General > General Technical Chat
Dodgy solar regulators catches fire this morning
VK3DRB:
Someone in my neighbourhood had two non-compliant solar inverters (actually solar regulators) he imported into Australia from China. The regulators have no CE, UL-94 or any other safety approvals, and had no conducted or radiated RF emissions filtering. The neighbour's regulators had caused broad spectrum EMI on HF since its installation, swamping the neighbourhood and wiping out my ham radio hobby.
I was awoken this morning by someone yelling "Fire!" in the distant background. A person had jumped a fence and put the fire out by switching off the power and using a fire extinguisher. The fire was quite large and was in danger of catching fire to the house the regulators were attached to. There was a family sleeping inside the house. I went over and took these photos this morning. The second image is the regulator box that incinerated itself, and the first one is where the flames started catching fire to the other regulator. The cases were cheap ABS plastic without any fire retardant of course. There was no flame barrier or EMC sheilding inside the regulators either.
The good news about this is my HF interference problems are magically gone! 20 metres, 40 metres and 80 metres are clean without the usual high levels of QRN.
The bad news is the owner of the inverters has lost his solar system, and deservedly so. I hope he realises you don't risk lives, saving a few dollars by buying non-compliant products designed and manufactured by idiots. He won't do it again. But it make me wonder how many other devices people have in their homes that do not have any testing for safety.
VK3DRB:
By the way, the incinerated inverter was a copy of the partly burnt inverter - same type of wiring, same type of circuit breakers. The circuit breakers were completely obliterated.
Cubdriver:
Damn!! He's lucky that didn't ignite his house! :o :o :o
-Pat
digsys:
There's a SERIOUS amount of dodgy practices going on wrt solar power / grid-tie etc etc A friend investigates over 20 incidents a week .. that's just one person.
PTR_1275:
Just going to put it out there, these are solar regulators for charging batteries, not the implied inverters which would be PV->mains or battery->240v.
A lot of people think that ELV solar systems are harmless because it’s “just 12 (24 or 48v)” but there are so many problems that can occur.
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