In case anyone's interested, I decided not to go with Solar City. I
think they would have done a fine job of installing a standard,
off-the-shelf solar system with a 20-year warranty that would have
worked fine as far as providing solar power. I was planning to buy it
outright rather than lease and I'm convinced that the investment would
have paid for itself in reduced electricity costs.
But I was worried about RF interference from the inverter, basically a
3000-watt switching power supply attached to the side of my house. So
instead I have decided to go with a local company that is willing to
work with me on RFI issues, even though their price is higher. Rather
than one big inverter, their system uses "micro-inverters" mounted on
each solar panel. They did some research and found that it is possible
to get extension cables to go between each micro-inverter and its panel
and between each micro-inverter and the power bus. The extra length can
accommodate a common-mode choke by wrapping several turns of the cable
through a ferrite core.
So the plan is to install the system without chokes and see if there is
any interference. If so, then I will buy the extra cables and ferrite
cores and install the chokes. For testing purposes I can just
temporarily disconnect all the panels but one and then apply whatever
works with one to them all.
Alan N1AL
On 07/18/2016 07:32 PM, Alan Bloom wrote:
I am now leaning on going with a local company rather than Solar City.
They quoted a higher price for a lower-power system, but because of some
convoluted accounting it will actually end up costing me less. And they
are at least willing to talk about adding some common-mode chokes. Their
system uses micro-inverters on each panel, which potentially should
cause less interference because all the switching electronics is
localized with short connections. Only 240 VAC 60 Hz comes out of the
panels.
Alan N1AL
On 07/18/2016 06:49 PM, John Kaufmann wrote:
My advice on Solar City is to avoid them at all costs. Their systems,
manufactured by SolarEdge, generate horrendous broadband RF noise....
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