Solar Nerd articles about: Enphase

If you’re looking for a solar storage battery for your home, Enphase offers several options with its IQ series. Enphase is best known for its microinverters. Most solar homeowners these days are choosing power optimizers or microinverters over conventional central inverters, and Enphase dominates the North American microinverter market with its IQ7 and new IQ8 series. Meanwhile, lithium batteries are getting cheaper all the time, utility companies are having scheduled blackouts (aka power safety shutoffs) due to wildfire risks, and utilities continue to attack net metering.

Enphase, the maker of the most popular microinverters in the US solar market, announced that it will be releasing the latest version of the IQ series later in 2021. Product releases from Enphase are often a big deal, because microinverters and power optimizers now dominate the residential solar market, accounting for about 80% of all installations. New features from Enphase are good news for consumers, and also have the potential to move other inverter manufacturers to adopt those features to stay competitive.

If you’re a homeowner who is thinking of going solar, or you’re already working with a solar installer and have a technical proposal in front of you, you’ll know that one of the key components in a home solar system is the inverter. Solar panels generate direct current (DC) electricity, which is the kind of electricity you get from a battery. Grid electricity and your home, however, use alternating current (AC).

When it comes to buying a home solar system, homeowners often focus their attention on choosing the best solar panels. However, arguably the most important component isn’t the panels, but the inverter. The inverter does the work of converting direct current (DC) power from the panels into alternating current (AC) power that your home can use. It’s the most complex device in the system, and the component most likely to experience failures.

If you have Enphase microinverters, you will probably have a device called the Envoy. This is the device that reports your solar production data and makes it available to the website and smartphone app. Your Envoy is connected to the internet with a couple different possible methods. When it loses its connection for any reason, your solar production data in the app will be frozen at the last time that the Envoy was able to connect.

If you’ve read my article about how solar inverters work, you’ll know that one way to get the maximum output out of your solar panels in difficult shade conditions is to use microinverters. The company that is far and away the largest player in the microinverter industry is Enphase Energy. In business since 2006, the California-based Enphase has shipped over 20 million microinverters, so they have a lot of experience. They’ve gone through several iterations of their product lineup, and in this article I’ll take a look at their latest offerings.