I'm in the middle of evaluating quotes for a roof solar installation and your comparison of microinverters vs optimizers can't come at a better time. Thank you!

You claim panels are "going to last decades". So sure, 21 years is "decades", but I assume most people understand that to mean "at least 30 years". Do you have any evidence that panels last 20+, 30+ years? I'm skeptical that there are enough 30-50 year old panels in service today to make any meaningful prediction about the life of current panels.

They have 50 year old panels making ~60% of rated power.....degradation is no worry are panels will be so cheap soon (see Rethinx) that it will be almost nothing to do so.

Thanks for this video! Now I understand how DC Optimizers can create a more streamlined and efficient system than going the Microinverters route. It sounds like the power optimizers are the least complicated route to go when including battery storage.

Really? You may have experience as an electrician but that doesn't mean you know what you're talking about.

Totally wrong, string inverters works totally fine, there is no "Christmas light effekt". All modern panels has by-pass diodes, so this is not a issue. What planet have you been on the last decade?

4 parts to every system panels contoler (you left that out) storage batteries and inverter ... and to obtain efficency first storage then controler .. panels and inverters are least important and don't dump in to the grid. Keep the energy and bank ..never use a all in one contoler and inverter

Competing vested interests create a lot of bs stories.

My feed-in 5cents kWh, supply 50cents kWh. Grid makes dirt cheap electricity expensive electricity. Return on infrastructure investment and maintenance and expansion and workers and equipment. Note new infrastructure construction values the existing infrastructure. Mileage rate $/mile x total length to millions and millions of customers. Return on total investment $BILLIONS per year. Nobody is thinking about the massive cost of the grid. Nobody even sees the grid. Nobody thinks that is my money used to transmit over huge distances. Everybody thinks it is government money or others money. Nobody thinks that it is the grid that makes electricity expensive. THINK ABOUT FACTS and then make decisions. Offgrid in the suburbs terrifies national grid owners. BV, battery vehicles, have oversized, for daily drive, batteries. Most vehicles are parked 23hrs every day and all night long. BV makes rooftop PV extremely valuable. No grid electricity costs. No heating gas costs. No petroleum costs. After-tax savings huge. A little fossil fuel in winter weeks is nothing. Petroleum for road building and petrochemical industry will continue.

ehh, that brown home with blue windows looks terrible. I think you have to commit to a totally black roof if you are worried about how it will look.

My feed-in 5cents kWh, supply 50cents kWh. Grid makes dirt cheap electricity expensive electricity. Return on infrastructure investment and maintenance and expansion and workers and equipment. Note new infrastructure construction values the existing infrastructure. Mileage rate $/mile x total length to millions and millions of customers. Return on total investment $BILLIONS per year. Nobody is thinking about the massive cost of the grid. Nobody even sees the grid. Nobody thinks that is my money used to transmit over huge distances. Everybody thinks it is government money or others money. Nobody thinks that it is the grid that makes electricity expensive. Think about facts and then make decisions. Offgrid in the suburbs terrifies national grid owners. BV, battery vehicles, have oversized daily drive batteries. Most vehicles are parked 23hrs every day and all night long. BV makes rooftop PV extremely valuable. No grid electricity costs. No heating gas costs. No petroleum costs. After-tax savings huge. A little fossil fuel in winter weeks is nothing. Petroleum for road building and petrochemical industry will continue.

100years from the first national grid in the UK. Australian grid costs $1million per km new build. Complex energised occupied city and suburban streets, or cross country energised towers, both expensive to increase capacity. No blackouts allowed. City and suburb shift work only. Australia has 1million km. $1TRILLION to supply 15% of Australia’s total energy used. Plus generation costs. GDP is $1.5TRILLION. More GRID electricity capacity to supply 100% electric energy and no CO2 emissions, insane economically. Rooftop PV and BV with an OVERSIZED daily drive battery parked 23hrs every day and all night does not need grid electricity. Grid costs are fixed costs shared by grid customers. Offgrid homes in the suburbs will destroy grid electricity cashflows. Grids costs are rental costs. Grid supply makes dirt cheap electricity from the generator, expensive electricity to the customers.

Good information 👍 😊

The immediate future is using the AC current. An extra panel will easily overcome a small efficiency loss.

Brad says electronics that get through the first year have a full reliable life. Quality Electronics last for decades. Enphase has a good reputation. If a PV panel or microinverter fails, you know which one and so can plan to replace it, no searching the array on the roof with enphase. Timely action in warranty period. Generation is maintained. CASH SAVINGS is maintained. Grid electricity is expensive electricity. If the supplier disappears in the future, you probably will not need them if your system is reliable and older than one year. 240vAC microinverters on a metal roof is a safer situation vs 600vDC. CASH SAVINGS lost adds to COST of cheaper string inverters.

Im a solar tech in california and let me tell you DO NOT get a DC optimizer system. I have serviced tons of solaredge systems and I have encountered customers whos inverters blow out EVERY YEAR. You have no idea how angry they are to find out their system stopped working a year ago and receive a $3000 electric bill. Microinverters are significantly more reliable. Im speaking from over 10 years of solar troubleshooting and diagnostics.

This is very discouraging. I would love to do solar in my home in NC, but the risks are significant and the incentives are dwindling.

Well your video was a good video but you did not mention any DIY systems. I did my complete system myself at my farm. I had a nice unusable hillside that was facing the correct direction for a perfect ground mount. I went with Enphase inverters. My power company allows me to associate other meters with my net metering solar array so I don’t really use a lot of kW’s at my farm but I am able to apply the excess to my home bill. The total installation was somewhat labor intensive but so simple. The money I saved was tremendous. My system will pay for itself in 9 years.

I live in Phoenix which has lot of solar and I can tell you every single person I know who leased or agreed to a PPA has been screwed over. I know at least 10 where they are now paying for a lease and a power bill which exceeds what they had before. The solar company response it "Your using too much power". Reality is they were sold a lie. Then have the solar sales side which IMO any solar company also providing a solar loan is a scam. They are not even selling solar at a legitimate price they are selling financial products to people who are gullible enough to only care about the monthly cost. The ROI is so long it is double or triple the warranty period. If you price the products out find the prices they quoted are 10-20 times the cost of the equipment. The problem with the industry it's unregulated and mostly scammers I have had to run off door to door salesmen multiple times who try to tell me something wrong with my meter only to find out they are selling solar. Vivant solar another scammer trying to get my mother to sign a contract to go on her roof when I went over looked at his tablet it was a 11 year solar lease contract. He claimed it was a liability release the fact of the matter it only released the customer if Vivant could not install solar on her roof. Solar industry are about 90% scammers.

I prefer a string inverter system - less to go wrong, much cheaper, and in most use cases, any differential panel shading only occurs at the start or end of the day, when not much power is available anyway. Secondly I would go with a hybrid inverter with build in solar chargers, such as EG4 18K or 12k which supports back-feeding the grid as well as power-shifting. These systems need to be used with batteries. I also like the EG4 LFP 48V nominal batteries - at around $1100 per 5KWh, they are a good deal, and should last decades if the daily discharge depth cycle is limited to less than 50% on average.

I don't agree with all your technical points, but I completely agree with the overall message: Microinverters are the least reliable element of a system, and there are a lot of them. I can't imagine the frustration of having them die on a roof. I have a 30 panel ground mount system at my home in Maui, that is grid-tied, with microinverters. The system is about ten years old. At six years microinverters (enphase) started dying. By ten years they were ALL dead. After some protracted communication with Enphase I got a small break on the price of 30 new microinverters and a new whatever they call it that monitors them. No one would come to my house to replace them, my contractor was long ago out of business, new companies looked at the slope of the ground they'd have to work on and said "nope". So I had to replace them myself. I'm 77, and physically active, but it was a tough week. I did manage to find a helper, but that was it. I totally expect the microinverters to start failing again in ten years. I plan to add some additional panels on a less dramatic ground mount and DC couple the series strings to an integrated system--probably a EG4 18K and a wall mount battery. I'll treat the microinverter system as a legacy AC coupled addition that the 18K (and other similar products) can handle and do 500VDC-ish series strings feeding the integrated MPPT controllers. The newest Tesla powerwalls likewise treat AC-coupled systems like yesterday's tech, only they ignore them even more than the integrated offerings from other companies--which has the installer companies going a bit nuts. I'm also building a big container/groundmount 3-phase system at my shop on the mainland, and there won't be a microinverter anywhere in that picture. They made a lot of sense 20 years ago, but they really are legacy tech.

The pessimism is real... inevitably change will come better sooner than later when crude is nonexistent and very expensive.

Some say the Victron controllers wont charge the battery till its over 5 volts above the battery. So if I'm getting 16 volts and 18 amps it still isn't charging? That's 288 watts. If this is the case what should I do to raise the voltage? You can charge a battery with 1 amp.

No upgrades in a hundred years all bullshit

No solar I've ever seen looks better than the roof did without it but you've shown some really neat examples. That being said I'm very particular about aesthetics and really don't want anything covering the metal roof of my beautiful farmhouse so the panels were installed elsewhere.

Some good points but you should watch Tony Seba and RethinkX

Deye hybrid inverter solve the problem with storage of energy in the battery because of the generatorport. My oldest micro inverter is 22 years old. If you don't buy a Chinese micro inverter it will last forever.

I think my one year old ground mounted emphase micros are warranted for 25 years so maybe they’ll last a long time? I went with ground mounted solar because the roof needs replacing in a few years but I’m starting to think it’s the best way to go anyways.

The only one that's not ugly is the Tesla Solar Roof.

Why does the government not actually do this

OK! This is a rather dumb slant on what is probably intrinsically poor product design from certain vendors. Yes, Micro-inverters can fail if they are not used inside the specified range of current and voltage in/out. Yes, DC optimizers can fail if they are not used inside the specified range of current and voltage in/out. The bottom line is that BOTH of these devices are actually electronic switch-mode inverters. And BOTH can and will fail if used beyond their claimed ratings. The input from solar panels to the DC optimizer or micro-inverter is the same. The OUTPUTS are not. And there are minor differences in the way such systems can be wired. The main advantage of the DC optimizer over Micro-inverter is greater simplicity. Because it is basically a tried and true DC-DC buck-boost switch-mode technology coupled with MPPT input load optimization to "sum energy" into a common bus back to the actual DC - AC inverter powering your home. The more common topology is to use DC optimizers under solar panels to directly charge a local battery storage system. This is cheaper, more efficient and more reliable overall. The DC-AC inverter to power your home then is from the battery only. Some readers may find this helpful... www.mysolarquotes.co.nz/blog/how-solar-power-works/micro-inverters-vs-string-inverters-a-comprehensive-guide/#:~:text=The%20power%20rating%20of%20a,of%20235%2D440%2B%20W.

What about bi-facial PV panels?

My experience is the opposite, DC optimizers seem to fail way more often then the micro inverters. I've yet to do an enohase replacement, but have run into many soleredge optimizers that failed. With rapid shutdown rules, micros work really well. Batteries, yeah that's marginally better, but it's a fairly minor percentage.

At least in my area N. California the discrete panel minoring is disabled to the consumer. I think the main reason is to cut down on service calls. People that don't understand the system would be calling their installer right and left when they saw something they think is a problem when it's not.

Solar panels, are a contributer to global warming due to the heat they reflect back into the local environment.

Why would I install ANY expensive, critical devices that, as you say, are guaranteed to fail. DC, micro or otherwise? I have yet to see any ROI projections that include these costs. Solar as sold today is a fraud.

I'm glad to find out we have another way to avoid string inverters. EEVblog on episode 1426 went over an issue he noticed because a tiny amount of shade on a sting inverter system was causing it to produce significantly less power when the shade was there. An easy way to think about the problem with a string inverter is to not mix new & old batteries. This is because the batteries with a lower output is going to encourage the other batteries to try to recharge that one battery & the same thing would happen with a string inverter system.

In the US, if you are roof mounting, either DC optimizers or micro-inverter are absolutely required under every panel for the emergency shutoff feature. Simply stringing the panels is not an option and the whole shading problem therefore disappears.

The whole point of micro inverters is to minimize wiring and eliminate routing dangerous levels of DC on the roof.

Thanks for this. A bit late for me, since my system was installed six years ago, but still enlightening. I don't know if the DC optimizer was even an option back then. But I have found that the microinverters on my system are _incredibly_ *unreliable*. In six years, five have failed so far. There are only 20 to start with, so that's a 25% failure rate in just the first six years, averaging one failure per year. And of course, they are way up on the roof, where it's hard to replace. Fortunately, the installer has been gracious about the whole thing. The inverters are under warranty, but the manufacturer doesn't cover labor. I had to pay labor for the first two repairs, but the installer has agreed to cover labor as these continue to fail, given how unreliable they have been. Who knows if I'll still be in this same house if and when the panels have degraded enough to require replacement, but seems that already, and probably even more so by then, the technology has been advancing quickly. If it weren't for the cost, I'd love to upgrade my 300W panels with 400W ones, and switch to the DC optimizer approach you suggest here.

"choosing an installer you trust to do good work and service the system for many years" - that's an impossible task for an average consumer. I think, one can get the most peace of mind if he gets technical and supervises and inspects the work himself, and then, instead of paying A LOT upfront for a 25-y warranty (which he may or may not get), chooses instead to pay out of pocket for all ongoing repairs (or continue education and even do them himself - it's another option). I'm just trying to make solar economically viable. Pay 10s of thousands upfront and wait years to recover the cost IF all goes well - this doesn't sound very reassuring.

Batteries cost a lot. How long do they last anyway? Perhaps the most profitable approach is to just use inverters to help run A/C during the sunniest time of the day. A maniacal desire I see in some people to turn every ray of light into electricity might be eclipsing common economic sense.

Sounds like a very good point. Thanks for helping crystalize my understanding of solar technology. I heard Tesla has just released a great integrated battery system that accepts DC from the panels and is easy to install. With utility companies not wishing to pay much for produced electricity, sounds like batteries might be the future anyway.

Why, for a start, don't they install the microinverters downstairs?

This is a blanket response to all those below saying I’m wrong about the Christmas tree analogy. To those screaming that it’s wrong and dangerously misleading to use this analogy because it no longer applies because of Bypass Diodes, please keep reading. The Christmas tree light analogy works perfectly in explaining how solar was traditionally wired and installed. Therefore, it is both useful and applicable. To say that it is not is like arguing that explaining how internal combustion engines work is no longer necessary. Modular level electronics such as micro inverters or optimizers use technology to overcome that very problem. Understanding that basic issue will help consumers in understanding how solar works. Bypass Diodes are just a new form of a modular level electronics that helps overcome the shade problem. String inverters coupled with panels with bypass diodes may be just as good at controlling the shade as any other technology. That’s a moot point today here in the US where it’s not offered to residential consumers because of the virtual duopoly between Enphase and SolarEdge. Plus, if you just use a string inverter, you lose the advantage of modular level electronics that give you monitoring access at a panel level, which is super important to consumers. If you don’t have that, you won’t know if you have an individual panel out easily. Also to be 100% clear the most important thing for a consumer to do is use an installer that they trust to do a good job and take care of the system for a long time with a good warranty that covers labor. That’s far more important than an individual technology choice you make. Hope this helps clear things up.

This is a blanket response to all those below saying I’m wrong about the Christmas tree analogy. To those screaming that it’s wrong and dangerously misleading to use this analogy because it no longer applies because of bypass Diodes, please keep reading. The the Christmas tree light analogy works perfectly in explaining how solar was traditionally wired and installed. Therefore, is both useful and applicable. To say that it is not as like arguing that explaining how internal combustion engines work is no longer necessary. With the advent of modular level electronics such as micro inverters or optimizers used technology to overcome that very problem. Understanding that basic issue will help consumers in understanding how solar works. Bypass diodes are just a new form of a modular level electronics that helps overcome the shade problem. String inverters coupled with panels with bypass diodes may be just as good at controlling the shade as any other technology. That’s a moot point today here in the US where it’s not offered to residential consumers because of the virtual duopoly between Enphase and SolarEdge. Plus, if you just use a string inverter, you lose the advantage of modular level electronics that give you monitoring access at a panel level, which is super important to consumers. If you don’t have that, you won’t know if you have an individual panel out easily. Also to be 100% clear the most important thing for a consumer to do is use an installer that they trust to do a good job and take care of the system for a long time with a good warranty that covers labor. That’s far more important than an individual technology choice you make. Hope this helps clear things up.

Videos like this one do the most damage because the channel presents well, and the presenter sounds like he knows what he's talking about. 80% of what he says is correct, and is valuable information. This makes it far more likely that the 20% of downright false information imparted will be accepted, absorbed and acted upon by viewers. As others have said, the reality today is that the Christmas light effect really no longer matters. Most panels I'm looking at have three bypass diodes per panel, meaning a 12 panel array is in fact 36 independent solar production zones. Shade one of those zones, and the 35 other zones continue to produce completely normally. You'll only see production drop for the zones that receive shade. The video also fails to specify that even back in the Dark Ages when bypass diodes were not being used in solar panels, the shading issue only really affects situations where there is shading. I know it sounds obvious, but it needs to be spelled out for some folks. MANY installations, if not most, won't suffer from any shading at all. So yeah - really, DC optimizers only really make sense to me if you want per panel monitoring. Otherwise they don't seem to be worth the considerable expense. Just get a good set of modern panels and a good string inverter, and you're good to go.

Totally incorrect regarding string inverters. Most panels from the last five years have bypass diodes. Some are even half or tri-cut. So, while shading a single panel, you will only lose power on that panel, or even a portion of it if it is half cut or tri-cut. And in high heat zones, optimizers or microinverters fail every few years, if manufacturers go out of business, you must find the identical optimizer or microinverter to ensure that the system functions properly. But string inverters can be replaced with any manufacturer's product. The main current disadvantage of string inverters is that you cannot monitor panels individually, however manufacturers like as Huawei are working on solutions for that as well.

I’m an engineer that actually has designed solar systems from the utility scale to commercial and residential applications for over 15 years. Dc optimized systems like the ones offered by SolarEdge are garbage. Not because of the technology but because SolarEdge, the largest manufacturer optimizer technology refuses to replace the components when they fail, unless you threaten to take them to court. Microinverters such as those from enphase have the lowest failure rate of any technology and there’s plenty of data to back that up. They actually test for that. But for the average homeowner, that doesn’t have a lot of shading of their roof by trees etc, then latest generation of solar panels (with bypass diodes) coupled with a high quality string inverter will be just fine. It’s not usually worth adding 20%+ to the system cost for a 5% improvement in performance. Also, black on black panels are purely an aesthetic choice but one that makes sense for residential applications as it has wider curb appeal. Most tier 1 manufacturers are making such panels these days at affordable prices. Finally, the statement about subcontractors is hit or miss. It would be ideal to have all work performed in-house by a company with a long track record of solar specific work. But that’s not the reality everywhere. The more realistic solution is to have a dedicated solar installer that has a sales arm that drives business to them. So, technically it’s not subcontracted since all the work is being performed by the contractor but the consultation/sales part is outsourced because those are two different specialties.

Just normal string inverters work very well. Where i live circumstances (normal yield) are worse then in Ottawa. Still a string inverter works very well here. I am in the solar business for more then 10 years and the chistmas tree explanation is just wrong. I prefer not using micro-inverters and really do not like Solaredge (Tigo optimizers are ok, they dont fault)