Paralleling 3 inverters together, Growatt 5000w Solar System

i just finished installing three grow watt brand inverters right behind me each inverter is 5 000 watts that gives me a total of 15 kilowatts worth of inverting power wow that's even more than my yellow inverters over here so in this video let's dive into how i wired them up what i did and what i'll be using them for here we go [Music] hi i'm david welcome to my channel where i like to diy renewable energy and energy efficiency projects now i've been running my house for the last year on these yellow inverters which are sma sunny islands and they work but they are expensive i got them at a discount when i bought them a year ago so i wanted to try something that was available today and that is these grow up brand inverters now what's neat about them is that they're putting out 240 volts so you can parallel an odd number like what i have here is three of them you don't have to parallel them in pairs like you do the yellow inverters each inverter is 5000 watts that gives me a total of 15 kilowatts worth of inverting power now that is a lot of inverting power that will power the entire garage that we're in and the house and it's going to power the whole thing hopefully off grid and hopefully no issues if there are some issues i'll be reporting them in an updated video after i've been running these for probably a month or so so you can actually purchase these three grow up brand inverters for about the same cost as one of these yellow inverters that makes these grow up brand inverters a really good deal now these inverters have built-in charge controllers so they're going to be connected directly to the solar panels outside in a previous video i ran through how i got the solar wiring in here and you can check out that previous video a link will be in the description below if you want to see how i got the solar pv wiring into these inverters not all inverters do that it used to be that you'd always buy them as two separate components the charge controller and the inverter these just happen to have both components built into one box so i wired the solar pv array one array into each inverter now the built-in charge controllers for these are higher voltage they go up to 450 volts dc so when i wired these in i was able to wire more solar panels in one long string that means that each array is coming in as only two strings that keeps the wiring pretty small this is actually the wiring for it now these three imo disconnect switches they can switch up to a thousand volts or i think there's even a setting on here for up to 1500 volts but you have to kind of de-rate it a little but the point is that they're very high voltage disconnect switches now i'm running my pv in here more at about 300 volts so these things can handle switching that off no problem [Music] this is a pretty old screwdriver it says number 30 on it it's a robertson or also called a square drive and this particular one i got from my grandfather's toolbox and i wish i could have known them more i don't have any memories of them but i got his uh his toolbox i don't know last year or year before and i i just kind of get a kick out of using some of the things any any chance i get it's just kind of nice [Music] so i have three circuit breakers for the three inverters each one run in on its own out of the ac combiner box right down here on the very bottom i have one circuit breaker that is a 30 amp circuit breaker it runs to the auto transformer this is a 5000 va auto transformer from solar edge and all of this stuff you can buy from signature solar now the auto transformer is what gives me my neutral and that is fed into the neutral bar of this ac load center out from that i then have two more circuit breakers to two different loads one load is just a water heater here in the garage and the other load is what is back feeding through my transfer switch into the house and garage as a total property remember all of this is off grid so the transfer switch will only power the property either on grid or off grid never combined none of this back feeds the grid i have three 50 amp circuit breakers these are where the grow watt inverters are going to hook into and then off here i have a 30 amp which goes to the water heater that's just for a load so i can load this down right here i have a 50 amp which is going to go off to the house and that's where this neutral is going to go right here so that that 50 amp with 6 gauge wire neutral is going to go off to the house through the transfer switch and this 30 amp feeds the auto transformer which comes back with the neutral now yes uh this should be in conduit but i need to test this whole setup before i go and buy all these fittings and conduits and everything else i need to make sure that it actually works [Music] this is a little meter i'm going to be using to measure the amount of power that the inverters are putting into the panel so i have this little clamp i'm going to clamp it around these three leads now these are all going into l1 of all three inverters so that's clamped on and now i'm going to use next i'll just use a couple of these little guys to kind of help secure it to the wall because i don't want it to go anywhere this is a large 600 amp hour just a little over 30 kilowatt hours worth of lithium iron phosphate batteries i've done previous videos on this battery bank and i'll leave links in the description below if you want to find out more information about the battery bank now inside this battery cabinet there are large bus bars these are copper bus bars with tin plating i need to run battery cables to each of these inverters the manual says to use at least two gauge wire the ones that i have here this is wanna wire and i use this in my giant tower of power over there so i've taken this off so that i can still use this victron smart shunt to monitor the power going from the batteries into here so we can keep looking at the efficiency of the total system so i've taken out one of the cables because i had built this originally with four so we'll put this on top of the cabinet i'll use some pieces of four out wire to go from the shunt down into the bus bar that's built into it now this side for the positive i wouldn't actually need this box with bus bar i could run these cables directly to the bus bars that are built in there are four spots in here where you could screw to them but since i have them built into the box i'll just use them this way so certainly if you were to do this better i would recommend getting a metal wire way which is what i've used for the sma inverters and then you can protect all these wires a suggestion from one of the viewers was to replace these little rubber disks uh the ones that are kind of in this uh battery box to start with they tear very easily so i ordered these ones from amazon and i'll leave a link in the description below hopefully they last a little bit longer [Music] so now you can trace this and it drops down into here and i've already attached it using a screw so now i'll do the same thing on the negative side but the negative side is going to go into the victron smart shunt that way we'll be able to monitor it inside each of these grow watt inverters is a positive and negative post those are 10 millimeter nuts so i'm just going to take those off [Music] so here's the positive and it'll just go in here and get on the post just like that and i'll just put the flange nut back on and same deal with the negative wire it'll just go in here on the negative post and i'll tighten these down and now it's just rinse and repeat i have three positives and three negatives to connect up to these posts once i get them connected i'll add on some of these little plastic hangers to help support the wire up so that we don't put stress on those posts just in case i accidentally hit it that is how i brought the battery to each inverter oh and let me backtrack for just a sec before i could mount these inverters i actually put up a quarter inch thick piece of cement backer board this is a kind of a concrete board that you buy at your home center and it's designed to be a tile backer so you might put it in bathrooms and then put tile on it now the cement backer board can't burn so that gives you that non-combustible surface the outside steel casing of these inverters doesn't seem to actually get hot the fans just run constantly but at any point here i could put my hand on them and the box itself doesn't get hot but still the manual says you need a cement backer board so it's a good idea to follow manual now each array is wired to one switch i have two strings but these are four pole switches now that means that i'm switching both the positive and the negative side of the array then each array goes through one switch and then to one inverter so each array comes into the garage through underground conduit then it goes to one of the imo switches so one array to one switch then it goes to one of the inverters now right at the point of the inverter the two strings are combined so the two positives are combined into one and the two negatives are combined into one but there's only one negative terminal and one positive terminal inside the inverter so right at the point where i was going to take those wires and put them inside this charge controller i combine them using a ferrule that takes the two wires and i crimp them together and it makes one nice little terminal end that's crimped and i can put that into the screw terminal of the inverter tighten that screw down and now i've combined the two strings ideally speaking i would have liked to do this using some fuses and done the combination down at the fuse port but i don't have the fuses in right now i ordered them when they come in in the future hopefully i can add them but the code does allow for you to combine up to two strings without needing a fused system in it so it's okay but i still like the idea of adding fuses or circuit breakers so i did order them and we'll be adding the inverters then use the power from the pv and they'll either power themselves power the building and any surplus they'll send down to the battery which is right here from the solar array to here i'm using 12 gauge stranded th n wire so i'm just going to continue this off of these pv disconnects so as of right now i'm just going to take this wire and we're going to run it into here i have two positives and two negatives coming to this pv disconnect from the solar array but i only have one positive and one negative on the inverter for each one that means that i need to do a combiner now there's a lot of ways that i could do a combiner but the simplest and fastest way is what i'm going to do here because again i need to just test that these can work with the whole house after that i can do a lot more with conduit and things like that so let's just get our our distance here let's say we're gonna go like that come down a little bit so that's our distance on the positive we'll do two positives and then we also need to do the same thing on the negatives there's something interesting about these disconnects that i didn't know when i first wired up the one that is out at the solar array and i had to go fix it it turns out that the ports don't go straight through they actually cross each other there's like an x pattern which i didn't know so the port up here called number one actually zigzags down here number two now part of the way to tell is that it's stepped farthest back so right here see how this has stepped farthest back it tags up with the one that's farthest back on the bottom [Music] [Music] okay see the copper is right at the tip go and now we'll just crimp this one down and get it in here okay so now we've combined the two strings so now i'll just do that same combination pattern over here on the third grow watt and then when the sun goes down i'll do it on this one we'll be able to turn everything on it'll be fun all three grow watt inverters have their covers on the load center is done being wired with the auto transformer and circuit breakers they all flow into each of the grow wad inverters i didn't have to go two or four or six i didn't have to move up in increments of two now that is one of the benefits of using the 240 volt inverters now grow watt as well as several other brands out there such as the sma brand they make inverters that put out 120 volts only and then if you want to combine them to create split phase for your house you need them in pairs so they'll be 120 and 120 out of phase of each other so that it'll be 240 volts across both of them now that works fine but when you need more than just the two inverters can put out then you need to always jump up in pairs sometimes that doesn't work out to your benefit and other times it just might not be a big deal at all it just depends on your situation the final step of wiring all three of these inverters is to parallel them we need to parallel them with some kind of communication so that they will be in sync with each other otherwise the sine waves might not match up so we need to make sure that the sine waves match in the manual on page 27 it shows a diagram of how to wire these and each inverter came with a bag full of wire so i need to follow the diagram here and jump from one to the next now inside each inverter is a parallel board a pcb or a printed circuit board which is specific for paralleling these together so if we look underneath you can see the connection points one of the wires to use is this a gray one here it reminds me of a really old-fashioned computer from when i would be growing up i don't know what this is called but it's a d shape a d style and it has pins on it so it looks like on inverter number one the left comes over here and goes to the right side of inverter number two so let's try making that connection okay now i just have a little coil here of the wire so have to tuck this up and screw it to the wall to keep it in place so that's the process i'll just follow this diagram and go from one connection to the next down the line i finished the wiring of all these inverters for all the parallel connections and there's a lot of them there's two grays and then these twisted pair of red and black for each so it kind of looks like a mess now and i wish that looked a little bit better than it does next step i'm on page 32 and 33 and this is for the settings in here so i'm setting all of them to pal for parallel mode and now we're going through the instructions and it looks like this one is the master and then these ones are slave one and slave two so i gotta go through this manual and set it up now once all of this wiring was complete i then spent a lot of time double checking and triple checking all of my continuity i wanted to make sure that i had l1 all hitting l1 l1 l1 across the board all the l2s uh so nothing was crossed uh the auto transformer was there and i had to turn on the auto transformer after about one day of running i did add a thermistor to the auto transformer just so that i could watch on a screen what the temperature is inside the auto transformer i've also added multiple monitors which are over here and what these will allow me to do is check what the total wattage is going into the load center as well as how much is on l1 how much is on l2 and it's just additional ways that i'll be able to pull efficiency numbers while running these over time now i'm going through all these menus and even though this is the master it does not automatically control the menus in the rest of them so now that i've got everything set up in this menu i'm going through and checking the rest so this is item number five and it says us2 so over here us2 and us2 at this point all of the menus in each inverter are exactly the same all the voltages all the parameters all of it so now i think i can turn on these circuit breakers and hopefully nothing is blown up so it looks like looks like all of them are putting out 60 hertz so now that all of them are working i can turn on the auto transformer that should be this one i can hear a little buzz coming from the auto transformer okay now let's go ahead and turn on this one which will be the water heater [Applause] and all the fans kicked on and it looks like this one is showing a little over 30 percent and the other two are just under thirty percent all right we can turn that off next let's see what happens when we turn on the solar and that's going to be these disconnects down here so this disconnect i'm going to switch on and what happens oh it's showing the solar coming in so this one turned on okay let's see what happens now it says that it is charging at 0.7 amps okay now let's try the next one okay so it found the solar and it's going to drop that that's open circuit voltage so it's going to drop that down i turned off the grid power now let's switch on the inverters see it worked excellent this says we're pulling 1.1 kilowatts i just came in the garage and i checked over here as i tend to do and the auto transformer is 48.2 degrees celsius inside so that's the hottest i've ever felt it so i can feel that that warmth it's not like it's going to burn my hand but i can feel it warm around here now it doesn't have a specification for the maximum temperature inside however it does say on here ambient air temperature 60 degrees celsius and if we look over here we can see there's a whole lot of power being drawn on this leg compared to that one so let's uh let's take a look at our neutral so we're at 14 amps on the neutral and so we're still half of what it can go up to so it can go a lot higher than that 32 amps on the neutral is the maximum so i don't think this is bad in any way i just noticed that it hasn't been that warm before up at 48 degrees celsius i typically see it in the 30s each one of these inverters is 900 and it's a 5000 watt inverter and can accept up to 6000 watts of pv now the largest pv array i have outside is 5.1 kilowatts so that entire array can feed into just one it actually this is the 5.1 kilowatt array feeding this inverter this one is a 4.4 kilowatt array and over here this one gets a 3.3 kilowatt array so this one has the the easiest time but all three have turned on and work at taking the power from the pv charging the battery powering the house and garage i mean they're doing their job so just in the initial day here that i've had them on there hasn't been any problems and i'm really excited about it i'll probably do a one month update after these have been running for a while to report if there's been any problems during that time i plan on running some efficiency numbers at different wattage so at a high wattage a low wattage and try to find out what the overall efficiency is of running these inverters they're a little bit less efficient than the smas but there's so much less money that losing out on a little bit of efficiency might be worth it but i do need to run the numbers to make sure all of this is really sloppy you know i don't like the look of all of the wiring just out in the open but i did want to get these up on the wall and test them it's been a while waiting for parts to come in if any of you have ordered things this year you know it's just kind of difficult to get your materials and supplies in so i wanted to get them up on the wall so i could get the testing underway be able to make the videos for you now on a previous video a lot of people commented that the way that i wired up the auto transformer could potentially be a little dangerous basically i have the auto transformer on its own circuit breaker now the potential problem is if that circuit breaker trips for any reason and the house and garage are still pulling power there will be an imbalance somewhere between the two legs so the two legs have to add up to 240 volts because that's what they're putting out but if you're not using much power on one and you are on the other then there will be an imbalance a difference in voltage between the two sides so that was a great point that so many of you brought up in one of my previous videos and thank you for that i did order some parts to try to change that up and make that more stable so once those parts come in i'll probably change up and add the fusing to the pv wiring i'll change up the wiring on the auto transformer try to fancy that up and make it so that there's not the potential of feeding the house with an imbalance so you know thank you guys for those comments i do read all the comments and they are very helpful and i take them to heart and i love that you guys take the time to try to help me out so we all just get better as a community building our diy systems now if you want to buy any of these components i will leave links in the description below to signature solar and you can use my coupon code which is davidpaws and that will get you a discount on your purchase it is part of the affiliate program so it does help out me and the channel so thank you if you choose to use that code so thanks everybody so much for watching if you enjoy the videos please like subscribe comment and share

Channel: DavidPoz

Views: 58,951

Rating: 4.9523053 out of 5

Keywords: Growatt, inverter, split phase, 120/240, volt, solar, mppt, charge controller, 5000w, 6000w, 5kw, 6kw, 5000ES, Signature Solar, Gyll battery, Lifepo4, 48v battery, off grid, off-grid, whole house, house, power, diy, powerwall

Id: dCQIGPuPHCc

Length: 28min 57sec (1737 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021