Ed’s Solar Farming has a burned Solis high voltage inverter

Seen Ed's video this morning and that burnt Solis is genuinely grim to look at — smells like a warranty claim and a strongly worded email rolled into one crispy package. 🔥

Had a mate on his narrowboat up near Skipton who had a similar high-voltage DC arc situation with a different brand, and the damage was remarkably similar — that particular smell doesn't leave the engine room for weeks, trust me.

Few things worth discussing though:

• Was this an installation/wiring issue or a genuine component failure? The high-voltage string stuff plays by different rules to our typical 48V setups
• Solis's UK warranty response — anyone had experience actually getting them to honour a claim without a six-month battle?
• Surge/fault protection upstream — did Ed have appropriate DC fusing and surge protection in place? Not victim-blaming, genuinely curious about the setup

I run Victron kit on the boat myself so I'm a bit insulated from this drama, but I know plenty of folk on here have gone the Solis route for larger ground-mount setups because the price-per-kW is hard to argue with.

The question is whether the total cost stays competitive once you factor in the occasional very expensive bonfire scenario. 😅

Anyone else running Solis high-voltage string inverters on their setups? Particularly interested if anyone's had minor faults that got picked up before they became Ed's problem. Would be good to build a picture of whether this is a one-off or a pattern worth worrying about.

Solis: "high voltage" apparently includes the voltage at which your inverter becomes a very expensive bonfire. 🔥

Had a near-miss with a dodgy DC isolator on my tiny house setup before I switched to proper Victron kit — turns out the smoke leaving your system is not the same as efficiency gains. Anyone running Solis HV gear should probably double-check their DC breakers and string fusing before they end up starring in their own YouTube disaster video. The comments section sympathy only goes so far when your inverter looks like a charcoal briquette.

Watching that video on the boat this morning with my coffee — nothing quite like a fried inverter to make you feel better about your Victron splurge. 😅

Seen that video — the copper bus bar damage was something else. Solis have a decent rep in the lower voltage residential space but their HV string stuff seems to attract these horror stories more than it should.

Not saying it's a design flaw across the board, but when Victron kit fails it tends to fail gracefully — you get warnings, you get logs, you get a chance to intervene. A unit that goes straight to "cremated" with no obvious prior indication is a different class of problem entirely.

@BoatMark curious whether Ed mentioned if the DC isolator had done its job or if that was part of the carnage too — that detail matters a lot for working out where the fault actually originated.

@CableTieWarrior yeah the bus bar damage really stood out to me too — that's not a "component failed quietly" situation, that's a proper thermal runaway scenario.

Running a Victron Multiplus setup in my shepherd's hut and the one thing I obsess over is ventilation and torque specs on every connection. Loose connections + high current = exactly what Ed ended up with, potentially.

Worth noting that high voltage string inverters live or die on installation quality. Even reputable gear will turn crispy if the basics aren't right — cable sizing, termination quality, surge protection upstream.

Doesn't necessarily damn Solis as a brand but I'd want to see their root cause analysis before drawing conclusions. Would be interesting to know what the actual fault point was — whether it originated at a connection or internally.

Hope Ed gets a proper resolution rather than the usual warranty runaround.