A few months ago I wrote about
my experimentation this year with solar power. I thought I would give a couple of updates.
The basic architecture hasn't changed, but some of the components have:
Given that I've never done this before, I expected to have some problems. However, I didn't expect every problem to be related to the power inverter. The inverter converts the 12V DC battery's power to 120V AC for the servers to use. Due to technical issues (none of which were my fault), I'm currently on my fourth power inverter.
Inverter Problem #1: "I'm Bond, N-G Bond"
The first inverter that I purchased was a Renogy 2000W Pure Sine Wave Inverter.
This inverter worked fine when I was only using the battery. However, if I plugged it into the automated transfer switch (ATS), it immediately tripped the wall outlet's circuit breaker. The problem was an undocumented grounding loop. Specifically, the three-prong outlets used in the United States are "hot", "neutral", and "ground". For safety, the neutral and ground should be tied together at one location; it's called a neutral-ground bond, or N-G bond. (For building wiring, the N-G bond is in your home or office breaker box.) Every outlet should only have one N-G bond. If you have two N-G bonds, then you have a grounding loop and an electrocution hazard. (A circuit breaker should detect this and trip immediately.)
The opposite of a N-G bond is a "floating neutral". Only use a floating neutral if some other part of the circuit has the N-G bond. In my case, the automated transfer switch (AFS) connects to the inverter and the utility/wall outlet. The wall outlet connects to the breaker box where the N-G bond is located.
What wasn't mentioned anywhere on the Amazon product page or Renogy web site is that this inverter has a built-in N-G bond. It will work great if you only use it with a battery, but it cannot be used with an ATS or utility/shore power.
There are some YouTube videos that show people opening the inverter, disabling the N-G bond, and disabling the "unsafe alarm". I'm not linking to
any of those videos because overriding a safety mechanism for high voltage is incredibly stoopid.
Instead, I spoke to Renogy's customer support. They recommended a different inverter that has an N-G bond switch: you can choose to safely enable or disable the N-G bond. I contacted Amazon since it was just past the 30-day return period. Amazon allowed the return with the condition that I also ordered the correct one. No problem.
The big lesson here: Before buying an inverter, ask if it has a N-G bond, a floating neutral, or a way to toggle between them. Most inverters don't make this detail easy to find. (If you can't find it, then don't buy the inverter.) Make sure the configuration is correct for your environment.
- If you ever plan to connect the inverter to an ATS that switches between the inverter and wall/utility/shore power, then you need an inverter that supports a floating neutral.
- If you only plan to connect the inverter to a DC power source, like a battery or generator, then you need an inverter that has a built-in N-G bond.
Inverter Problem #2: It's Wrong Because It Hertz
The second inverter had a built-in switch to enable and disable the N-G bond. The good news it that, with the N-G bond disabled, it worked correctly through the ATS. To toggle the ATS, I put a
Shelly Plug smart outlet between the utility/wall outlet and the ATS.
I built my own controller and it tracks the battery charge level. When the battery is charged enough, the controller tells the inverter to turn on and then remotely tells the Shelly Plug to turn off the wall outlet. That causes the ATS to switch over to the inverter.
Keep in mind, the inverter has it's own built-in transfer switch. However, the documentation doesn't mention that it is "utility/shore priority". That is, when the wall outlet has power, the inverter will use the utility power instead of the battery. It has no option to be plugged into a working outlet
and to use the battery power instead of the outlet's power. So, I didn't use their built-in transfer switch.
This configuration worked great for about two weeks. That's when I heard a lot of beeping coming from the computer rack. The inverter was on and the wall outlet was off (good), but the Tripp Lite UPS feeding the equipment was screaming about a generic "bad power" problem. I manually toggled the inverter off and on. It came up again and the UPS was happy. (Very odd.)
I started to see this "bad power" issue about 25% of the time when the inverter turned on. I ended up installing the Renogy app to monitor the inverter over the built-in Bluetooth. That's when I saw the problem. The inverter has a frequency switch: 50Hz or 60Hz. The switch was in the 60Hz setting, but sometimes the inverter was starting up at 50Hz. This is bad, like, "fire hazard" bad, and I'm glad that the UPS detected and prevented the problem. Some of my screenshots from the app even showed it starting up low, like at 53-58 Hz, and then falling back to 50Hz a few seconds later.
(In this screenshot, the inverter started up at 53.9Hz. After about 15 seconds, it dropped down to 50Hz.)
I eventually added
Bluetooth support to my homemade controller so that I could monitor and log the inverter's output voltage and frequency. The controller would start up the inverter and wait for the built-in Bluetooth to come online. Then it would read the status and make sure it was at 60Hz (+/- 0.5Hz) and 120V (+/- 6V) before turning off the utility and transferring the load to the inverter. If it came up at the wrong Hz, the controller would shut down the inverter for a minute before trying again.
It took some back-and-forth discussions with the Renogy technical support before they decided that it was a defect. They offered me a warranty-exchange. It took about two weeks for the inverter to be exchanged (one week there, one week back). The entire discussion and replacement took a month.
The replacement inverter was the same make and model. It worked great for the first two weeks, then developed
the exact same problem! But rather than happening 25% of the time, it was happening about 10% of the time. To me, this looks like either a design flaw or a faulty component that impacts the entire product line. The folks at Renogy provided me with a warranty return and full refund.
If you read
the Amazon reviews for the 2000W and 3000W models, they have a lot of
1-star reviews with comments about various defects. Other forums mention that items plugged into the inverter
melted and motors
burned out. Melting and burned out motors are problems that can happen if the inverter is running at 50Hz instead of 60Hz.
The Fourth Inverter
For the fourth inverter, I went with a completely different brand: a
Landerpow 1500W inverter. Besides having what I needed, it also had a few unexpectedly nice benefits compared to the Renogy:
- I had wanted a 2000W inverter, but a 1500W inverter is good enough. Honestly, my servers are drawing about 1.5 - 2.5 amps, so this is still plenty of overkill for my needs. The inverter says it can also handle surges of up to 3000W, so it can easily handle a server booting (which draws much more power than post-boot usage).
- The documentation clearly specifies that the Landerpow does not have an N-G bond. That's perfect for my own needs.
- As for dimensions, it's easily half the size of the Renogy 2000W inverter. The Landerpow also weighs much less. (When the box first arrived, I thought it might be empty because it was so lightweight.)
- The Renogy has a built-in Bluetooth interface. In contrast, the Landerpow doesn't have built-in Bluetooth. That's not an issue for me. In fact, I consider Renogy's built-in Bluetooth to be a security risk since it didn't require a login and would connect to anyone running the app within 50 feet of the inverter.
- The Landerpow has a quiet beep when it turns on and off, nothing like Renogy's incredibly loud beep. (Renogy's inverter beep could be heard outside the machine room and across the building.) I view Landerpow's quiet beep as a positive feature.
- With a fully charged battery and with no solar charging, my math said that I should get about 5 hours of use out of the inverter:
- The 12V, 100Ah LiFePO4 battery should provide 10Ah at 120V. (That's 10 hours of power if you're using 1 amp.)
- There's a DC-to-AC conversion loss around 90%, so that's 9Ah under ideal circumstances.
- You shouldn't use the battery below 20% or 12V. That leaves 7.2Ah usable.
- I'm consuming power at a rate of about 1.3Ah at 120V. That optimistically leaves 5.5 hours of usable power.
With the same test setup, none of the Renogy inverters gave me more than 3 hours. The Landerpow gave me over 5 hours. The same battery appears to last over 60% longer with the Landerpow. I don't know what the Renogy inverter is doing, but it's consuming much more battery power than the Landerpow.
- Overnight, when there is no charging, the battery equalizes, so the voltage may appear to change overnight. Additionally, the MPPT and the controller both run off the battery all night. (The controller is an embedded system requires 5VDC and the MPPT requires 9VDC; combined, it's less than 400mA.) On top of this, we have the inverter connected to the battery. The Landerpow doesn't appear to cause any additional drain when powered off. ("Off" means off.) In contrast, the Renogy inverter (all of them) caused the battery to drain by an additional 1Ah-2Ah overnight. Even though nothing on the Renogy inverter appears to be functioning, "off" doesn't appear to be off.
- The Renogy inverter required a huge surge when first starting up. My battery monitor would see it go from 100% to 80% during startup, and then settle at around 90%-95%. Part of this is the inverter charging the internal electronics, but part is testing the fans at the maximum rating. In contrast, the Landerpow has no noticeable startup surge. (If it starts when the battery is at 100% capacity and 13.5V, then it will still be at 100% capacity and 13.5V after startup.) Additionally, then Landerpow is really quiet; it doesn't run the fans when it first turns on.
The Renogy inverter cost over $300. The Landerpow is about $100. Smaller, lighter, quieter, works properly, consumes less power, and less expensive? This is just icing on the cake.
Enabling Automation
My controller determines when the inverter should turn on/off. With the Renogy, there's an RJ-11 plug for a wired remote switch. The plug has 4 wires (using telephone coloring, that's black, red, green, and yellow). The middle two wires (red and green) are a switch. If they are connected, then the inverter turns on; disconnected turns it off.
The Landerpow also has a four-wire RJ-11 connector for the remote. I couldn't find the pinout, but I reverse-engineered the switch in minutes.
The remote contains a display that shows voltage, frequency, load, etc. That information has to come over a protocol like one-wire, I2C (two wire), UART (one or two wire), or a three wire serial connection like RS232 or RS485. However, when the inverter is turned off, there are no electronics running. That means it cannot be a communication protocol to turn it on. I connected my multimeter to the controller and quickly found that the physical on/off switch was connected to the green-yellow wires. I wired that up to my controller's on/off relay and it worked perfectly on the first try.
I still haven't worked out the communication protocol. (I'll save that for another day, unless someone else can provide the answer.) At minimum, the wires need to provide ground, +5VDC power for the display, and a data line. I wouldn't be surprised if they were using a
one-wire protocol, or using the switch wires for part of a serial communication like UART or RS485. (I suspect the four wires are part of a UART communication protocol: black=ground, red=+5VDC, green=data return, and yellow=TX/RX, with green/yellow also acting as a simple on/off switch for the inverter.)
Pictures!
I've mounted everything to a board for easy maintenance. Here's the previous configuration board with the Renogy inverter:
And here's the current configuration board with the Landerpow inverter:
You can see that the new inverter is significantly smaller. I've also added in a manual shutoff switch to the solar panels. (The shutoff is completely mounted to the board; it's the weird camera angle that makes it look like it's hanging off the side.) Any work on the battery requires turning off the power. The MPPT will try to run off solar-only, but the manual warns about running from solar-only without a battery attached. The shutoff allows me to turn off the solar panels before working on the battery.
Next on the to-do list:
- Add my own voltmeter so the controller can monitor the battery's power directly. Reading the voltage from the MPPT seem to be a little inaccurate.
- Reverse-engineering the communication to the inverter over the remote interface. Ideally, I want my own M5StampS3 controller to read the inverter's status directly from the inverter.
As components go, the Renogy solar panels seem very good. The Renogy MPPT is good, but maybe not the best option. Avoid Renogy inverters and consider the Landerpow inverter instead. I'm also a huge fan of Shelly Plugs for smart outlets and the M5StampS3 for the DIY controller.
Efficiency
Due to all of the inverter problems, I haven't had a solid month of use from the solar panels yet. We've also had a lot of overcast and rainy days. However, I have had some good weeks. A typical overcast day saves about 400Wh per day. (That translates to about 12kWh/month in the worst case.) I've only had one clear-sky day with the new inverter, and I logged 1.2kWh of power in that single day. (A month of sunny days would be over 30kWh in the best case.) Even with partial usage and overcast skies, my last two utility bills were around 20kWh lower than expected, matching my logs -- so this solar powered system is doing its job!
I've also noticed something that I probably should have realized earlier. My solar panels are installed as awnings on the side of the building. At the start of the summer, the solar panels received direct sunlight just after sunrise. The direct light ended abruptly at noon as the sun passes over the building and no longer hit the awnings. They generate less than 2A of power for the rest of the day through ambient sunlight.
However, we're nearing the end of summer and the sun's path through the sky has shifted. These days, the panels don't receive direct light until about 9am and it continues until nearly 2pm. By the time winter rolls around, it should receive direct light from mid-morning until a few hours before sunset. The panels should be generating more power during the winter due to their location on the building and the sun's trajectory across the sky. With the current "overcast with afternoon rain", I'm currently getting about 4.5 hours a day out of the battery+solar configuration. (The panels generate a maximum of 200W, and are currently averaging around 180W during direct sunlight with partially-cloudy skies.)
I originally allocated $1,000 for this project. With the less expensive inverter, I'm now hovering around $800 in expenses. The panels are saving me a few dollars per month. At this rate, they will probably never pay off this investment. However, it has been a great way to learn about solar power and DIY control systems. Even with the inverter frustrations, it's been a fun summer project.