Solar panels get all the attention, with their clean aluminum, and beautifully crafted solar cells. Appropriately so, as the technology needed to make them is some of our most advanced.
However, much like that one group member in school – inverters do a whole lot of heavy lifting without getting the proper attention.
On the most basic level, an inverter switches the electricity your solar panels make from Direct Current (DC), to Alternating Current (AC) – which your home and electric car can use.
The Enphase IQ7 line – World’s most popular microinverters.
Enphase decided to change the solar inverter game by shrinking this very important hardware from the size of your electric panel, down to just larger than your hand.
In addition to being smaller, a portion of the brains of the system have been moved from your garage to the back of the solar panel up on the roof. One significant benefit from doing this is you get to see a live feed of what every single solar panel is doing via an app, or the website.
You might wonder – why else should we go with a microinverter? Well, one reason is resilience in case of parts breaking, or bad weather.
In fact, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, suggested that to protect yourself against hurricane winds you ought consider using Enphase:
Many systems only lost a minimal number of solar panels, and that systems with microinverters have a greater chance of allowing undamaged panels in a PV array to continue to generate electricity even if one panel is blown away or damaged by wind-borne debris Source
This distributed architecture keeps the power flowing, and also allows for easier expansion in the future. We can add additional micro-inverters with each additional panel and not worry about matching impedance with the other panels like we would with a DC string inverter. These features do come at a small price premium, and are not necessary for a fully functioning solar array. If you think Enphase IQ7 Micro-Inverters are a good fit for your system, be sure to mention it to us during our site visit if we haven’t defaulted to them already!
