 500 watt grid tie can handle 22 - 60 volts

How the heck would I try to grid tie both panels with just one grid tie inverter, since the voltages do not match up?

[dasar123]

If I have a 1000W grid tie inverter , can I plug into it my 300W solar panel ?

[hotsexybrownguy]

Hey, I just had a quick question about grid tie. I have a 200 watt solar system in my back yard. If i were to get a grid tie inverter and plug it back into the grid, this would never ever turn back the main electricity meter. Will I be pumping electricity to the grid if my main meter never actually turns back?

[embeddedprogrammer]

@hotsexybrownguy Good question. You will still be pumping energy into the grid within your home and thus decreasing your energy bill. The appliances in your own home would draw less current from the electric company.

[digitalfuk]

@hotsexybrownguy NOP, YOU HAVE TO HAVE A NET METERING METER INSTALLED BY THE POWER COMPANY THAT WILL RUN FORWARDS AND BACKWARDS.

[justdfactsmaam]

The inverter that you blew up probably had the female plug for the plug-in to accept the male portion of the "load" plug. I noticed the inverter you are using now has the male end of the plug-in to accept the female end of the "load" plug. Maybe that's a good indicator as to which is a proper and non-proper one to use? Keep up the good work.

[pvampire]

I own a very nice 500W grid tie inverter that I was going to use for my solar panels. I would like to use it with my wind generator. Can I hook a grid tie inverter directly to the wind generator? The wind generator puts out anywhere from 9-36 volts depending on the wind. Would that work?

[embeddedprogrammer]

@pvampire That may fry your grid tie inverter. Use a marine battery as a regulator if the grid tie inverter is like many and can't take more than 24Volts.

[cliffgaurd]

@pvampire you would need to connect your wind generator to a charge controller then to your inverter. Or find a grid tie inverter that is designed for use with a wind generator.

[eddyogi]

One question, if I have this plug in grid tie inverter plugged in and I am not using any power at all, will it make my grid electricity meter run backwards?

[embeddedprogrammer]

@eddyogi Only if you have the right kind of meter.  Many electric companies have put in "greedy" meters.

[solarpanels3]

@eddyogi Yes it will (my smart meter did)

[solarpanels3]

connect amp meter and volt meter to your solar panels.

Use ac amps on the output x 115= WATTS

[juanjomf97]

Hi, I will add my converter turbine 12 to 220 v.

The battery consumption of the converter without any spending is 0.4 amp.

And if the charger goes from 14 v. automatically turns off the drive, I think I will have to put a voltage regulator.

[kimmer6]

Very informative. Thank you. I'm impressed! A TWO FLUKE household... This auto synchronization thing is really cool. I have seen the results of a 6 megawatt turbine generator that came out of synchronization due to instrumentation problems then slammed back onto the grid. It came out of the foundation ripping 1.5 inch bolts out before crashing into the lunch room OVER the control room before falling back into the foundation. How many yahoos tried to back feed the grid with the wrong inverter?

[ubeatme]

I bought one of these and it stopped working after my batteries died out, and is not working at all now,,any suggestions?

[jasonhdvideoman]

how much money can you save ever moth

[watcherjohnny]

Great demo!!  Thank for posting!!

[jonathans1212]

Hey I have a 12v battery and based on what I've heard 6v golf cart batteries are the way to go I only have about 100 watts of solar but can I have 2 golf cart batteries 12v and 1 12v battery until the 12v dies then have only 6v batteries

[happygameshow]

So do these things actually work? Are they safe and just that easy to use? Will my meter slow down?

[H2O2FromH20]

This is the best Demonstration of a Grid Tie Inverted I have see. You have covered so much importent Inforamtion, and showed it with a Volt meter and A Kill-A-Watt. Well Done!

[solarwindaus]

I notice you connected this inverter to battery power !. after watching this video some time ago I bought 2x pswgt-300 inverters from china and had them connected form my 24v battery bank to a dump load controller at 24 volts, Output at 220 volts , THEY FRIED IN NO TIME !!. I have since found out that they should not be connected to batteries under any circumstances. They are meant for solar panels only and cannot take the high amp output from batteries. BE WARNED !!

[pdgelling]

@solarwindaus I am sorry you've had such unfortunate results. What your report says to me is that the particular GTIs you purchased couldn't withstand generating their rated power continuously. Either that or there's something about how you wired up your system that lead to their early demise. It seems to me that such a device can't take more amps than it can use, but it could overheat doing it, particularly if the design was lacking.

[metrowash]

Great info- thanks so much!

[irisauser]

Thanks for this video mate. It helped quite a bit. WOW, only 75%, I didn't expect it to be very efficient... but wow. so if you have 4 of these and 1000 watts worth of generated energy, You're only going to see 750 watts. Is this amount of inefficiency any surprise to you or is this a the norm of inverters?

[embeddedprogrammer]

@irisauser It was a bit of suprise but marketing uses the words "up to 95%" efficiency because the device is probably more efficient at lower wattages when the torroids don't heat up as much.

[Shakespeare1612]

But one of the cool things about generating your own electricity would be if you could be the only one on your block who had working lights, during a black out. Could you make a secondary system that could engage a few lights, and an emergency radio in case the grid power were to go bye bye?

[embeddedprogrammer]

@Shakespeare1612 Yes, that can be done and we may be covering it in a future video. You need to charge batteries and have two inverters which are switchable, a grid tied inverter and a regular inverter. When you lose power you need to switch out the grid tied inverter, then turn off your Main Breaker (for the safety of line repairmen), and then turn on your grid tie inverter for the circuit(s) you wish to power.

[embeddedprogrammer]

@Shakespeare1612 Yes, but you would need another regular inverter on a switch (switch out the grid-tie, switch in the regular inverter). The good news is that the regular inverters are very inexpensive now.

[WulfBand]

Thank you for explaining the difference.

I don't know why they don't make these Grid Tie Inverters with higher wattage ?

Maybe it so you will simply have to purchase more.

It would be nice to have one that would develop 2,000 to 10,000 watts or higher.

[embeddedprogrammer]

@WulfBand Anything in the higher wattage range should probably be connected to a 220v circuit instead of a 110v because it will probably exceed the wattage of the circuit breaker in some homes (although some space heaters exceed 13,000 Watts). You want to make sure you don't heat up your wires and cause a fire so I am going to test anything before I recommend it. These things are growing in size and I will be testing a 1000 Watt 110 V plug in inverter this week.

[WulfBand]

@embeddedprogrammer Interesting, I was looking on ebay and I saw them going all the way up to 6,000 Watts BUT it was really expensive, like $650.

Please let me know if how it goes with the 1000 Watt unit and thanks for the response.

[shyguykm]

enphase is a better an safer way to go and it UL 1743 rated

[embeddedprogrammer]

On the contrary, the Enphase M190-72-208-S11/2/3 has a minimum starting voltage of 28V making it unsuitable for micro wind applications which are well suited to this inverter.

[joskemom]

I like the demo. When I first heard of this device, I trashed it. Your demo shows that, when used properly, has a lot of potential. The Fluke was nice, but a Simpson 360 in your inventory adds some 'classics ' to your lab.

[OBXSOLWIND]

Nice multimeters I have been a Fluke fan forever. I have an 88 and a 98 and about every accecory you can plug in to them. great video I have learned alot about these tricky little inverters watching my aray volt meeters when the sun is setting is wild they will pull the volts down and then let go over and over thats why these things do not work with wind turbines there not fast enough. Thats why sunny boy came out with the windy boy GTI. Great vid keep them coming. CEERS WINDY NC

[pdgelling]

@OBXSOLWIND Thanks. I love my 3 Flukes 87s! The name is kind of ironic, but the meters are great. More recently, I have become enamored with some of the Extech meters, but they are very Fluke-like.

[embeddedprogrammer]

@OBXSOLWIND The Windy Boy (actually a sunny boy with different parameters) is a great unit but is very expensive. The unit above will work with wind turbines which are matched well to the device as I will be showing in a future video.

[tegf4]

@ 5:55 your batteries are pushing 12.29 amps and 24.07 volts =295.7024 watts in to the inverter and your power plug bars it telling the inverter is putting out 227 watts?

Did I read that right?

If so is that a lose of 68.7024 watts?

I am confused of what you showing.

[OBXSOLWIND]

I can answer that. When converting ac to dc there is a factor of 11 thats why you can plug a battery charger into a 15 amp recepticle and charge batterys at such a high amperage its just in reverse. Check out my videos. CHEERS WINDY NC

[pdgelling]

@tegf4 There's this pesky thing called the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics that boiled down basically says that there's no such thing as a free lunch. There's always SOME inefficiency in any system. This particular device seems to have an efficiency of about 77%. Higher, would, of course, be better. I don't know that this unit is any better or worse than similar units at this point. I would have hoped for closer to 90%, based on DC-to-DC converters I am more familiar with.

[pdgelling]

@tegf4 If you are dismayed my this inefficiency, consider that ordinary incandescent bulbs are something like 80% INEFFICIENT. Putting it another way, an ordinary 100 Watt bulb only produces about 20 Watts of visible light. Some are better some are worse. Some bulbs claim to be more efficient, boasting the light of, say, a 60 Watt light for 55 Watts of energy.

[tegf4]

I am Just learning, I did not realize that much power got leaked threw the pipe. This is good to know when building a system.

Yes you can get your free lunch but you can not eat it.

[mccunecp]

those are cool to have but usless if you cant keep producing power after the pwoer goes out. I like to find large ones that will do the same thing but if I lose powe4r otu side and I have enought power to splemet the power los to power my house I like for th epower to stay one.

[embeddedprogrammer]

@mccunecp That would be illegal unless you have a protection device to prevent power from leaking out into the grid. You want to avoid killing the electric linesman who may be working on the power cables after a system wide outage at all costs. If you can isolate the lines leading out of your house to the grid, then what you are asking for is doable, and can be done with an ordinary, non grid tied, inverter.

[mccunecp]

O I know you dont want to feed the gride if the power goes out on the power companys end but I wonder if there is a gride tie inverter that will disconct the out side line if that part of the power goes out but yet power the home. like a girid tie inverter that shut s down when it dose not dect the power commiing in. instead of it shutting down put have a breaker set up to were it will disconnect the main untile the main has live power again and when it dose it will turn the breaker back on.

[mccunecp]

part 2 of replay, I like building stuff and I want to provide my own power and beable to sell it back to the power company when I produce excess I know they have stuff like that because you I know buy law have to beable to disconct the main if there is a main power failer. and I also want a larger inverter. I guess they have stuff that can be used to turn a main breaker off or on need be. but is all call one day we will all produce our own power and tell the pwoer bill by by lol

[keithmobile73]

i see someone made the comment already but always connect positive first to avoid spark, if there were fumes around boom

[embeddedprogrammer]

@keithmobile73 After receiving the first comment we ran a test to verify if this was indeed true...We tried doing positive first and it still sparked.

[pdgelling]

First of all, sparks can happen regardless of the order of completing the circuit. The idea behind this "positive first" gem was to reduce the possibility of a hydrogen gas explosion by making the final connection away from the battery to the frame of the car. Second, the hydrogen (and oxygen) gas comes from electrolysis of the water in the battery when charging the battery at a high rate and/or voltage, like when jumping your car battery.

[pdgelling]

I am always in favor of proper safety precautions. That is unless laziness doesn't overwhelm my sense of impending doom. Perhaps we should have included some "don't try this at home" disclaimer. Certainly a switch would have been better, although less dramatic (moving the spark to the inside of the switch). The risk of "boom" under this particular set of circumstances was nil to nonexistent. Good thing. My protective Lexan bubble was in the shop.

[whiterican74]

quick question what is the difference  between the an inverter and a grid tie inverter... Is it a matter of synchronization technology.

I own a 1500w inverter and would rather know the difference than screw things up.

[embeddedprogrammer]

@whiterican74 Don't plug that into your wall or you will blow it up!!!!! We tried it and fried it already. If it doesn't say Grid-Tie, it will die.

[IslandEnergySystems]

What is the point of this? The electricity you are delivering to the grid is just the discharge of the battery. How do you re-charge the batteries?

A battery is not a SOURCE of energy, just storage. If you have PV panels please do not try to connect them to the grid with one of these!

Use PV panels to charge the batteries and the 'normal' small 12V inverter to run your lightbulbs (but get some CFLs).

[embeddedprogrammer]

@IslandEnergySystems The point of this is to review this inverter and to analyze the efficiency of the device. We now have this hooked up to a wind turbine. The UPS batteries were used simply to provide a known electrical voltage for benchmarking the device. This inverter is important because it allows reduction of your electrical bill for very little money when coupled with PV or Wind. PV to battery is another option, but 12V LED is the best lighting option.

[pdgelling]

Thank you for the advice. I am sorry that it wasn't obvious to you that testing the grid-tie inverter using a handy, compact, and controllable current source that fit on the table isn't the same thing as advocating charged batteries as a form of alternative energy (which we do not).

I am interested in the rationale behind your prohibition of using PV panels with a grid-tie inverter and your ardent affection for mercury-containing CFLs.

[centralscrutinizer76]

great video ,it was very helpful .I`m planning a solar project

[MrLagros]

Excellent video... thanks for the info! Please keep up the good work!

[vanfarowe]

my panels are rated at 28.04 without a load. Would I have problems?

[pdgelling]

The important thing is the voltage under load. For example, when it's attached to the grid tie inverter. Otherwise, it's sort of an open-ended question.

[KR1IS]

Smart grid is coming and they might not like these inverters hooked up to the grid but isee allot of them selling like hot cakes!

[richallenmusic]

very good video i just got the grid inverter

[slacker361]

Hey bud I don't have plans I just used videos on here, Although I wouldn't use the soda cans, as they have a lining in them that shouldn't exceed 120 F, as they will start to off gases. Also make it so you can access the inside a mistake that i made, as i have stuff growing in the tubes and now i cant use it.

[slacker361]

do you have the company name so i can look it it is UL approved?

[embeddedprogrammer]

If you click more info on this video there is a link to the seller. But I am pretty sure it is not approved at this point by the complete lack of markings on the unit.  Hey, can you send me the plans for your solar heater?

[slacker361]

are they UL approved?

[embeddedprogrammer]

I believe they are CE approved only.

[dolinick]

Thank You for this video! I am thinking about using solar panels for my cabin. My 55 gallon drum vawt needs some work or a different motor/generator. It has produced some power but not enough to keep my battery bank fully charged. I will post as soon as I make any uprades/changes.

[embeddedprogrammer]

dolnick, good to hear from you again and good luck with the modifications.

[bidwell187]

When connecting D.C. power connect the positive first and the negative last to avoid sparks. You sound like Tom Selleck

[embeddedprogrammer]

Thanks.

[pdgelling]

@bidwell187

Thanks for the Tom Selleck comment! I only wish I looked more like Tom Selleck, and so does my wife.

[pdgelling]

@bidwell187

At the risk of creating more sparks, I drew the sparks on purpose for dramatic effect. It could explain why one of my favorite sites is sparkfun. Your advice, though, sounds as if it came from the procedure advised for hooking up jumper cables on a car in order to avoid a hydrogen gas explosion. I was quite sure it made no difference which way the circuit was completed, but I tried it anyway. I got sparks no matter which order the leads were attached. Spark fun was had by all.

[pdgelling]

A mains disconnect is always a safe idea!

[breezebro]

Great demonstration!

Is 76% efficiency about what you

expected? Quite a loss but I guess it's about all you can ask for.

The fault when no AC is detected is great because I understand some city codes require it so some unsuspecting power company repairman wouldn't get a big surprise.

[embeddedprogrammer]

Breezebro, Thanks. The product is advertised at "92% Peak Efficiency", but I'm not sure how to get that level of efficiency. Right, the auto shutdown feature is called Anti-Islanding, which is there to protect the lives of the electrical repairmen. The nice thing about these little units is that they are stackable; you can plug a number of them in at once and get over a kilowatt of power from several micro wind turbines and/or solar panels.

[tbnlc]

@embeddedprogrammer

where did you get these power inverter and kilo watt power strip

thanks

[embeddedprogrammer]

Just click on more info to the right of this video and you will see links for both of those