I just got my install. My SE inverter has NO display on it to see what going on or to change anything. Ideas on how to even know if all the panels are actually paired?
So I’m in pretty much the same situation. My system was just installed with two SE7600H inverters that have no display. This is still a bit of a work in progress and I don’t have access to monitor my system yet, but I think I’m close. Here is what I’ve discovered. Hopefully we can figure this out together.
On Friday I contacted SolarEdge and asked about getting access to their monitoring app. They told me that there is nothing they can do from their end and Tesla would need to provide access for me. I called the Tesla tech support number (877-798-3752) and asked if they could get me access to the SolarEdge monitoring portal. They ran through a script saying that Tesla can provide access, but I’m pretty much on my own with it. Tesla will under no circumstances provide any support for using the SolarEdge monitoring portal. I agreed and they submitted a ticket and gave me the ticket number. They said that the request needed to be approved by a Tesla supervisor and then I would get an email with details about setting up my SolarEdge account. Sure enough, yesterday afternoon I got an email from SolarEdge with a link to click on to set up an account.
I set up the account and downloaded the SolarEdge monitoring app, but unfortunately there was very little data there. I could see my site and my two inverters, but it showed no production at all and no panels connected to the inverters. I called SolarEdge back and they told me that the inverters have never successfully communicated with the SolarEdge servers to report any information. They said to check with Tesla to see why there was no communication. Based on the script that the agent read when I requested the account and the experience of others in this thread I figured I probably wouldn’t really get very far talking to Tesla, so I didn’t even bother to call them back.
I started looking for other options. Others have suggested that running an ethernet cable to the inverter will allow it to bypass the little black gateway box (not to be confused with the large powerwall gateway) and allow the inverters to communicate directly with SolarEdge, so this is what I considered next, however, running an ethernet cable to my inverters will be possible to do, but won’t be particularly fun (I’ll need to run it through my attic which is hot and cramped and just not fun to work in). So I wanted to make sure that this really will be a viable solution before I went through the effort. There were a couple of considerations here:
First, it sounds like the inverter communication might be either the gateway box or ethernet, but not both. Using ethernet will cause the inverters to no longer talk to the gateway box. (Although I did see at least one report of someone who claimed that they were both working at the same time for them.) It also looks like the gateway box is only used to report to the Tesla app if you don’t have powerwalls. I do have powerwalls, so I went ahead and unplugged my gateway box and confirmed that my Tesla app was still working and seeing my solar production being reported in realtime. So it looks like not having the gateway box isn’t going to be an issue for me. If you don’t have powerwalls, then this might be a problem for you.
Next, it sounded like one needed to configure the inverters to use the ethernet cable instead of the zigbee connection to the gateway box. Apparently this is a quick and easy change to make if you have an LCD screen, but it’s not so quick and easy for us with no LCD screen.
Luckily, I happened to be talking to my installers as they were commissioning my inverters and they mentioned that they use a SolarEdge app called “Set App” for the commissioning and configuration of the inverters. I installed Set App on my phone (it’s just in the App Store) to see if I could play around with it and get anywhere. It asks for a username and password and I discovered that my new SolarEdge username and password doesn’t work (It just gives me an error saying that I don’t have permission for this). However, under the username and password box there’s a checkbox that says “View only? Start Here”. If you click on that it will ask you to use the phone camera to scan the QR code on the inverter (in my case there are several QR code’s on the side, but it’s the bigger one at the top that I needed to scan). It then asks me to move the switch on the inverter to the “P” position for a couple of seconds, then my phone asks me to join the inverter’s WiFi network. Once I do that Set App can see the inverter and all of it’s settings. Unfortunately it’s in read only mode so I can’t change anything, but at least I can see the settings and see how it’s configured. It was kind of interesting to look through there to see the configuration options.
However, here is the really cool thing. I also discovered that if you go through all of the above and get Set App connected in read only mode, then (while you’re still connected to the inverter’s WiFi network) you can go to the web browser on your phone and connect directly to the inverter’s IP address. In my case that was 172.16.0.1. When you connect directly to the inverter’s web page like that it would appear that it is not in read only mode and you can actually make changes. (Of course I didn’t go around changing things, but did look through the settings and nothing was greyed out to prevent me from making changes).
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like you can configure the inverter to connect through WiFi (which in my case I would have preferred over running a cable) because when I looked at the WiFi settings when I had connected directly to the inverter it just said “requires Set App to configure WiFi”. However, I was able to access the options to configure ethernet.
It also looked like the communication selection was set to “automatic” so I believe that once I do connect an ethernet cable it may just automatically see it and start using that connection without even having to make any changes on the inverter. But even if changes do need to be made it looks like I can make them by accessing the inverter this way.
I’ll probably wait until this evening to actually run the cable and connect it so I can do it while the attic is cooler and so I’m not interrupting my solar production to open the inverter and connect the cable. Once I do so I’ll post here again and let you know how it goes.