New Off Grid Inverter Charger

[clockmanFrance]

Excellent news to here about real progress. 

If Midnite get this Inverter right, you should have a World beater on your hands.

We here come from the RE & sustainability Philosophy point of view, sadly a very different mentality than most folk, who talk.... but don't do.

We have Mains Grid, sometimes, but our RE system design is cost effective and sustainable for the benefit of this planet for our childrens children. Before you ask, yes, we can beat the main Utilities prices/charges.

Okay so what do us barmy folk want from an Inverter.....

1.      Draws little power when running. An absolute must for treating your precious batteries with care.

2.      Can actually deliver power at the kW rating stated,  and for us in France 48vdc to 230vac at a pure sine wave of 50HZ. And be expandable in the future and not locked into one particular manufacturer.

3.      Uses Units / components readily available at a cost effective price, be expandable, and can be repaired or component parts re-made .

4.      Does AC Coupling and DC Coupling without the need of secondary very expensive add On’s.

5.      Does back charging to the battery from the AC Coupling side.

6.      Is Cost effective, and not astronomical expensive.

Do you realise Midnite, get these Inverters correct, your Company will change forever, Lads (& lasses), you will be stepping into a very, very different league.

[Robin]

We are understanding of your ideas. Bob and I have been involved with some of the best inverter designs still available today by other companies. Some of the things you ask for are right on the money while some are not so easy to understand. As far as price goes, we will have small and inexpensive to large and expensive. That just goes with the territory. More parts means more cost. The more we can do with firmware, the cheaper they get. The EGo inverter has about ten microprocessors on it. We will be doing a lot with firmware!

Our tenKW inverter will have the idle power of one with much less power. This is new to the industry.

All inverters that have a UL, ETL or CSA listing are capable of putting out full rated power. I do not understand your request here unless you are comparing to Chinese inverters that do not have any real agency approvals. CE is NOT an agency approval by the way.

The battery based inverters we are designing should be able to work at 230VAC 50Hz or 120/240VAC 60Hz.

The EGo can be repaired by a ten year old kid. You will not be able to go to the hardware store and get parts to fix it, but you will have the ability to get it back running immediately. You will have to get those parts from your dealer.

The EGo will do Ac and DC coupling without the need for additional parts.

You will be able to charge batteries while AC coupled.

We do not know the price yet, but there are quite a few inverters planned just for this reason.

We are well aware that we are going to change things. We did that with the Trace DR and SW inverters from the 1990's and once again when we did the Outback FX and VFX inverters. Those were nice incremental improvements to the inverter industry. The EGo is light years ahead of those designs!

[clockmanFrance]

Many thanks for your positive reply..

All inverters that have a UL, ETL or CSA listing are capable of putting out full rated power. I do not understand your request here unless you are comparing to Chinese inverters that do not have any real agency approvals. CE is NOT an agency approval by the way.

In particular I am talking about SMA Sunny Islands, I had a SI6, but if you dig in the data small print it will not do 6kW continually and yet it is inferred in the product name. In-fact mine would not do 4kW for more than 15 minutes. What I am saying is be honest with your output figures, that's all. I am sure that Midnite will.

This new EGo sounds exciting.!

PS, I do understand your reluctance to talk about any other Inverter manufacturer except of course those you were involved with.

[Westbranch]

Yup, sort of like;

Honda makes eg, a 2000W inverter generator, but it will only 'run constantly' and output 1600W

[Robin]

Knowing that you are in France explains quite a bit. The Sunny Island sold in North America will put out 6KW continuously. It would not get the UL/CSA listing for 6KW if it didn't. They are allowed to round up on the model number, so I suppose it might only do 5500 watts, but knowing what it weighs, I think it probably does 6KW. Ryan has one at his house, so he can look up the label and see what it says. I am in Edmonton Alberta at the moment so I cannot look at ones we have at MidNite. In Europe SMA and everyone else just has to put the CE label on the product. To me the CE label is pretty well good for nothing. I have seen too many companies do the self certification and they just lie about things. SMA would not do that as they are the leaders over there, but there may not be any requirement that ties model number ratings to specs. I am surprised that you are getting only what you mentioned though. How are you measuring things? It is very difficult to do measurements with any accuracy at home. It takes a pile of test equipment to verify output power in the lab.

[vtmaps]

I have seen too many companies do the self certification and they just lie about things. SMA would not do that as they are the leaders over there

Not so long ago I would have said that about Volkswagen.  --vtMaps

[onanparts]

If Robin & boB are involved you get more than you pay for. Under Promise & Over Deliver. That's been my experience going back over 40 years with any products they have manufactured.

If you want to be happy for a day, Drink. If you want to be happy for a year, Marry. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, Get Mooned!

[russ_drinkwater]

So you are saying the new inverters will do grid tie feeds and standalone as well?
Similar to the sunny boy islands?
Charge your standalone system and then flick over to grid tie feed.
And will provide standalone power up to 10kw?
Is that from one inverter or stacked smaller units?
I am not a tech person, I can birth assist cattle,  other vet work, firearms design and repairs, build fences, houses and rebuild motors  etc.
The point for me is the unit needs to be super reliable, dumb proof, good performance and indestructible.
My old latronic inverters are not quite as old as me but are going on 10 years old and operate without a hiccup!
They are tanks and out perform beyond their stated specs (back breakers to lift).
I wait with anticipation!

[Robin]

All I can say is you will have to wait and see. Most all the inverter designs I have been involved with over the years are still functioning out there. The Latronics is a good inverter. They are nice people too. Their inverters are not like what we are doing though. Our inverter will do a lot more things than the Latronics, so it will be more complicated for those that want to take advantage of the features built into the EGo. The first ones on the market may not have all the features we are thinking about, so from that stand point, it will be pretty simple.

[mike90045]

Will it do Generator Support ?  Properly ?

  When charging batteries and it qualifies the generator, will it slam full load onto the genset, or will it activate transfer switch, then ramp up battery charging ?   In gen support, can it sense a overloaded genset dropping RPM's and start unloading battery charging, or wait till it disqualifies the genset ?

[clockmanFrance]

How are you measuring things? It is very difficult to do measurements with any accuracy at home. It takes a pile of test equipment to verify output power in the lab.

Firstly the SMA SI6 has a SD card, and by looking at what it reports and what it does, and boy what an eye opener that was! something that I used to shoot back at SMA.....

I do have my labs, clean rooms, chemical room, machine room.

I don't have masses of stuff, just a couple of HP stability time bases, with DVM, and other nowadays readily obtainable metering stuff.

I specialise in Micro engineering manufacturing, small batch stuff for R&D departments, in the mechanical manipulation of materials from 40mm to 5 micron. Over the years I have made simple electronic circuits for particular process or to achieve a particular one off work programs.

By calibrating and comparing metering stuff I can get reasonably accurate readings, probably around the + or - 5%, but I am not a specialised business doing this stuff day in day out, and certainly not at a certification level in this field.

Here's a pic of me bench testing, roughly, yes that analogue amp meter has been calibrated, and yes I used several different meters including Digital, my latest 6kW, 52kg, OzInverter for idle power use using different laodings.
Using the single open wound 32kg toroid and 3 turn ferrite choke I have about a 40w tick over use.

Its not as good as the SI6 but then the SI6 has separate windings and these would flicker the lights between its internal winding switching's.

I am not commercially orientated any more, and certainly not interested in manufacturing and selling Inverters. But, Personal empowerment and self-improvement is very much our Philosophy here in Normandy, especially with real hands on cost effective renewable energy creation.
With my small, A4, 76pp colour, "Making a OzInverter"  booklet I have produced, hopefully, I can pass on my 'Open Source' experiences to other interested folk and importantly the next generation, especially my 3 boys.

However, in the real world most folk want to buy a good, simple, robust and cost effective Inverter off the shelf, and not struggle making a good one of their own, so very soon I would like to point people at the New Midinte Ego Inverter.

[Robin]

That OZ inverter looks like a serious piece of gear. I could not find anything on it though through a Google search.
You mentioned that the SMA has an SD card. That might record what the inverter was doing, but that isn't the same as bench testing it for continuous output. That takes hours and hours of full output to allow it to get up to max temp using thermal couples and data loggers. I don't think you have the batteries, power supplies or loads to do that. It is always a scramble for us to gather power supplies and loads for us when we do this type of testing on a powerful inverter. We are pretty hard on them too. Maybe that is why we have sent off 12 100 pound power supplies to be repaired! We were testing a 120 amp version of the KID the other day and we could only get 114 amps out due to loads and even then we were not testing it worse case because the input voltage wasn't high enough. The results were impressive, but when we test it with 120VDC input the thing will get hotter. The goal of this testing is to determine heat sinking and quantity of transistors, fet drive, inductor sizing and such. We need more equipment for sure, but every time we get more stuff it always gets allocated to production or to dedicated projects like burn in etc. If you guys are interested, we can post some of the boring test data here as it becomes available on the different projects we are working on.
We have been talking about the EGo inverter a lot here. I am attaching an picture of a 750 watt wind turbine grid tie inverter. This shows about one year's worth of development. The project is now in the re-layout phase (thank goodness). That board can't stand many more modifications. This inverter will have a very cool colored LCD display. It will have a Clipper built in as well as Blue tooth. It will be in an outdoor case. We are also working on a 1500 watt grid tie wind turbine inverter. Yes, we are also working on wind turbines (3 of them).
All together we have about 8 different inverters planned.

[clockmanFrance]

That OZ inverter looks like a serious piece of gear. I could not find anything on it though through a Google search.

Its New, its 'Open Source', the World moves on.

I named it after 'oztules', John Tullock, Flinders Island, Australia, the originator. I am just the Apprentice.

I understand that 'dgd' is making one.....

The OzInverter... summary... Get the silicone iron wound cores right, get the hand wound toroid correct, get the connections correct, get the cooling system correct, get the Boards in right...... Do it all properly..... and It will do 6kW for some time, that's if the batteries can take it, but it will also do even bigger/huge 15kW loads for a short time.

I have 1300ah at C10 48v batteries, 8kW of operational PV with 5kW of that on Trackers, simple, robust and cost effective, yep another booklet 2 years ago.
As I also have utilities power, I can connect in those ELTEK 100a 48vdc chargers, so testing for 10 hours or so is no problem.

Below pic shows the OzInverter, literally being bench tested down at my Power Station Building, the temp is in C after 30 minutes of 4.5kW loads with no cooling system. That Fan is a safety feature as the control board requires it to pulse back or the boards will shut down.

The 15kW Power board is robust and easily reproduced, but the Control board architecture is peculiar. At this very moment 'oztules' is working on a New Control board from the EGS002 board..... http://www.anotherpower.com/board/index.php?PHPSESSID=h7jd5l4edljl6k4ls18pgfj4i1&action=recent

[Highflyer]

Robin,

The linch pin for the success of the B-17 was the Nordon bombsight.  Out of respect for those who flew before us, Norden (or something close) might be a possible name for the new inverter.

Also, I have a cabin waiting for a MN inverter to power it. 

Like I said before, you build it, I'll buy it.  I will gladly pay for a beta unit to work with.  So far I have amassed several sets of panels, a few Kids, and other items for the build.  Classics, Or their replacements, will be used for the retirement house when built. I am using 12 and 24 volt systems for now and will go to 48 volts when available. I have the perfect place for two windmills and a large area for solar.  This retirement house will be capable of being off the grid with power to spare.

Thanks for the great teases, I enjoyed the visit and have been patiently waiting for the inverters.

[niel]

from russ_drinkwater, "The point for me is the unit needs to be super reliable, dumb proof, good performance and indestructible."

i think we could say their stuff is super reliable or they strive for it to be as much as possible.

nothing is dumb proof. you can make something from every precaution imaginable and somebody sooner or later will find a dumb way to break it. it's called murphy's law and is why there's instruction booklets to try and head that scenario off and customer service just in case.

the performance of their stuff has been great and they strive for even better all of the time.

nothing is indestructible either, but i'm remembering a video i saw of the outback inverter where they literally ran it over.

in a nutshell they care and don't try to screw people over if that helps you.

the bad part is always the wait for the product to come out. i know as i'm waiting to see if this will fit my needs and when it will come out as my system is somewhat waiting in limbo too. another year. ugh.