Solar Power Failure

[papaof2]

After almost five years, I have had a partial failure of an EPEver MPPT solar charge controller.  Not one of the primary controller, but a spare that was being used to check some new solar panels.  The most recent nearby lightning strike (close enough for one UPS to go "Beep!") damaged the RS485 communications port on the controller.  It still works fine with a computer monitoring the controller, but the separate meter that is powered by the controller itself and can display all the status info and can read and set all the parameters no longer connects to that controller.  The message in the screen is "Connecting…" but it never connects.

That's not a big deal, as multiple controllers (up to six) can be monitored with one laptop and I rarely have more than two controllers mounted on the shelving unit: one active and the other a switchable spare.

Next month (September) will be the five year anniversary of having a small solar system running 24/7.  I've replaced a half-dozen of the USB-RS485 adapters and at least two laptops from lightning-induced damage in that time but this is the first time there's been any type of damage to a controller.  The adapters simply stop working and the laptops lose their USB ports.  There's a reason for using teenaged laptops in that application - they are fast enough (just need to be able to run Win 7 Home), they are inexpensive and they are readily available on eBay ;-)

[biggkidd]

Wow in thirteen or more years we've used solar we've never had a lightening strike bother anything.

[papaof2]

That strike was less than 200 feet away to have gotten a neighbor's fiber internet/TV feed (I know where the fiber cable was dug in) and tripped a breaker in their house. We lost the HDMI ports on the 50" TV that day (underground power, so not lightning on the powerline but voltage induced in those six foot HDMI cables by how close that lightning was), but the TV and most of the other A/V equipment have "component video" jacks so I spent less than $50 for a 3 port switch (cable, DVD, Blu-Ray) and some cables. Still have good picture and sound so everything works except the Android internet/TV box which is HDMI-only - something I got just to see how it works (even added a wireless keyboard & mouse) but it's seen very little use.

If I wanted to use the Android box, I could connect to the 23" monitor that has VGA, DVI and an HDMI port - that's on the tower PC I use for some of the picture/document processing when working on the family tree: two family lines, 10,000 names in one line (back to England in the 1700's) and about 4,000 names in the other line; thousands of document images (deeds, military documents, birth/death/marriage documents), tens of thousands of pictures from tintypes to Kodak Brownie pictures to the latest from someone's phone. The first 10,000 or so of those images have been cataloged (person(s), place, date, location, event - or as much of that data as I have). Some image data is from the back of the picture "Mary, 3rd grade" and I can only put a date on that pic by checking which 'Mary' in the family and when/where she was born - that takes a lot of time Don't know that I will live long enough to catalog all of them...