r/enphase

My one year of free inverter and battery monitoring is up and the installer is asking for $240 / year and $120 / year respectively to continue the service. I’m thinking this is a money grab - as I take a look at the Enphase app a few times a week to check out operation and battery status.
Can’t really tell what they would be doing to earn that money?

Equipment:

IQ7+ panels x27

IQ gateway

IQ 5P batteries x4

IQ System Controller 3

IQ Load Controller

(pulling from Enlighten app, hope I didn't miss something)

Events:

Utility outage Sunday afternoon.

System switched to batteries; shed A/C compressor. We manually turned off HVAC fan and just about everything else, goal to keep refrigerator running, have option to briefly run shop vac if basement water intrusion became an issue. No appliance usage, powered down desktop PC.

System showed batteries at 85% late Sunday/early Monday. Down to 82% Monday morning. Gateway quit communicating Monday morning. Internet was out, but household Wi-Fi was still up. "Assistant" in app responded that gateway issue was due to home Internet failure, reported that we do not have cellular option. Cellular module is installed, but signal can vary.

No gateway reporting all day Monday. I emailed Enphase support about the gateway communication and got a ticket number back. I contacted my local installer and they advised that batteries would charge even if gateway stopped reporting.

Power Co out, restored, disconnected for adjacent restoration, restored briefly again, disconnected. Rain started and they stopped working, leaving us disconnected.

Had full sun most of Monday, plus intermittent grid connection. System set to full backup.

Around 9pm Monday, house abruptly went dark. Checking outside, gateway is completely dark, batteries have steady red lights.

Questions:

Besides "what the heck"?

Why did batteries not charge during an entire day of full sun, with basically no household draw but refrigerator?

Why does app report no cellular backup option?

How do I prevent this from happening again during a future "sunny day" outage?

Thanks for any advice/assistance.

I'm considering buying the Enphase Air thermostat. It's expensive at $599. However, I've been using an Ecobee and it's not at all optimized for my setup.

I have a 30-panel Enphase system with 5 5p batteries. We installed a heat pump 18 months ago. We're in CA with PG&E.

The problem I've had for a long time is that Ecobee has no understanding that we have solar or batteries. So it's constantly trying to "optimize" based on PG&E rate schedules. But rate schedules are mostly irrelevant because our power is being pulled from our batteries, not from PG&E. Ecobee even defaults to "eco-mode" and makes it almost impossible to disable eco-mode.

So this seems like a great solution if it's well done. So my questions are things like: How smart is the AI in the system? Does it do a better job of optimizing based on panel generation and battery levels? Does it understand heat pumps well enough to optimize for them? Does it optimize based on utility rate schedules (but also understand battery storage levels as well)? Are there any downsides you've found with the thermostat?

Thanks!

At some point within the last 6 years, a chunk of my PVs stopped producing. I'd added solar since 2012 piecemeal, so I didn't notice until I looked at my annual generation.

In 2019, I had a set of panels installed with Enphase IQ7s(?) installed, but since I had PowerWalls, I figured no need for the Envoy, since I could see the total production on the Tesla app. Looks like that may have been a mistake, as I would have noticed the stoppage.

I saw a post where someone mentioned their Enphase system stopped working until they connected them up and got a firmware upgrade.

I'm looking to add an Envoy system, and hoping that resurrects the microinverters. Or is it possible they're shot? It seems unlikely that only the 12 IQ7 microinverters broke, while the older Enphase and big central inverter all still work.

Thoughts?

Edit: Notes from the electrician who checked out the system
"I checked everything: every jbox, all splices, breakers. all trunk cable connectors, end caps. No problem found. The voltage was good 243V at any point in the circuits. but micros still not producing. I checked DC voltage on several panels, the DC input on inverters was all good 35 VDC. I have a feeling all those IQ7+ micros have fried somehow. The strange thing is that all of them are dead. I can call tech support on Monday. Don't know what else i can do."

I have a line on 2x 10C batteries from someone around here. They claim (and I cannot verify) that the batteries are "brand new in box", from "an authorized enphase dealer", and come with "full warranty". They also claim to have sold multiple already (these apparently aren't just a couple they bought and never used).

I had my system installed last year by a local company here, and I've contacted them about installing these two, and they say they're not interested in installing any equipment that they didn't source themselves. Fair. They did say I'm not at risk of voiding any warranty or service agreement if I have someone else install them, except that if a problem turns up in the Combiner (I already have the 6, I should be ready-to-go), they'll "have to see" if it's related to a bad installation. Also fair; I'm relatively confident it's pretty much plug-and-play from the Combiner point-of-view, and once all the hardware is in place, I can do the training and manage the system changes myself, I assume.

Now, the first question I have is, if I drop $5k on these two batteries, are they likely to be (a) fake, (b) defective, (c) stolen, or otherwise just a really bad plan? AFAICT, they're less than half the price they should be.

The second question is, from an electrical install point-of-view, can I have any ol' electrician mount them on a(n interior) wall and do the through-wall wiring (the combiner is on the outside of the wall I'd mount them on)? Simple as running about 10" of conduit and installing a couple breakers?

Enphase just provided Enphase IQ Gateway software 8.3.5566 release notes:
https://enphase.com/installers/resources/documentation/communication?product_type=141&f%5B0%5D=document%3A217&f%5B1%5D=document%3A217%3F&media_id=35249&langcode=und

The Grid transition improvements feature is appreciated.
I did notice when the grid comes back up after an outage, the transition is faster, which keeps my networking equipment from power cycling.

So, spent some time trying to figure out why I was pulling so much off of the grid. Turns out that my system was transferring from my battery back to the grid at peak times. Since PG&E only pays me $0.03 per Kwh, I was basically losing money for every KwH being moved back to the grid.

After changing the settings, the export stopped and I started using only 0.4KwH from the grid on sunny days.

Until today.

Today, it apparently decided pull from the grid this morning to recharge my batteries, even thought the panels were producing. my battery hit 35% and then it started importing to recharge. as of 2:35pm, I'd pulled 21Kwh from the grid. it pulled $8.50 worth of electricity ($0.40 @kwh) from the grid to recharge. I'm now pushing excess solar back to the grid at 0.03 per kwh.

I called support and they claim that my microinverters are talking top another controller, three houses away from mine. WTH. is this even possible? Can anyone explain what might be going on. That house is at least 100' away from mine...and why would the microinverters pair to that system? it makes no sense to me at all.

Unimpressed, out real money, and a little more than aggravated that the system is so colossally unreliable.

So I had a legacy Solar City/Tesla system installed a long time ago and this was great (net neutral on power use) until we got an EV and our annual true up started climbing (~$2k Last year)

Since we're PG&E - this also means that blackouts are always a possibility, so this led to a modest Enphase solar add-on, a controller and a 10C battery.

Worth mentioning we're not allowed to export any of the new power and still keep NEM 1.0 (for the next 9 years)

The problem is that Enphase insists on charging the battery from both the new and the old solar. Which means at this time of year the battery hits 100% by 11AM, and then all that new solar goes to waste.

Literally to waste as the new solar won't even contribute to the house load during these times, it just cuts its output to zero.

I've mitigated this by building a smart EV charging system using Home Assistant - Basically get the house battery to drain so that the new solar kicks in again, with various bits of logic to keep the house battery above 60% (because blackouts) and try to get as close to 100% by nightfall.

But I'd rather the Enphase system would just let me choose the power sources it charges from myself. This way I could prioritize charging from the new solar, export from the old, and just top off the house battery from other sources if needed.

Anyone know a way to do this?

Is anyone experiencing data reporting issues? I have a system with combined 6c and IQ8x inverters and 10C batteries.

The last 4 days my data has been reporting backwards. Telling me I’m producing when it’s night time and I’m exporting when I’m producing. Live production report is showing 7.8kwh max for the last 4 days also. I have a 16.2 kWh system btw.

Hey guys,

Looking to see if anyone else has had this issue.

Running 30kwh of 10c batteries with the 6 combiner and meter socket. Full house backup system, currently running in self-consumption mode.

Couple months ago we had a utility outage and the system didn't stay on.. Thought it was a weird fluke, batteries were pretty low. I didn't think to much about it.

Got a storm on the way, so I tested by turning off the main breaker in my meter socket enclosure. Batteries are full, sun it about to set, so the array isnt producing much... House does dark. At the panel, Solid green except but a blinking green SS led. According to the panel, this means the DER relay is open.

Turned the utility back on, reset the combiner. Couple minutes later solid green in the panel. I switch from self-consumption to backup mode, give it a few minutes to happen. Flip the main power off again and the house goes dark...

Reset and tried "off grid" mode, confirmed house load was on the batteries, no utility draw via app live status. Turned off the utility breaker and the house goes dark again. This should not be? According to the app, we were off grid and running 100% of batteries at the time.

I've emailed the installer, I probably wont hear from them till Monday. I'm pretty handy and been an electrician for 20 years, but I'm stumped. I think there is a bad piece of hardware somewhere, but no idea where to start with that other than turning off all but one battery at a time and running a simulated utility outage. Also thinking about trying with "power match" disabled.

When we installed the system about a year ago, we tested the backup by turning off the meter breaker and it worked seamlessly.

Anyone have a thoughts on something I could check that would get me ready before this storm hits?

Thanks for reading!

UPDATE: Hurricane Lala been flickering the power all night. System has kept the house running.. Seems like turning off "power match" has solved it for now till I can do more testing.

I found a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability that allows unauthenticated root access.

Enphase has since patched the primary issue in a firmware update, but I believe some important related issues were never fully resolved.

Additionally, I went down this rabbit hole originally because the 4GB Embedded Multi-Media Card (eMMC) in my IQ Gateway failed due to excessive writes, causing it to not work reliably.

There was an update of something a week or so ago, and I am now getting this view, which I find pretty cool (the part about showing the # of inverters currently active)

https://preview.redd.it/li0sprhyd9jh1.png?width=1074&format=png&auto=webp&s=7bd84319cf70e5a72dff7d3dfba0f37c56c70fa6

$539 for a thermostat at 10% off??? Are they nuts??? How big could the market for a thermostat in this price range possibly be? The hardware can't be much more expensive than what's required to run a Google nest thermostat and they already had the majority of the software made for the phone app. I don't understand why they would price it competitively against the other smart thermostats on the market. It would all but guarantee anyone with an Enphase system who is buying a smart thermostat would go with theirs. I can get a smart thermostat for less than 1/4 the cost and the Enphase software on my phone for free. Why would anyone pay 4x as much for their thermostat unless they just have money to burn?

Hey Folk! We (homeowner) completed our install in Dec/Jan. I still have a mountain of boxes from the 2x10C batteries/combiner etc. With the warranty being so long, is there any strong need in keeping the original boxes?

If there IS a warranty claim, do they advance-ship so you can return the failed stuff in the replacement's packaging?

TIA!

We have an enphase solar + 2 10T battery system that was professionally installed and has been working for several years. 20 kwh just isn't a lot of juice for our needs, especially when i can get a standalone 60 kwh battery for under $10k.

Has anyone expanded the capacity of their enphase battery system with a 3rd party battery? Thoughts on if this is possible.

Its an IQ7+ system. Thanks!