Inverter degradation over time when exporting to grid

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Leokem
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Oct 05, 2023 1:25 pm

Hey all,

Could not find anything related to this, but where I live and with what I currently produce, it's not worth it to sell the excess to the grid.
My country, however, have a (pretty bad) 15 minutes net metering, so I'm considering feeding a few kWh on peak sun to use it, but I'm wondering it makes sense to use the Export Control to feed something like 1kWh or 2kWh instead of the full possible load for my inverter. It gets warmer when it's on full load so I wonder if this could decrease its lifetime.

Thanks!
Dave Foster
Posts: 1256
Joined: Thu Oct 13, 2022 7:21 pm

It's an interesting topic, limiting the export reduces the amount of energy your inverter generates which reduces the amount of heat it produces, but the energy is free so it does no harm to export it to the grid?, plus the inverter is designed to maximise the conversion of PV into usable energy.
I have heard the Foxess product manager say that being throttled by the export limit means the electronics has to work a lot harder to meet a fixed limit and 'arguably' would shorten the design life.

Having heard arguments in favour and against doing this, my own view is that these are both perfectly legitimate modes of operation and you should choose the one that suits you best - excessive heat in summer can be managed by fitting cooling small fans on the top of the inverter which cool the fins.
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