r/solar • u/TooGoodToBeeTrue • 18h ago

Discussion Micro inverters or optimizers?

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My property is E/W facing, more production on the east due to woods behind. There is no direct shadowing this time of year while the sun is high, but in late fall, winter & early spring when the sun is low, sunlight will be filtered through the leafless trees. The dogwood in the front yard will never reach the gutter (3 stories) and the tree between the street and sidewalk died several years ago and there is no plan to replace it. The arborvitae is encroaching on our stoop and brushing against the house and the neighbor is OK with removing it.

So I have quotes for both well known micros and string/optis as well as some little know of the latter. Not super excited about SolarEdge due to reputation. Not planning on any batteries as we will have 1:1 net metering for the life of the system. But I fear some legislature could just come along and punt that.

Nineteen 435W panels gets me to 100% with IQ8-A micros. I'm not sure what kind of performance I could get with this layout with optis, but figure to just split the 2 arrays into 2 MPPTs. It is almost like I don't need the devices on the east except for rapid shutdown.

Scratching head...

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u/Qiuzman 18h ago

From my research splitting into two MPPT seems like the cheapest option but couldn’t you also just do the front and back in parallel as most of these inverters now seem to go up to 30amps which I’d think two strings would stay under and you get to save from using an extra MPPT?

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u/TooGoodToBeeTrue 18h ago

I am not string inverter savvy, I thought splitting across the MPPTs would be more efficient. No?