I'm thinking about getting a Sol-Ark inverter/charger for my solar system. Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated before I plunk down any cash.
You guys really helped me pick out our solar at the other site but I forgot most of what I leaned so here is a take on it.
Car could you explain a little bit what this does? Dose it help protect the system?
As I understand it, the Sol-Ark controls the charging of the batteries using either the solar panels or the grid depending on the sun. A generator is also able to be put into the mix. It also inverts the DC from the batteries into 120/240V AC for the house. If the batteries hit 90% it quits using them and goes to the grid or a generator. The batteries are charged off the grid at night or when necessary. Basically, it is set up as a seamless system that pretty much controls itself. It can also be setup to be EMP hardened. I live 20 or 25 miles from one of the major nuclear targets in Alaska.
Our Magnum Energy 4,000 watt Pure Sine Wave Inverter/Charger is transformer based and has an 93% peak inverter efficiency, it runs on a total of 24 volts of battery power with an input range of 18.0 to 33.8 VDC and an output of 120/240 volts AC with a maximum of 5,800 watts for 5 seconds or 5,200 watts for 30 seconds. I'm a bit old tech in that I run true deep cycle lead acid batteries, a total of 20 6 volt golf cart batteries, series/parallel for 24 volts for a total of 1025 amp-hours. The solar array, when I get it installed, will be eight 195 watt panels for a total of 1560 watts, series/parallel for full sun output of 72 volts processed through an MPPT solar controller to keep the battery bank charged. When we have had grid power loss the system transfers so seamlessly that it's almost like it was just like the lights blinked for a microsecond. I designed this backup system to mainly run two refrigerators, a freezer and a few LED lights, but when it's kicked in on a few occasions, it's ran a lot more without any problems, in fact the transition was so smooth that I had to check the inverter to see if it was doing the work. I like the 6 volt golf cart batteries because they are easy to get ahold of, we bought all ours from Costco, they generally have a lot on hand and their price is low compared to most other battery suppliers, however Interstate Battery has unbranded 6 volt batteries for pretty low prices that are of a high quality as well.
There is a built in transfer switch in the inverter/charger. I forgot to mention that my inverter/ charger can be stacked up to 4 units using a router that I have for parallel use but after running my single MS 4024 PAE unit I have found that it does a more than adequate job taking care of all the necessary electrical needs of our home, the only thing I need to do is build the solar array mount system and wire it to the solar controller so that I will no longer be relying on the grid system for charging battery bank, I really hope to have that taken care of before summer of the coming year. Due to my congestive heart failure earlier this year, I really got set back from doing the job this year, I was lucky to get my firewood supply for the winter taken care of, that's the biggest bump in the road of life I've had to deal with and I'm very happy to be on the other side of all that, thanks be to God.What are you using to switch from grid to battery bank?
I also need to add that the grid and solar backup going through the inverter feed a dedicated subpanel that only feeds circuits that take care of the two refrigerators, a small portion of other outlets and one light circuit, all other circuits are grid fed and not as critical under a grid down situation.What are you using to switch from grid to battery bank?
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