Electronics > Power/Renewable Energy/EV's

How much of a markup do high end inverters and stuff for solar panels have?

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CopperCone:
How much can you save doing the engineering of the inverter yourself?

Is it a typical ~400% materials markup? Or do economies of scale bring it down some?

I would like to consider electrical solar power (I use solar thermal water heating, which has actually paid off), but the margins are kind of slim where I live.

I think I can handle doing the roofing work, building/designing load bearing wind and seismic resistant fixtures and mounting the panels by myself to save labor costs, but decent inverters are kind of pricey.

How would a DIY job (assuming you buy the appropriate water proof connectors and don't make ghetto fixtures) save vs just paying the company?

And, another reason for this is because I very much like the Tesla Powerwall, but I know that in terms of making money, it basically prevents the system from ever breaking even (I never did the calculations but I assume it would take at least 20 years to pay itself off and its a battery that will degrade). I don't really enjoy using generators and there are power outages here.  Most are under 24 hours, and I don't mind using some chinese shit generator for longer ones, as its basically a state of emergency, but I would prefer a tesla wall to some kind of monster standby generator which I see as a complete pain in the ass high maintenance investment, for at least 3000$.

I don't feel too comfortable making some kind of home made power wall or battery maintainer at this point, unless I figure out a way to make some kind of underground storage unit for the battery bank away from my house), which would have its own challenges of moisture proofing, temperature control, etc.

David Hess:
Designing an inverter is a losing economic proposition although you would learn a lot about the various failure modes of line connected power equipment.  The only reason I would suggest doing it is to learn the details of power inverter design.

CopperCone:
why? manufacturers get crazy bulk IGBT discounts?

What does the volume look like for the industry? What kind of wheeling and dealing is going on do you think? Like what order quantities do they use on their assembly line. I figure between 1000-10000 units? Or is it even bigger then that? So like 30% cost reduction on the power components? Or more?

David Hess:

--- Quote from: CopperCone on June 03, 2018, 11:39:34 pm ---why? manufacturers get crazy bulk IGBT discounts?
--- End quote ---

No, the parts cost is a small fraction of the investment if you are only building one or a couple.  The bulk discount for parts is better than 75% but the investment in design time is considerable.

To put it another way, there are many more ways for a line connected inverter to fail than to work.  The parts cost during the design and testing phase increases as the parts are lost to explosive disappearance.


--- Quote ---What does the volume look like for the industry? What kind of wheeling and dealing is going on do you think? Like what order quantities do they use on their assembly line. I figure between 1000-10000 units? Or is it even bigger then that? So like 30% cost reduction on the power components? Or more?
--- End quote ---

I suspect that is about right for the larger players.  Remember that there are multiples of the big ticket items like power transistors so the bulk discounts are better.

CopperCone:
my idea was to use big reactors to control the peak currents to hopefully prevent really big explosions but I forgot that you need to basically make some kind of high powered boost converters.

The efficiency of a stepup converter seems hard.

I also see myself wanting microconverters, which may or may not complicate things. Single big inverter seems dumb.

Im guessing these microconverters use phase shifting ? The control loop seems kinda odd, im guessing fast control on the phase shift and slow control on the boost converter voltage adjustment (so you rather loose power through cancellation for a short duration then trying to adjust a buncha DC DC converters all fast? Seems like the inductor would be easier to deal with doing that?

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