Seriously? I thought you said you installed one of these systems.
Do you remember older movies where the thieves would unscrew or shoot out one light bulb at the car lot, and the whole string went out?
Did you have those old strings of Christmas lights where when you plugged it in and nothing lit up you had to go down the string checking each bulb to find the one that was loose or broken?
Those are both called strings of lights because the lights are all hooked up in series - sharing the voltage across them all and having a common current flow.
This is also why we call it a string inverter - the solar panels are hooked in series to build up a big DC voltage.
In a Solar Edge system, the optimizers are all hooked in series instead of the panel outputs themselves. Still very much a string system, and if one optimizer gets disconnected from the string or fails open you lose the entire string, just like the light bulbs.
I thought I might have missed something, so I went to the Solar Edge website this morning. Here's their guide on the optimizers- notice how often the word string appears:
http://www.solaredge.com/sites/default/files/se_application_fixed_string_voltage.pdf
This is the big difference from micro inverters, which are hooked together in parallel - like the lights in your living room and kitchen, where one bulb burns out and the rest are unaffected.
