Rosie in Barbados

[Robin]

Hi all, this is the third time I have attempted to post here. This will be a bit long winded as I attempt to explain rationale for features and changes to the Rosie E-panel.

Pros:
1. Looks like it is out of a Transformers movie. Thanks, it is actually a copy of the valve cover from my old 1999 BMW V8 engine. Transformers works also.

2. Black makes it easy to coordinate from one factory to another. I am working on a couple more inverters now that aren't exactly black though. They are made out of some high tech engineered plastics. One top cover is actually a see through smoked translucent polycarbonate. It is very cool. (RV inverter. Less weight).

3. Compact main DC breaker. I never really liked the 1.5" wide 250 amp breaker that I have been using since 1990. That was all there was, so one day I wised up and asked Carling and CBI about making a triple wide C series. Carling was able to make a 250 amp and CBI a 300 amp. WooHoo. We will also make versions with shunt trip and aux switches. Both for yet to be announced future products.

4. Break away side panels for ease of wiring. Hmmmm, these are die cast aluminum. Hard to make anything break away. Not sure exactly what the goal here is because of the next comment.

5. Generous wire compartment. Wow, in all my 30+ years of doing the mechanical design of dozens of popular inverters I have never been accused of giving a generous wiring room! Does anyone remember how bad the Trace DR and SW were? Trace DC250? OutBack FX? Many MidNite boxes? I will admit our 1000 amp battery combiner does have a bit of room though. Thanks.

6. Fake plastic screws. The side panels fit the Rosie, Hawke's Bay and Barcelona breaker box. The original side plates were extruded, but when they changed to cast there were quite a few unused holes on each model. They didn't look good, so I made fake screw heads to fill up the empty holes. Too bad I didn't have a real screw handy when I designed the fake screw heads otherwise they might better match the real screws. That kind of thing happens when I am designing things at home while watching old SciFi movies.

7. No direct connection to the inverter. I didn't think too much about the breaker boxes when designing the inverter, HB and Barcelona enclosures. It would have difficult and expensive to make them attach and I couldn't think of a good reason to make them attach? So as long as you use our back plate or just push the two parts together there is very little gap. We do have a draft angle to contend with so you may notice a smallish gap. Nothing to worry about though. Besides, we already have a ton of screws on these units. I had a certain steam punk, BMW, art deco look in mind and that dictated a lot of screws.

8. Rubber domed knock out inserts. We have 1/2" and 1" silicone snap in conduit hole covers. Too bad one is gray and the other is black. I believe they eventually all will be black. I doubt we will ever make a 2" silicon knockout cover. That would not be cheap. Most people use the 2" conduit holes anyway. Metal conduit covers are readily available at local hardware stores. Well.......maybe not so much in Barbados?Sorry Damani

Cons:

1. No mini busbars for combing PV inputs. Yah, hear you. The Hawke's Bay controller was much further along than the Barcelona or Rosie, so I designed a breaker box for the Hawke's Bay. This set the final length in concrete as we ordered tooling. Then came the Barcelona breaker box. That was a little more challenging, but it worked out ok. Then finally the Rosie and boy was I shocked at what I had done! The oxes all wanted to be the same length for cosmetic reasons so had a real chore on my hands. I did not have room for the nice mini busbars. I had to use two layers of breakers and din rail terminal blocks. I gave the installer as much room as was humanly possible. Production is still angry with me because any spare room in the box came at their expense, but it seems to work. I have UL wire bending room requirements that have to be met for field wiring and that meant something had to give. Production figured out the proper sequence for wiring the Rosie E-panel and now they are talking to me again. We do give away 8 pick offs with each Rosie E-panel. These pick offs add one extra circuit to each terminal. We had planned on one charge controller for each E-panel and it does accommode this for the most part as I will discuss later, but I did not think anyone would be using it as a PV combiner. In fact I never anticipated that our regular E-panels would be used as a combiner although we do provive six holes for wires on each PV busbar. It just so happens that six positions is the shortest made by our vendor. PV combiners are normally up on the roof or out by the PV array. I think Damani has PV arrays that are sometimes located so close to the E-panel that it is cheaper to use the E-panel busbars as a combiner? Be careful to never combine more than two strings this way though as you need breakers on each string for 3 or more strings. I think something is coming that might help you though that I will discuss on #2.

2. Insufficient PV breaker slots. The first person outside of MidNite to see a Rosie E-panel complained that he wanted to install 2 Classics. Crap, I did not accommodate this. Remember I don't actually install this stuff and I don't always get it right at first. OK, how can we accommodate two Classics? Look at the second picture. This is showing a modified cover plate. We removed some of the vertical spacers that are part of the die casting. This change has been relayed to the factory and the next shipment of covers will allow up to 12 single 1/2" wide breakers or ten 1/2" and two 1" wide breakers. Do the math. You will see we can then add another three charge controller breakers. One 1/2" wide for the input and a 1" wide 80 or 100 amp for the charge controller output. 1/2" wide MNEPV breakers are presently limited to 63 amps and 150VDC. In the future we will be getting in 50 amp 300VDC breakers. I do not know when though as these 300V breakers are about two years late. The one inch wide part can be our present two pole breakers tied together with a copper busbar or in the future they can be a single pole 1" wide breaker up to 125 amps that accepts at least a 2AWG wire. Maybe larger? I had a 2AWG wire handy and it looked kind of loose in the elevator clamp.
 Now look at the third picture. There are three snap in end stops. If we use bent up tabs from the metal din rail, we can eliminate these end stops. That should free up enough room to add two more din rail terminals. So you would then have two PV+ and two PV- terminals as well as two more pick offs. We do not add wiring to the PV input terminal blocks, so they can be used for two Classics or combine them using the pick offs to use as a two string combiner. Does this help? I think we will make these changes. These die cast tabs could be removed in the field by someone with the right skills and tools. If you really need these extra breaker spaces, I am sure for a nominal fee we could machine the tabs out and get you a new cover.
 
Second #2. No DC panel mount breakers. Nope. No way to add those. They take up more room than the din rail breakers. I believe my answer above solves this issue though.

3. Classic mounting bracket. BobQ and Tony spent many hours designing a custom plastic Charge controller bracket. We 3D printed a few and they worked great. Then the subject of a dual Classic installation surfaced. Back to the drawing board. Well they did it. Beautiful design. It worked on both sides, accommodated all the wires and even gave you a spot to add an SPD. After getting the tooling quote this bracket design was put on the back burner until it can be justified. We are now adding holes to the side plates to mount the original E-panel Classic mounting bracket. Right and left side. They are quite sturdy with the 1" close nipple, but we broke out the 2" cast in knockout when we accidently dropped the sample unit. Now we are including a large adapter ring that stiffens everything up and solves the broken casting issue. Problem solved, but we all really like the cool plastic design better. It was a lot of work and very novel, so if we sell enough of these brackets and pre-wired systems, we will tool it up.

4. Inaccessible bottom left conduit hole on the Rosie. ETL didn't like the fact that you could stick your finger through that opening and touch the Rosie battery busbar. Gee, I can't see any problem here, do you? We added an insulator between the hole and busbar, but now have decided to remove that hole as it was just too much of a liability. We have however added three holes in the E-panel to help wire routing issues. One on each side panel and one on the internal curved surface of the E-panel chassis. This does give more flexibility when wiring things up.

5. Different sized screws on covers. Yes, we caused a lot of frustration here. The original side plates were extruded. They required a 5/8" long taptite screw that gripped the side walls of a groove extruded in the side plates. This design did not work out as well as hoped. When inserting the screws a number of times the aluminum grooves would wear out. It also caused a lot of metal filings that could fall into the electronics. Now we have cast sides with tapped holes. At first some of the side plates did not all have the same call out for thread depth. This is why we had different screw lengths. No everything is standardized and everything is 1/2" long machine screws. We add wax to the threads to capture any loose filings. We do not want metal filings getting into a 600V charge controller. I asked production to start adding two extra screws to each product also.

Additional questions:

1. Will the older Classics be able to talk to the MNGP2? Yes eventually. Years ago we did a project for SMA where we could have up to 4 Classics (modbus) talk to the Sunny island (Canbus). It worked flawlessly. We are working on a single Classic version that will work as part of our canbus network. The same engineer is creating this dongle so we are sure it will work. A second way to accomplish this is to write code for our upcoming ComBox. We planned on adding the RS232 input to the ComBox many years ago and the hardware is there. The ComBox is not finished although we are starting to ship some in limited quantities. It is an engineering level part at this point, but all the engineers use it.

2. We will definitely have a cloud based system along with phone app support for all the new products. Parts of this are quite complicated depending on how it gets implemented. The phone app seems pretty straight forward, but not the server stuff. Do any of you have expertise in this field?

That is all I have to say in regards to Dapdan's comments. We really appreciate all the comments. We need input from you all to help insure we are making the right product.
Thanks,
Robin Gudgel

[dapdan]

Robin,

You are the man! Please shout out all of the engineers and other staff at MNS. You guys rock. You have responded in such amazing detail I am going to have to take many bites at it. I am off to read it again. I really appreciate all of your attention to detail on products, service and community support. I am going to take my time and study your responses in the presence of Rosie then I will start to respond.

The center modification with the additional DC breaker is amazing and I would prefer that as I tend not to use the charger feature of the inverter so for going the  full bypass breaker assembly and the ac input breaker is what tends to occur. Yes

Yes I do use the e-panels (this is why I would buy the plus models) as combiner boxes. I have been doing this for 10+ years and given that I have been adding PV to mine and other clients installation over a period of time quite often different arrays have different specification and it is necessary to use more than one  controller for the same battery system(which can be a dual battery system with a combiner switch). So yes using two classic is definitely a real possibility.

Damani

[dapdan]

Rob,

4. Break away side panels for ease of wiring. Hmmmm, these are die cast aluminum. Hard to make anything break away. Not sure exactly what the goal here is because of the next comment.

By this i really meant removal and not to actually break or break out anything. In the process of installation it was really easy to remove 6 screws to route voltage sense and RJ45 cable from the aux connections.

I have personal proof of the ample wiring space as I did not cut or scrape my hands at all. Yes I was not wearing gloves, I know laziness.

I think the fact that they are not the same size is a good thing as one could be always able to identify them and remove them by hand. When I first tried to unscrew them they fell off. Now imagine if I could retrieve them that could have made my OCD flair-up.

7. I like the fact that they don't mechanical connect or are fastened together, this was a compliment on simplification of the install so I wouldn't have to get on my knees or haunches to install a screw vertically. I like the fact they just slot together and you then fix them to your vertical substrate.

8. Your comments are understood and noted. Wouldn't want you to add unnecessary cost. I don't think the colour would be an issue, at least for me, as the way it is installed you would only see them if you get on your knees to look at the bottom of the e-panel.

Now on to your "Cons" responses:

1. When I first saw the "picks" I was wondering what the heck are these things. when I saw one installed on the neutral on the ac side I understood what it was meant for.

As stated previously I do use e-panels as combiners. They really add great value to small to medium sized systems where you don't need to install a combiner at the arrays (when the distance accommodates this approach). I do install breakers for every string/array at the e-panel, hence why I would request more 1/2" din rail slots for the 150V breakers. Longest run I had to install for an array was around 120ft and I would usually maximize the PV input voltage to deal with the voltage drop.

2. Sir in my view its 99% right and 1% is tweaking and customization.

Loving the modified cover plate, especially that 1" din rail mounted 125A breaker that will make the panel mount breaker obsolete.

Yeah the vertical spacer were taking up valuable real estate. 
I am thinking 2awg from the CC is adequate as the run is quite short once the classic is adjacent. larger wire gets very difficult to bend and generally coax into position. It is usually a good work-out with lots of sweating.

I can see the value of removing those lockin end tabs and replacing them with terminal blocks even if the installed doesn't use them they still give the spacing if one desires that. The extra PV input would definitely work for 2 or 3(if your combine the wires in the larger terminal block). However, the next challenge is to combining the negatives from the arrays. Assuming that all of the attached controllers have a common negative then one could have 4, 6 or 8 10awg wire to combine and send to a common negative point (This is why I loved the mini-DC e-panels, they were truely multipurpose in this regard). This is where the terminal block would not suffice. If we could have a single 6 point stand of negative DC mini busbar would solve that issue. I was looking at the bottom left side of the e-panel and thinking that I could modify it to install one similar to the earth block. The only issue here is due to the large 2" knock, that I will never use, the area is not machined flat and have ridges that would be inconvenient for the mini-busbar.

I may take you up on that offer of the modified cover as i am going to be state side late August/ early september this year.

No DC panel mounts...no problem your 1" din rail 125A breaker would do the job. In the mean time I was looking at installing one using one of the 1.5" holes in the bottom. The breaker would be mounted on 2mm aluminium plate which would in turn be mounted, facing down, on the bottom panel of the e-panel with the breaker lever poking out the bottom. In-elegant but it should work with the studs facing upwards for easy installation of wiring.

3. Like your solution. I will patiently wait.

4. I was wondering what this internal curved surface was all about. This open through channel on the outside reminds me of that storage tunnel on the Rivian RT1 electric pick-up.

5. So interesting to see the design process you guys go through. I was also concerned about strip out of the cast threading as I am removing and re-install the cover many times as I am testing/playing with it. I think I have already worn one or two of the threading already on Rosie right side (go thing it has many holes to counteract a possible loose cover, your additional holes will mitigate this).

Additional questions/ your response:

1. I remember that com-box for SMA. Glad to hear the Classic wont be talking with itself and be snubbed by Rosie, he doesn't deserve that  .

2. Looking forward to that app and web monitoring. I must say that one thing midnite could do better, not that it is a deal breaker, is more interactive apps for their power electronics. I received the dongle for the DIYMN3024 in this shipment and installed it yesterday and this thing along with the app on andriod is absolutely awesome. I can monitor everything anywhere in the world on any wifi connection and this is a low to medium spec inverter. One may have expected Rosie to be able to do at least that out of the box with built-in Wifi. This is like to have, but I appreciate the fact that all of the MNS rock-stars are making sure Rosie and all other Solar power electronics do their core function excellently first.

Finally, you are making an excellent product.

Damani

[Robin]

Damani. Let me know where to send a modified Rosie E-panel cover when you are here. Some of us will be at a show in Miami in late August. So if you are in the area, check it out. Energy Expo August 22-23.

[dapdan]

Robin,

I will more than likely be between Ottawa, Canada and NYC end of August. The place I would want to visit is MNS manufacturing. Hey, what ever happened to Midnite the Cat. I havent heard about her. My Cat is also black but goes by Kit/Massey.

I am wondering how many tourist you get at Midnite

Damani

[boB]

Robin,

I will more than likely be between Ottawa, Canada and NYC end of August. The place I would want to visit is MNS manufacturing. Hey, what ever happened to Midnite the Cat. I havent heard about her. My Cat is also black but goes by Kit/Massey.

I am wondering how many tourist you get at Midnite

Damani

You are welcome here any time !

Midnite kitty is alive and doing great.  Saw her just a couple of weeks ago.  She is now living with Doug, one of our old mechanical engineers. She is doing much better living with a family all the time now.

I re-homed my little black kitty there as well.  They are getting along !

boB

[dapdan]

Thanks boB,

Glad to hear that Midnite is doing well. We have to look out for these black cats. Thanks for the welcome.

[Robin]

The curved surface at the top of the Rosie E-panel is to allow air in from both sides. There are four small fans at the bottom of the Rosie heatsink.

[dapdan]

Robin,

Good to know. I will make sure not to store anything in that tunnel  .

Damani