In the last few months, there has been interest in the Fronius brand of grid tie inverters, specifically, questions asked here about configurations and performance. I have been in Contact with Fronius USA and they have agreed to monitor the solar-guppy site for questions relating to their products.

I have also been testing the IG2000 and IG3000 model inverters in the next few months be updating this site to have my performance data , notes and comments on these inverters

I'm really glad that Fronius is willing to participate in this open forum; I encourage the solar-guppy users to interact with the Fronius representative

Greetings, everyone -

My name is Brian Farhi and I am in charge of technical affairs for Fronius USA. If you ever have any questions or comments about our products, please feel free to let me know or open a discussion here. I am often on the road, so I will try to respond to posts as qickly as I can. If you ever have a question that needs an immediate answer, just send me a private message or call our office at 805 683-2200; or - please also feel free to rely on our distribution network. They have been trained to deal with design, installation and service related questions.

For those of you unfamiliar with Fronius, we are the #2 inverter manufacturer in the EU. We have about 80,000 solar inverters installed worldwide, of which about 40,000 are the IG series. The power electronics are the same for the US and the internationally-sold units. We're also a well-established company - 59 years young, with a long history of innovation in power electronics.

We pride ourselves in being responsive to our customers' needs, and strongly encourage you to give us all the feedback you can - both good and less good. We want to provide the best inverters out there, and can only improve upon what we have by knowing what you'd like to see.

I look forward to many productive conversations.

All the best,


Brian

I guess I'll start with the first question:

Are there any plans to bring the Sunrise series of inverters to the US?

Sean

And I'll add two cents. My company did an install about a month ago inconjunction with a few others (we all wanted in on the job , a reasonably large grid-tie installation for Parks Canada, a Canadian government organization, down at a biological station called The St.Lawrence Island Provincial Park.
The first one on a government building in Ontario, they say.

It was a large photovoltaic array, 44 Sharp 123s, with 22 panels feeding each of two Fronius IG inverters (11 panels in series, twice, each).

The inverters were attractive, light, easy to hang and easy to wire, with good manuals.

The only suggestion I would make would be to have more "knock-outs" in the bottom panel of the inverter. As we had two IG inverters, we needed to cut another hole in each to run the conduit for the monitoring wiring. Also, it would have been nice to have another "hole" to stick the lightning arrestor in, as the inspector wanted it at the inverter, not at the AC breaker box.

Other than that, yep, nice gear.

DJ

Sean -

Thanks for your question. The Sunrise series was the first generation solar inverter from Fronius. It is gradually being phased out and is being replaced by the IG series, so we don't plan on offering it in the US.


DJ -

Glad to hear you had a good experience with your first installs. I will include your feedback on the knockouts in my next conversations with the R&D team to see if we can make the knockouts easier to access in the future. Also - there should have been a pre-drilled hole for data communications on the right side of the bottom, with a plastic bushing to keep the hole closed when no in use. But regardless - it sounds like you would like a little more flexibility, and we can work on that.

Thank you both for your input.

All the best,


Brian

> DJ -

> Glad to hear you had a good experience with your first installs. I will
> include your feedback on the knockouts in my next conversations with the
> R&D team to see if we can make the knockouts easier to access in the
> future. Also - there should have been a pre-drilled hole for data
> communications on the right side of the bottom, with a plastic bushing to
> keep the hole closed when no in use. But regardless - it sounds like you
> would like a little more flexibility, and we can work on that.

Well, lessee now. We had two Froniusssss... Fronii? Anyway, we had two of them. So, to tally up the needed ports, we needed one knockout for the conduit coming down from the panels. One knockout for the conduit carrying the juice into into the building. One knockout for the comm cable (in conduit because the engineer was anal) going into the building, and one knockout to link the two Fronii together for the comm cable. So one inverter needed one more knockout than the other one did.
We eventually just stuck the lightning protector inside that nice big empty space at the bottom of the inverter, and the inspector was ok with that.

DJ

Yep - we have fun trying to pluralize the name Fronius, too!

I've noted your installation needs in our files. If you have any photos of the site (esp. of the connections or surge arrestors as installed), please feel free to email them to me.

Hope you enjoy many future installations!

> Yep - we have fun trying to pluralize the name Fronius, too!

> I've noted your installation needs in our files. If you have any photos of the
> site (esp. of the connections or surge arrestors as installed), please feel
> free to email them to me.

Actually, yeah, I do. I photo-log all my installs for future reference and to help my fuzzy memory get refreshed if I get a service call .
I don't have one with the surge arrestors installed, as I had originally put them on the AC breaker box, and the inspector rathered them on the inverter instead. No prob. But, as I said, that brought a total of preferrable knockouts to FIVE per inverter.
The pics are still in their original size off the digital camera, so they're the better part of .6 of a meg each. It might be easier to just stick them up on my company page and let you grab them from there.
I "shrunk" the final mounting picture, showing the conduit connections, and a pic of the company that supplied the panels and inverters, and I'll email that to you as a couple of 50k jpegs.

DJ

> I "shrunk" the final mounting picture, showing the conduit connections, and
> a pic of the company that supplied the panels and inverters, and I'll email
> that to you as a couple of 50k jpegs.

Actually, that was supposed to read "...and a pic of the engineer with the company that supplied the panels and inverter" and I'll send those images off just as soon as you provide an email address!

DJ

DJ , just hit the email button on one of Brians posts and it will pop up his address , or on a PC it should pullup a "new" email window