FoxESS Community - Owners & Installers Forum

hi can anyone help?
i have had 2 prices for 18x Aiko Neostar 2S 455W All Black ABC N-Type Mono solar panels 11 to be placed west facing and 7 east facing.
one company wants to use a 3x SolaX TP 3.0kWh battery and a SolaX X1 G4 5.0D hybrid inverter. the other 2 x 5.18kw Fox Ess Ep5 (10.36kw Capacity) and a Fox hybrid ac inverter 6kw.
the solax system is dearer when i asked the installer to do a better price i showed him the Fox ess and fox inverter price he said the fox system wouldn’t work as that can only take 6 panels either side.
can anyone shed some light on this please

No 6 panels is not correct - I can’t comment on the Solax specs but a 6kw Fox H series inverter has a maximum string input of 4500 watts.

With the 11 panels on the one string if you have a perfect day it will clip at 4500w (note a perfect day is full sun, but cool such as May/early June - in July/August the panels will derate slightly because of high temperatures).

It’s not a problem to have 11 panels, for cloudy days it will generate a little bit more power - but on those few perfect days it will be restricted to a max of 4500 watts and not the 5000 watts the panels are in theory capable of.

I would say the Fox ESS and Solax systems are very comparable in terms of quality and reliabilty.

thank you very much Dave, it’s conflicting advice from 2 different installers that’s putting me off a little, i thank you for your reassurance.

A KH7 inverter would be perfect for this. It has three MPPTs so you could have the 7 east facing panels on one string and spilt the 11 west facing panels to 5 and 6 on their own strings. No issue with clipping then.

Rather than two EP5s I would look at one EP11 instead as it has a higher charge/discharge rate (up to 10kW) and greater possibility for future expansion.

The cost of the KH7 vs the H1-6.0 and 1x EP11 vs 2xEP5 shouldn't be massive.