▲ 2 r/solarenergy
Enphase system keeps losing power — new breaker, no fault found across multiple inspections, still recurring within a day of the last fix. What am I missing?
Hoping to crowdsource some ideas because I feel like I'm stuck in a "replace a part and hope" loop with my installer.
System: Enphase microinverters, came with the house. Owned the house ~2 years, first year was totally issue-free.
Timeline:
- December: First trip. Diagnosed as a loose cable / water getting into the wiring during the rainy season. Fixed.
- Ran fine for about 6 months after that.
- A few weeks ago: Main panel breaker started tripping again, cutting power to the system. Supplier sent someone out who replaced the breaker. All cabling checked and called "fine."
- A few days later: Tripped again.
- Last Friday: A different engineer came out and did three things: (1) found Permission to Operate (PTO) was somehow switched off and turned it back on, (2) found my Enlighten app access had been revoked on their end and restored it, (3) pushed a software update.
- Less than 24 hours later: System's down again — no power at all reaching the Enphase combiner panel.
What's already been checked, with nothing found:
- My builder confirmed the solar wiring is on its own dedicated circuit, separate from the rest of the house.
- The builder's own electrician has separately inspected the wiring — including a full check of the house wiring, not just solar — and found no fault.
- There's also been a recurring burnt-wire smell in the first-floor bathroom, on two separate occasions. Each time, the builder's electrician came out, checked the house wiring, and found nothing.
- A solar tech visit in August inspected the solar wiring specifically and also found nothing related.
- The engineer from the original December visit suspected pigeons on the roof may have disturbed some wiring; the most recent engineer did a visual check and found nothing disturbed either.
So at this point: a new breaker, a PTO reset, a software update, an app-access fix, and no visible fault found across at least three separate inspections (builder's electrician, solar tech in August, most recent engineer) — and it's still recurring, now within a day of the most recent visit.
Specific questions:
- Does a PTO flag showing "off" ever point to something other than a simple status toggle — could it be a symptom of a deeper comms/relay issue rather than a standalone setting?
- Could the software update itself have caused this (bad push, reset config)?
- Is a burnt-wire smell somewhere that's supposedly unrelated to the solar circuit (first-floor bath) worth taking seriously as connected, or is that more likely a coincidence?
- What should I be pushing them to actually test — insulation resistance, thermal scan — instead of another visual check?
Appreciate any input, especially from anyone who's had Enphase chase a trip like this across multiple "fixes."
u/Tri6483 — 10 days ago