In addition to designing and installing solar systems for all kinds of clients since the 1980's, I am starting to receive requests from owners to commissioning new solar installations that were designed and installed by other firms. In many cases these may have been installed by a large commercial electrical contractor with no prior experience with solar installations but was the installer for the rest of the wiring on the new facility. It is also possible that the engineer who designed all of the electrical work on the new facility had no prior experience with solar design, and just did a "cut and paste" outline spec using guidance from suppliers providing the modules and inverters on the project.
Since I am also a consulting engineer, I am sometimes asked to commission new schools and hospitals, so I am very familiar with the "normal" LEED type building commissioning process. However, although I typically use a voltmeter, ampmeter, and ground fault meter for commissioning my own solar installations, I am thinking that to commission solar systems installed by other firms (in some cases my competition) I better use one of the new recording IV curve tracer test meters that would provide data recording for documentation in case there was a later problem. Since I do not need this level of system verification more than one or two times per year, and the IV analyzers by Solmetric, Daystar, and Seaward are very costly, its hard to justify the expense. Is anyone commissioning larger arrays using these "do-it-all" testing devices, and which meter is easiest to use and best features for the $$. Need s something that can provide separate and combined IV curves for multiple string arrays and save data files that I can convert to print back in the office. I would want a meter that is very easy to download the data and print custom graphs without going through all kinds of data conversion issues. Any suggestions, Jeff Yago _______________________________________________ List sponsored by Home Power magazine List Address: RE-wrenches@lists.re-wrenches.org Options & settings: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/options.cgi/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org List-Archive: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/pipermail/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org List rules & etiquette: www.re-wrenches.org/etiquette.htm Check out participant bios: www.members.re-wrenches.org
