{"id":159,"date":"2026-09-02T21:21:39","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T21:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/?p=159"},"modified":"2026-09-25T00:53:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T00:53:04","slug":"equipment-failures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/?p=159","title":{"rendered":"Equipment Failures"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Equipment Failures are like Life Failures: inevitable. What’s important is what you do about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far in the solar project after installing (which I am working on the post for I promise) I have had two. The first, which was a major one, was the failure of the DC-DC converter in my FlexBoss21 Inverter. This is apparently a known issue due to the firmware coding the cooling fan to come on as a function of PV power instead of something like, perhaps, the internal case temperature. As a result if you have zero PV power but a high battery load the case temperature can get quite warm. In fact digging into the temperature logs it hit 60\u00b0C before things went south, which if you remember is a common terminal lug rating…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After some back and forth with the warranty department a replacement was shipped. Disconnecting everything and dropping the new one in took an afternoon, along with a 3D printed fan shroud to promote air flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The second failure, which was much scarier from a financial aspect, was my battery banks shutting themselves down due to low voltage. I had set the batteries to maintain a 50% SOC level to try and maximize the lifetime, however the coulomb counter is finicky and over the course of a few weeks the voltage dropped to the internal cutoff level of 44.8V. I only discovered this two days after it had happened, and quickly started a 1KW AC charge to slowly build the battery charge back. Luckily it seems all the self protection systems worked well and they have returned to their max voltage of 55V quickly, where they will remain until I figure out a better programming of the charge modes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Equipment Failures are like Life Failures: inevitable. What’s important is what you do about it. So far in the solar project after installing (which I am working on the post for I promise) I have had two. The first, which was a major one, was the failure of the DC-DC converter in my FlexBoss21 Inverter. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,10],"tags":[28,24,25,26,29,31,30,23,32,33],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elec","category-solar","tag-backup","tag-battery","tag-eg4","tag-electrical","tag-inverter","tag-nec","tag-pv","tag-solar","tag-wire","tag-wiring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":209,"href":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions\/209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lewis.engineering\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}