Solar Power Day 17

This is probably going to be my shortest post ever on my solar power project, and because no construction was being done, I have no pictures to show.

To my surprise someone from my solar installer did come to my house, though he was a new face. Nice guy though, very easy to talk to and didn’t have a problem answering my questions, though speaking his language may have had something to do with that. I’m not sure if he was an electrician or an inspector (or something else) but he worked for my solar installer and not my electricity provider or the town, so his exact title and position are unknown to me. But I digress.

He did a cursory inspection of the system, installed the fuses for the main disconnect switch, and then turned the whole system on. Next he programmed the Enphase IQ Combiner box to connect to my WiFi and then let it go about getting its firmware updates from the internet. This part of the process took about forty minutes. Once that was complete he called into his main office to get things synced up with my Enphase account so that the Android app (also available on iOS) could access my system and do live reporting. This took about twenty minutes and then I could sign in and see what my system was doing. After he spent a grand total of just over an hour, he left.

So … after I signed in to the Enphase Enlighten app I could see what my system would be doing if the microinverter firmware updates and syncing were complete, which they weren’t. That process seemed to take overnight, though it could have just been a few hours, I didn’t remember to check it until well after midnight. Oops.

That’s all to report for now. I’ll know more tomorrow once some daylight hits the panels. At some point in the future I’ll do a deep dive on the Enlighten app because there really is some very useful information being presented, and the live readouts are always fun for me to view.