Sunny Boy 1100LV alternative

[OuttaSight]

Just as I decided to give up on powering the fridge on off-grid and go grid-tied for my excess solar power (when the batteries are full) I tried to buy a SMA Sunny Boy 1100LV grid tie inverter only to discover that SMA have stopped selling them!

The LV version would have been ideal as it will work from 21-60VDC and I can switch my ~680Wp 35Vmp array over to it from the other battery charger when the battery gets full.

The supplier did suggest something interesting though...  SMA still make the Windy Boy 1100LV that is actually identical to the Sunny Boy and for a small fee they can reset a Windy Boy back to MPPT PV mode.  It actually works out cheaper than buying the original Sunny Boy as well... which is weird.

Apparently, it's a service menu option (not user settable) and the only difference between the two "versions" of the inverter are the firmware mode it runs in and the name on the box being "Windy" or "Sunny".  The same G83 certificate is valid for both versions and also for a Windy Boy reconfigured to be a Sunny Boy and so on.

Dunno why they didn't just market it that way in the first place and make the DC mode selection a user setting.  They could have made it a DIP switch setting (like the language option for the menu).

[scottsAI]

People get confused by choices.

Some people just cant help playing with settings... must make it better! Then get mad when it breaks. You should have told me... it's your fault.

Have fun,

Scott.

[tjspears]

There was a joke at work many years ago for a product we made, something to the effect of "We like our defaults, if we didn't we would not have picked them, don't change them think of them as mandatory defaults, it has a nice ring to it."

--James.

[OuttaSight]

That's all true but SMA do expose most of the inner working of the Windy Boy firmware mode...

You can program the power curve and so on but for some reason you can't select between two sets of mandatory defaults: tubine mode of PV mode.  If they locked all the other settings down as settings associated with the one-time setting of what kind of power source are you using (not the most technical of setup choices) then they could have marketed the same unit for both purposes and cut their inventory costs of having xxx of the "wrong" type in the warehouse...

Most vendors were telling me that SMA don't make the Sunny Boy LV any more... How many lost sales have they had when in fact they just need to say that all I need is a Windy Boy with the firmware mode switch "flipped".

Plus, must be quite a selling point against the competition... Buy our inverters and you can chop and change between wind and solar but only have to buy and service one make and model of inverter in your combined wind / PV system.  The Sunny/Windy Boys are parallel-able so you could have several of them.