Two weeks ago I did a large solar install for a customer in West Texas. I own Shae Solar and we are a niche solar install company. I started my company with one purpose, use the best product I can find and drive cost low. Focus on quality installs that will lead to problem-free solar installs for many years for my customers.
The majority of my customers are wanting a turnkey solution, although a small percentage will do something to help offset the costs, which we love. So that means they generally don't want to be tweaking their system every so often. They want it installed and that's about it.
This install used two Sol Ark 15k inverters, 72 Trina bifacial panels, configured 12 per string, 36 per 15k. We also used 20 RuiXU 48v100ah batteries set up in two 10 slot racks. Finally, a mandatory item for those that are grid connected, a fused disconnect and a double throw transfer switch.
Regarding the Ruixu Battery part, they went fine. We wired and cabled them per the instructions and it went well. We had the entire system down, and then flipped the battery breakers on, taking about 4-5 seconds per battery, then 'woke' up each battery by depressing the reset button for about 4-5 seconds. This is typical of LIFEPO4 batteries in general.
We then turn on the PV disconnect on both inverters, set the Fused Disconnect to on, and the double throw transfer switch to Solar/w Grid. Then turned on the battery breaker on both inverters. As a note, you never turn on or off the battery breaker if current is flowing to or from the batteries.
All 20 batteries came online and after testing voltage, we then went to the Sol Ark 15ks (set up in parallel), and pressed the power button. Went to the Master inverter and configured the battery settings like max charge/discharge and amount of storage, and so on. This is well documented in the Sol Ark manual. As an aside, RUiXU hasn't paid for Sol Ark to perform testing for closed loop communication so Sol Ark says its not supported. However it works fine.
The main thing you want to do is to ensure all dip switches are set correctly. The one battery should have one of the dip switches set differently, see the install notes. And this is the one that should have the CAT6 cable connected to the Master inverter.
We then turn on the Load Breaker on both inverters. All breakers in the House main panel we flipped to off. As an aside, before we turned a breaker(s) on anywhere, battery, inverter, house panel, we always measure voltage at that step to ensure there weren't any issues.
After confirming no issues, we then turned on a few breakers in the house main panel and verified everything is working as expected. We continued turning breakers on and all is good. We then drove amps up by turning on the dryer, both AC units, oven and so on. We let that run for a little while and were seeing about 18kw of usage. We then turned all that off and the customer set up his his to run normally.
As of this article the customer has been running his house 100% off solar during the day and we enabled Time of Use (TOU). Where at 5pm (due to Winter) the inverters will pull from the battery stack. We set the inverters to not use Grid to charge the batteries. So around 7am CDT, the batteries begin charging and are finished around 12pm. So far the customer is depleting the batteries down to around 74%, each night. There is zero electricity being pulled from the Grid. The customer and I are working on a Net Metering/Interconnection with their utility and expect to have that set up within three or four weeks. The customer will then be able to dump all his excess production to the Grid, which will be awesome.
So long story short, I have been an advocate for SOK batteries for years as they are time tested and proven. I like that they are field serviceable and you don't have to send the heavy battery back. However I don't like the SOK battery rack (no wheels, no bus bars, no enclosed rack) so we used the EG4 rack. And I would need to remove the battery shelves and re-drill for the shelves since the SOK battery is a little larger.
When I saw the Ruixu Battery and how nice they looked and the battery rack, and then the price, I talked with my customer to give them a try and so far its been great. He has a great looking system and saved a fair amount of money.
The one issue we ran into, and its easily corrected, is the bus bar has screws in them where you would connect the battery cables to. However those screws are so tight, we snapped one of the heads off the screw. And two others we left alone. So they need to work on that. Otherwise, its a great rack!!!
Wrote by Michael Williams with Shae Solar
