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Andy Rhody
10th October 2017, 21:41
We've had 6.8 Kw of solar on our garage roof since 2013 which does 87% of our bill annually running problem free but in July started blowing a circuit breaker between 10AM and 2PM every day. I'd reset the breaker and in a little while it would blow again and my wonderful Power One inverter 5 year warranty had just run out the month before. It was less than 4 years old but the Power One warrantes start the day they are manufactured and they sit around a while in the warehouses. I got burned on my wind inverter too.

Anyway with work and family issues I've had no time to address it and wasn't sure what to do. I did notice that right after the breaker would blow it would be warm and none of my other breakers in the chain would get warm so just for fun I replaced it for 15 bucks and everything seems to be running fine for a week. I hope that was all it was.

Has anyone ever hear of a circuit breaker going bad?

Here's the diagram.

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e295/andy47bottles/Solar%20Bad%20Breaker._zpsyod9onoh.jpg (http://s41.photobucket.com/user/andy47bottles/media/Solar%20Bad%20Breaker._zpsyod9onoh.jpg.html)

Rob Beckers
11th October 2017, 06:40
Andy, yeah, breakers can go bad. I've seen a few. So this is a 40A double-breaker? With just 5kW in solar PV it should only get about half its rated current.

Good to hear your solar system is still going strong!

By the way, a very dishonest policy IMO by Power-One/ABB to not use the sale date for warranty. These inverters don't wear sitting on the shelf. I'm not aware of any other manufacturer using this dubious method. There should be a consumer protection law against such practices.

-RoB-