What to me this thread shows is the lack of complete engineering from these OEM's to be able to actually install their equipment to NEC specifications by not providing the needed BOS equipment.
I respect the ingenuity that has been shown here in creating the products the OEM’s should have available.
Whether it’s OEM conduit bodies/box to fit specific batteries or inverters or how to run cables or even mount cables to their batteries or battery combiner box/breakers etc improvement is way overdue.
I mean in the 90’s Trace had a fully integrated power panel with all the parts, or Outback, or Magnum or Midnite.
Why have we gone backwards such that we the installers are having to do custom work to create products to install the system? These companies can buy expensive equipment from china but can’t supply a conduit box that has the same KO pattern as the inverter or integrate to the battery?
I don’t know about you all but I always install a bypass switch, why don’t they have one that integrates into the system?
It’s one of the reasons i’ve been buying EG4 products. They are providing a complete set of parts all from 1 OEM: inverters/batteries,conduit bodies, battery cables. For example they have a mounting jig that comes with the battery so you can mount the inverter bracket exactly where it needs to be so they can be attached together, that is slick. It saves me a ton of time/hassle and the customer money. They have touch safe quick connect battery connectors and they sell the parts to make them yourself, I like that.
Oh believe me there is any number of things I’d have them change/modify/upgrade but to me they have been thinking like an installer with providing all this equipment.
In the mean time I”ll wait for the others to bring the parts that make it easy and code to install.
Jay
On Jul 26, 2025, at 8:18 AM, Jason Szumlanski via RE-wrenches <
[email protected]> wrote:
I use 10x10 gutters for Midhite AIO and 12x12 for Sol-Ark. It works great.
I attached a pic of a recent Midnite installation. Note that the hack job flex conduit is not mine. That was the builder's electrical contractor.
Jason Szumlanski
Principal Solar Designer | Florida Solar Design Group
NABCEP Certified Solar Professional (PVIP)
Florida State Certified Solar Contractor CVC56956
Florida Certified Electrical Contractor EC13013208
Jason Szumlanski
Principal Solar Designer | Florida Solar Design Group
NABCEP Certified Solar Professional (PVIP)
Florida State Certified Solar Contractor CVC56956
Florida Certified Electrical Contractor EC13013208
On Fri, Jul 25, 2025 at 6:43 PM Zeke Yewdall via RE-wrenches <
[email protected]> wrote:
I noticed this on a SolArk job -- I think I bought out all of NW montana of 1" offset nipples to get 3 of them mounted to an 8" gutter once.
On the Midnite AIO's a 10" gutter is perfect to not need any offsets. But you can mount smaller gutters on various levels of unistrut to space them off the wall. An 8" gutter on standard unistrut works fairly well, and I think you could space a 6" off with two or three levels of unistrut to get it to line up well. Of course then the gutter is too far from the wall to easily mount other equipment on top of it, and it can be harder to do rear entries into the gutter from the wall. That's where the 10" gutter is nicer, because it can catch the front of the inverter, as well as an AC panel or such mounted off to the side of the inverter, and catch pass throughs into the back of it. I'm not sure about the SolArk and Fortress, but I imagine they'd be pretty similar.
Zeke
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2025 15:19:29 -0700
From: William Miller <[email protected]>
To: RE-wrenches <[email protected]>
Subject: [RE-wrenches] Knockouts far from the backplane.
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Friends:
I have noticed increasingly that inverters I have been using (Soul-Arc and
Fortress Envy) have knockouts that are far in front of the backplane on
which the inverter would be mounted. Connecting conduit from these
inverters into standard gutters, load centers and pull boxes is quite a
hassle: Offsets can eat up a lot of vertical space. Pulling elbows (LBs)
don?t really work in this situation.
See diagram below:
One solutIon is to stack pull boxes or gutters, althouigh this eats up
vertical space and increases the labor and parts count:
How are the rest of you handling this backplane problem?
Thanks in advance.
William Miller
Miller Solar
17395 Oak Road, Atascadero, CA 93422
805-438-5600
www.millersolar.com
CA Lic. 773985
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