PPOB for the (mostly) win.

[fhteagle]

Doing an electrical service upgrade at a family members' house in preparation for a solar install. Power has to be off about 60 hours between lineman appointments with an inspection in between.

Rigged up a temporary power inlet using a 14-30 cord, generator inlet box, etc. Had to lift the inlet ground to keep the truck happy though, which tells me there may be a superfluous N-G bond somewhere in the old wiring we need to chase down. Lightning happily carrying lighting, fridge, small heater, etc type loads in the house since last night.

However, it was not able to start an ancient 5 ton geothermal compressor. I had put a clamp meter on the compressor circuit that said 28 amps max, but I suspect my clamp wasn't actually capturing the peak due to sampling rate or something. Tried a couple of times and the watts display on PPOB jumps around a bit, but just barely trips over 3600W on each leg as the compressor is trying to get up to speed and the system shuts down. Wonder if PPOB would make it if I had a soft start device on the compressor.

It's all about to be moot though once the Sol-Ark is installed anyway.

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[02Reaper]

I put a soft start on my 3 ton heat/ac unit to be able to power it with the lightning during a power outage. Without the soft start the starting current would trip like you see.

 

[RLXXI]

Soft start would definitely help. Keep in mind that 240v is limited to 7.2kW, the other 2.4kW is used for the 110v outlets.

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