Apple Valley · Mojave High Desert
Sixteen kilowatts of glass, forty-six and a half kilowatt-hours of lithium, and no wire running to the road.
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World Health Organization UVI · Apple Valley
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Plant status
Four stages carry the load. The profile below is the shape of a clear summer day — what the array could make, what the inverter is able to pass, and what the house actually draws.
Clear-day power profile
Against rated limits
Plant figures are a static snapshot. Every value is held in a single PLANT object and can be swapped for a polled feed without touching the markup.
Generation
Seven in series rather than five is a decision about watts per amp. The tracker limits current, never voltage, so a taller string puts forty per cent more power behind the same thirteen amps — reaching the ceiling earlier and holding it later.
Field verdict, Aug 15: the wash test is in and it settles the argument. With the glass cleaned, PV1 read 3.4 kW and PV2 3.6 kW — ~7.0 kW total, unchanged. Soiling was never the cap. What is left is geometry: modules lying near-flat at the worst midday angle, and now visibly bowing mid-span on their cinder blocks. Under afternoon light a single tracker has peaked at 5.1 kW, so the array's demonstrated capability remains 9–10 kW combined. Racking, not washing, is what recovers it.
Meter verified against a known-good unit before the reading was trusted.
Conversion
Ten kilowatts of split phase, two trackers, a two hundred amp charger. It is also the tightest constraint on the property — eleven kilowatts of input against sixteen of glass.
Combining
Each sub-array feeds its own tracker and never meets the other. The manual is explicit: PV1 and PV2 stay independent, and so must the arrays of any two inverters run in parallel.
Storage
Five hundred and twenty-five amps of discharge behind a two hundred and twenty amp inverter. With unit three revived the bank is further oversized for the machine in front of it, which is the correct way round. B2 is the one to watch — it takes more current than B1 on every reading and runs fifteen to twenty degrees hotter doing it.
B1 against B2 · state of charge
The two packs meet at the top of charge and part company under load. Both reached 94 % together; by the next morning low the gap was fifteen points. That is a capacity and gauge difference, not a wiring fault.
B1 against B2 · temperature
B2 runs hotter in every single paired reading, charging and discharging alike, and it kept doing so after the Anderson connector was reseated. The reseat restored current sharing; it did not close the thermal gap. Remission, not a cure.
Unit three
Fifteen and a half kilowatt-hours that held charge and passed nothing. The manufacturer is in bankruptcy, so every step below was owner-diagnosed — down to a blown 300 A fuse in the positive path, with every cell alive behind it.
53.20 V internal, steady, no drain. Cells are sound.
All alive — ~3.3 V per cell, ~19.5 V across each six-cell span, verified by hand.
LWS-16S300A-915(B) — 16S 300 A with an active balancer. Intact. Negative path good through the FET bank and heatsink.
0.00 V at the Anderson, against 53.75 V on a working pack.
No pack appears to the app. The single UART feeds the display; there is no radio.
Blown 300 A ANL fuse, positive path. 53 V measured across the fuse on the battery side, 0 V downstream — open circuit, confirmed.
Hot-aerosol QRR0.012, potassium/strontium nitrate, sitting intact inside the case. Do not touch it.
New 300 A ANL and holder fitted. Unit 3 is on the bus. Bank is now three modules, 46.5 kWh, 915 Ah.
Fifteen and a half kilowatt-hours were out of service for the price of a fuse. The original is a bolt-in ANM link, 300 A stamped, red viewing windows in the lug bodies. Standing upgrade for all three packs: Class T 300 A, Blue Sea 5113 — the right interrupt rating for a bank that can deliver 525 A into a bolted fault.
The arithmetic
The array demonstrated 9–10 kW of real capability in afternoon light; flat mounting is what caps midday at ~7, and the wash test proved dirt was not the difference. Adjustable-tilt racking recovers it and steepens for winter per frame. Unit 3 is now carrying the evening, which is what the shortfall column was waiting on.
As configured
The inverter enforces a voltage ladder — [15] < [12] < [04] < [14] < [35] < [37] < [05] < [09/11]. Any profile change that breaks the chain is silently refused.
Sun in, lithium between, house on the far side.
The build
Measured on Aug 15: each module is 88.8″ × 44.6″ on a 35 mm frame and weighs 62 lb. Lying near-flat across cinder blocks, they are visibly sagging mid-span. Point-loading glass on two blocks invites cell microcracks — permanent output loss that no wash and no tilt ever gets back. The home-built A-frame plan is scrapped. Commercial adjustable-tilt ground-mount racking, bought and anchored, is the next job on this property.
What killed the ballast plan
Fitment spec — vet every listing against this
The old dimensioned plan assumed an 81″ module depth and a cinder-block ballast foot. Both are wrong now — it has been withdrawn rather than left up to mislead a future row layout. New spacing gets drawn once the racking is chosen, because tilt angle and rail height set the shading pitch, not the reverse.
Field log
Running record of measured data and what each reading changed. Newest first. The model gets re-based from this table, never the other way round.
| When | Reading | Action / verdict |
|---|
Open goals
Still to do
A second inverter is not on this list. A parallel unit needs its own independent array — fourteen more modules bought to gain AC capacity that a 4.3 kW peak will never ask for.
Standing orders
Nine hundred and fifteen amp-hours of paralleled LFP with no fusing between cells. At fifty-three volts the hazard is not shock — it is a bolted fault across the busbars. One hand in the box. Tape the shanks. Metal off the wrists.
Each pack carries a hot-aerosol fire suppressor — QRR0.012, potassium and strontium nitrate. It is a one-shot device that discharges into a sealed case. Work around it, never on it, and never with the case closed on your hand.
Three hundred and forty-eight volts open circuit per string, higher on a cold morning. A DC arc has no zero crossing to extinguish it. Break the combiner poles before touching a connector, and never pull one under load.