Because we simply can’t keep truck-rolling two hours away every week for two months.
here for the sunshine shenanigans
Month: July 2024
This week, my YouTube channel was victim to some malicious copy-strikes from a home inspector in Arizona. Short story, I exposed his arrogance in a blog post on electricdramatic.com last year, that post was used in a hearing against him earlier this month, and he chose to lash out.
The videos he copyright-struck were on a secondary channel from my main channel, and they were uploaded as unlisted, used only to support proper embedding into the blog post, and to avoid losing parts of the record. This is clearly a “fair use” situation.
Clearly pissed about my post being used against him in court (unbeknownst to me, might I add), he copy-struck ALL videos uploaded, including videos he did not own. This is against the policy for how the DMCA takedowns feature is allowed to be used, but YouTube has very little recourse for a smaller creator like me to fight malicious actors who know how to play the system.
The secondary channel was taken down, obviously, but what I didn’t realize was that any YouTube channels on the same Google account are also often disabled when this happens. And so, the solarboi’s YouTube presence disappeared. All videos, all subscribers.
Yes, YouTube has some tools for submitting for a repeal of this decision, but it’s extremely limited, and I’ve exhausted all the ones I can find already.
I’ll be doing my best to rebuild what I’ve lost, but I need all of YOUR help with this, too. I don’t intend to be cowed by well-known but insecure entities, but that only works when others feel the same way.
If you enjoy what I do, and support my work to inform the solar industry’s workers and customers, please consider sharing this post and subscribing to my new YouTube channel! To all those who have already shared the new channel and subscribed, thank you all so much for your support, it’s very appreciated. ❤️
By the way, please do not attempt to find the person responsible to harass or bully them in any way. He’s not worth it, I’m fully past the possibility of getting my channel back, and I don’t want to get into it with him any further. He’s a silly boi, and he’s playing games and finding out the hard way all on his own. I’d just like to wash my hands of this entire situation and move on.
This coming week, I hope to release a video where I’m playing with arc fault testing, which promises to be fun, and start a conversation around needing better tools for maintenance. Hope to see you there. 😄
For those of us who can’t get enough of solar troubleshooting info, I present to you your “SolarFix”, where I’m highlighting what the larger solar community is able to share when it comes to troubleshooting and maintenance of PV installations.
From a post by Energy Support Services:
Every season presents its own set of opportunities and challenges for solar energy systems, but the elevated temperatures of summer can be particularly tricky. One common issue is overheated breakers, which can lead to system failures. This case study conducted by Energy Support Services (ESS) explores a scenario where overheated breakers impacted multiple project stakeholders, and how innovative solutions were implemented to address the problem.
Great little case study. I’ve known similar situations with direct sun on an AC combiner box to be dealt with via some kind of extra sun cover. If you can interrupt the sun’s radiance before it ever hits the box, you’ve probably already fixed your intermittent breaker-tripping issues. The other solution is spacing your breakers farther apart, but often that’s not practical, depending on how the system was originally built.
If you’ve seen something that should be highlighted in SolarFix, or would like to submit a guest post, let me know!
Editor’s note 07/09/24 – An earlier version of this article asserted that any module could be used with the Pegasus railing. That was incorrect, and the offending intern has been sacked.
Amid Unirac publishing their new listings for NXT Umount and SolarMount, and rumor of EcoFasten getting their railings listed, Pegasus may have just completely blown the roof off the expectations for 3741 listings.
To date, the onus of testing has been placed on the racking manufacturer, who gathers all the ingredients, in dozens of permutations, to test components like modules, inverters, and MLPE. All those components are then specifically listed in the racking manufacturer’s “3741 installation addendum”, or some other document that modifies the installation manual for 3741 applications.
However, Pegasus contacted me this week to show me their listing: one with ZERO approved inverter vendors lists. No inverters, no MLPE. Excuse me, but what in the actual fuck.
I initially assumed that there was a document they forgot to send, so of course I asked for a list of approved vendors. They wrote back that no, there was no mistake. They simply don’t have a list of approved vendors, and that as long as the equipment used is listed under UL 1741 (or has some other specific UL 3741 COC), you may use that equipment with their railing.
ANY inverter. Not just an inverter that’s been tested by some other racking manufacturer, but ANY inverter. The implication is that literally everyone else could do this, too. We could find ourselves in a situation where picking an inverter and rail system that works with UL 3741 will no longer feel like untying a Gordian knot; instead, we’ll be slicing through it with a sword.
I have so many feelings about this— a mix of excitement, frustration, and dread. I’m excited that this indicates the industry could move to a much simpler way of listing these products, spending less of humanity’s time on confusion, lowering the barrier to entry, and allowing for more solar that is less complex. I’m frustrated that only now, 2 years after the first listing with SMA and Sollega, have we discovered that this is possible. And I’m dreading that the code body will see this, say “Oh, you’re not supposed to be able to do that”, and change the standard to lock out this option.
There’s probably good reasons why racking companies have defaulted to listing every piece of third party equipment, but it seems to be an overly large burden. It also ends up being far more complicated for the end user than it should be. Even if Pegasus’ strategy isn’t technically correct in some way, I hope we can compensate by adding the appropriate requirements into inverter listings, instead of overstuffing racking listings with redundancy.
Truly, the biggest obstacle to greater UL 3741 implementation is confusion about what equipment can be used (and also SolarEdge/Bill Brooks trying to undercut it and scare everyone with any chance they get). This is the entire reason I created UL3741.com, and dear reader, I truly hope this action by Pegasus will lead to the website’s demise. Simplifying the listing like Pegasus has done is the coolest thing ever. I just hope that we get to keep it.
Once you’re connected to the SolarEdge inverter’s WiFi, either find the IP address in your WiFi settings, or type “172.16.0.1” into your phone’s web browser. If nothing comes up, you’re screwed, but there’s a good likelihood that you’ll get access to the familiar menu of commissioning info and settings.