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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Have you owned a multi-kW inverter before? Because if you know one that is mostly free of drama I would love to know the brand! Solar photovoltaic systems are not as maintenance free as one might wish. They still make a ton of financial sense if you own them outright, but inverters and critter damage to wiring can be unwelcome surprise costs.

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I have an Aurora PVI-6000-OUTD-US that's been pretty solid. I've also heard good things about the Sunny-Boy inverters. One thing I like about my Aurora is that there is a linux command-line tool that can pull data from the inverter over serial. I pull data from mine every 5 minutes into text files on my home server.

Thank you. I have a SolarEdge currently... after two bad units (to their credit, under warranty) the third has been solid for a long time. I have heard mixed things about microinverters, and my installation has developed partial shading over time (damn trees!) so that's something else I've looked at.

Victron's Multiplus and Quattro are drama free. I buried and conduited/sealed all my cabling and had zero issues.

Added bonus: if you use them with a CCGX and are comfortable with MQQT and/or Python there is literally nothing you can't control, automate or visualise with them. The CCGX itself is arm + linux and mostly open sourced https://www.victronenergy.com/live/open_source:start

The downsides are: 1) price but imho you get what you pay for many times over. 2) veconfigure for the multiplus itself is windows only, but runs fine in Wine on Linux and Mac

   We bought our solar panels from Solar Edge.It's a 4.5-5 KW system 
   We are in our forth year. I've done nothing to it, no  maintenance. It just works. Every now and then it rains and that cleans up the panels enough.

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