thanks all for the thoughts.  Ended up replacing all breakers and the
controller and the problem has gone away. sent the controller back to
midnite and came back with no issues so we are assuming it was the breaker.


Daniel Tittmann
CTO
Greenwired
www.greenwired.com
[email protected]
707-923-2001 (office)
707-206-5088 (Cell)

On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 4:44 AM, Chris Mason <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Good tip, and also prompts me to remind that a thermal camera will see a
> lot of problems the eye cannot. We have a fluke thermal camera and I make
> it a practise to survey a customer's electrical room prior to doing a
> proposal, as identifying the overloaded components can help to avoid the
> blame game later. It's the old story, you installed solar so you are
> responsible for everything that went wrong later.
> I did a survey recently for a customer as part of a proposal and with the
> camera could see that the middle phase on their 800A main breaker was very
> hot, although it carried the lowest current relevant to the others. The
> main breaker was clearly faulty and would fail soon. Had we a solar
> installation in place, it would have been construed as being because we
> back fed the breaker.
>
> On Sun, Nov 1, 2015 at 3:46 PM, Daniel Duffield <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Some years ago, we had a similiar problem with a 50 amp breaker nuisance
>> tripping, we over  analyzed the problem and still could not prevent this
>> erratic issue, sometimes it would work fine for weeks - sometimes days
>> apart, sometimes on sunny days, sometimes on cloudy days.
>>  In the end the answer was simple and so easy it was overlooked more than
>> once.
>> It was just a matter of the proper torque, with the copper compression
>> fitting on a Sq D QO breaker, just a hair breathe too loose, enough heat
>> would build over many hours to change the trip curve.
>> We measured, swapped breakers, everything you could think off until we
>> employed a torque wrench with a screwdriver bit.
>> Problem vanished, never to come back.
>> Not saying this is answer, but sometimes tightening a compression fitting
>> to the correct "feel", by a journeman electrician with 20 years experience,
>> is not good enough. If your crew or organization has torque screwdrivers,
>> we had no excuse not to use them, and back then we found out the hardway.
>>
>> Daniel O. Duffield
>> NABCEP Certified PV Installer since 2005
>> EE 98 & ER01, Albuquerque, New Mexico, IEEE member 1995
>> DPW Solar (Integration-Division)
>> >
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>
> --
> Chris Mason
> NABCEP Certified Solar PV Installerâ„¢
> Solar Design Engineer
> Generac Generators Industrial technician
>
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