Repairing an Enphase Envoy 3 after lightning strike

Three weeks ago Sunday, a bad thunderstorm sent out a lightning bolt which hit close by our small farm and took out a sheep fence charger, a microwave that was already glitching, the Internet (DSL) remote, and, as we eventually discovered, the motherboard for our solar PV system's Envoy 3 "combiner" box.

It also terrified our kid, who wouldn't stop crying and worrying about it for hours, and is still afraid of thunderstorms. But that's another matter. 

(We live on a hill and have experienced close strikes before. But none have hit this close since Edana was born.)

What follows are instructions for testing and replacing the motherboard. 

This is designed to be helpful for owners that want to fix their own stuff. 

Enphase is a popular brand of solar PV kit, but like a lot of corporations these days, their preference is for "professionals" to do the work if repairs are to be made. They may have heard of the "right to repair" but they maintain a two-tier information system. The owners get only a certain amount of information, and have access to an online interface that gives them nicely turned-out graphs and charts so they think they can see how their systems are doing, but the online system updates only every six hours, and is not helpful in diagnosis. "Professionals," on the other had, have access to "Installer Toolkit," a separate and more complete online interface that allows real-time connection to the system. They also have access to a separate part of the corporate website where they get better manuals.

As Matthew Crawford pointed out in "Shop Class and Soulcraft," there is nothing more pathetic than a modern man or woman mystified and infantilized by the high-tech gadgetry he or she owns but can't repair or even understand. We have become by historic stages the owners and users of powerful technology, gadgets of all shapes and purposes with previously-unimaginable labor-saving abilities and convenience, but we can fix none of it ourselves because fixing -- learning how to use tools and reason to make things that have stopped working work again -- is unfashionable. 

We are told by modern culture that gainful employment requires a college degree. Apart from a few science labs, that degree will be almost all taught in the classroom or worse, online. And children thus spend their apprenticeship years, the years they should be learning to use their hands and brains together, using only their brain and only a small part of the brain at that. It's no surprise that only a small minority of folks ever learn to fix anything more complicated than a Lego set. This is a major problem for society in many ways. Most importantly, it creates a kind of aura of invincibility and invisibility around technology that few penetrate.

And then we wonder why there are so many conspiratorial nutcases and Q-freaks around. They don't understand "normal" society because, never having been taught or learned anything about our complex society and the technology that runs it, they make stuff up about in their heads and share it on the Internet.

Needless to say, I accepted none of this conventional wisdom during my own thirty-year academic career and advocated for a fuller understanding of human intellect, to include doing as well as thinking, fixing as well as researching, and best of all yet thinking while doing. 

The great thing about technology is that it doesn't freaking care what you think about it. There are no "alternative facts." It has only one reality: working or not, and making it work again when it stops requires you to interface with that real world and experiment using trial and error, getting real information, and responding to that real information with actions based on logic and reason. 

I fix, therefore I am. And by fixing, I am more complete a human. Richer in many ways, not just financially. I am, as Crawford says "master of my own stuff."

Now I'm retired, I don't have a classroom and teaching workshop anymore in which to deliver this philosophy, just this blog. So this is my soap box.

Back to Enphase. These instructions are for the "Envoy IQ Combiner 3" combiner box, which is best described as a "smart" electrical sub-panel. There are other Enphase set ups and even other Envoy set-ups. You may be able to adapt the instructions for your set up. Let me know if this is is or isn't the case. My email is to the right.

The Envoy IQ Combiner 3 has a normal circuit breaker "bus" bar, but also a microprocessor "brain," the Envoy itself. The brain connects to both the PV inverters and the Internet, and sends data and instructions from the Internet to the inverters ("microinveters") (one of which lives behind each solar PV module in this kind of system), and also sends data back to the server at the Enphase corporate HQ.

Fry the brain, and everything stops. The inverters are designed to shut down if the brain quits, because they are programmed to national and state-level safety protocols called "grid profiles" that are designed to keep them from exporting power to the grid during a power outage and also (in some states) at different times when the power is not needed or the power company doesn't wish to purchase it back from the owner.

If you get a lightning strike and your PV power quits, the first thing you will notice is that your Enphase website doesn't show power production. this is what it looks like when everything is working correctly:

Notice that it says "system normal" up in the top right corner. 

Next you will go to your Envoy combiner and open the two catches. There are normally four LEDs that light up, at the top right of the black "dead panel." If the LEDs are off or one or more of them is red then you may have a problem. in my case all four were off.

BTW, the dead panel is there for your safety. It's to stop you from sticking your fingers in the works and getting a shock. 

But it's also there to stop you from fixing. 

Take the bloody thing off. That's right. Penetrate that aura. Get under the hood. Yes, it can hurt you. But, as Ed Abbey said many times, it's your God-given right to make a fool of yourself or kill yourself if you want to. Four Phillips number three screws, one in each corner.

If you don't know what a Phillips number three screw is, look it up. Call it adulting.

No need to switch the breaker off. You're going to need it on. Just don't touch the shiny bus bar conductors or any other live parts and you'll be fine. If you do touch them, you'll get a nasty 110 volt "belt" but unless you are already on the verge of a heart attack, this will not kill you.

Then take a volt-ohm meter or multimeter and switch to the alternating current setting. That's the one with the wavy line symbol. Set it to the first notch higher than 220V, usually 600 or 700V. Take the black and red probes that came with the meter and, being careful not to touch any metal parts, test for voltage at the PV breaker. this is the one that connects the wires from the inverter string to the bus. You should see between 220 and 240V, give or take.

If you have voltage at the PV breaker yet all four LED are "off" this power all comes from the grid, not your solar array. But this tells you that the problem is in the solar system, not the grid connection. If you don't have power, troubleshoot back to the entrance panel using the same technique and meter and care not to get electrocuted to find out which bit of your home's internal wiring has gone awry. 

If you do have power it's still possible that the lightning fried the inverters, not the Envoy. Enphase has a lengthy troubleshooting procedure in the manual for the inverters. Possible, but unlikely. The inverters have better protection against lightning strike. So because of this unlikelihood, and because it's easier to get to, I would check out the Envoy before I ran this procedure.

Now it's time to turn off the solar breaker in the power entrance panel. Then use your meter or one of those 110/220 voltage detector pen-shaped thingies to double check that power is off. Mine is made by Klein and very reliable. Once you have done this, use your cell phone or tablet to take a close-up picture of the Envoy combiner box wiring for reference. Here's the one I took:

I didn't need to photograph the breaker wiring because the cut-outs on the dead panel told me where the breakers should go. You may have more breakers so you may wish to do this.

Then remove the breakers. You don't have to disconnect the wiring. Just pry them gently away from the bus bar. Using a small flat screwdriver, disconnect the wires that go directly to the Envoy, in my case the small white and blue wires from the transducer, the three 220v wires that power the Envoy, and the ethernet cable to the Envoy. Then, using only a Phillips number 3 screwdriver (not a bloody great cordless impact driver) carefully unscrew the Envoy.

If your Envoy got fried by the lightning strike there will most likely be some discoloration of the printed circuit board (PCB). With mine you could smell it; there was a little whiff of burned wiring. There may even be a little soot on the PCB or on the surrounding plastic box, like this (below):

Here's the kind of discoloration you'll look for:

You can see grey marks around the spots of solder where excess voltage has fried the PCB.

Time for a new one. Order direct from Encase using their online shop. Your new PCB will arrive in the mail. You'll fit it, reversing the procedure above. make sure all the connections are in the right place using the picture you took earlier. They sent you a sticker to replace the one you had with the Envoy serial number. this goes on the door of the combiner box. 

Then turn the breaker in the power entrance panel back on. 

You should immediately see four red LEDs where, when your system was working, you used to see four green ones.

Now you have a choice. You can call or chat with Enphase corporate and have them update your Envoy's serial number in the system, then wait for your system to boot up and send data to Enphase and update the Enphase consumer interface, which can take up to 24 hours or more. Once everything is properly booted, you should get four green LEDs and be able to see from Enphase that your system is now working. 

You may need to use the Enphase website or have Enphase themselves update your grid profiles. Rebooting with a new Envoy resets the grid profile. This is a set of instructions that the Enphase server sends to your inverters, telling them when to turn on and off based on local grid requirements.

Here is what Enphase wants you to know about grid profiles.

You can get in trouble with your grid operator if you use the wrong profile. You may need to call them to find out what the profile is supposed to be. The national default is IEEE 1547 2015.

But better and faster than this, you can go to the Apple Ap Store and download "Installer Toolkit" to your phone or tablet. If you have this software, you can switch out the Envoy serial numbers themselves using the "replace Envoy" function, update your grid profiles yourself, and see if the new PCB is working. If it is working your inverters will be pushing power to the grid and you'll see that in the Toolkit interface.

There's some scuttlebutt in comments on the Enphase website that mere mortals can't download use Installer Toolkit, but I was able to get it. Give it a try.

Enjoy.

Follow-up...

... to the the article posted a few weeks ago by Jonathan Malesic in the NYT.

"Gathering people in the same place obviously risks viral transmission, but it also permits modes of learning and mentoring that are hard to replicate any other way. Tyler Burkhardt, a student at the University of Texas at Dallas (where my wife teaches and where I taught last year), told me that when he was taking remote classes, he missed the spontaneous interactions with his peers. Online, he said, “there’s not that network of people to continue interacting with after the class to keep that knowledge fresh and keep applying it.” As a result, he said, he retained less of what he’d learned." 

More here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/opinion/college-education-breakdown.html

The feed

 

The Church of Reason

"The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself. 

"In addition to this state of mind, "reason," there’s a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.

"But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist. "Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, and think that control of the church buildings implies control of the church. They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations."

My famous cousin

Muggeridge is back in the news, this time on NPR.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/08/1097097620/new-york-times-pulitzer-ukraine-walter-duranty

My paternal grandfather, George Womersley of Sheffield, England, locally famous in his own right for helping organize the Kinder Trespass of 1932, had a first cousin, Malcolm Muggeridge, who was, among other things, a journalist and BBC TV personality. My great grandmother, Ida Booler Womersley, was sister to Muggeridge's mother, Annie Booler Muggeridge. Both were raised in Crooks, Sheffield, the Victorian row-house district where I lived as a small child.

He's my first cousin, twice removed. A tiny quantity of shared DNA. Probably that high forehead, which my grandfather and father also shared. 

Luckily, my hairline is not receding quite as fast as theirs did.

In a very full life, Muggeridge was also at different times a spy, for M16 during WWII, an army intelligence officer, a college teacher, an early advocate for racial and caste justice in India, and an author of various novels and plays, none outstanding successful but most published or staged. He spent many years in India as a young man and in early middle age, meeting and corresponding with Gandhi; later in life he was responsible for introducing Mother Theresa to the west with a book and several TV shows. He was great friends with George Orwell, sharing some elements of his philosophical outlook, and met and interviewed many of the great men and women of his times.

He was also a womanizer, a groper, a serial cheater on his wife Kitty, and alienated or insulted most of his friends at one time or another. 

The general verdict on him is that he was brilliantly erratic, yet mostly oblivious to whatever good or harm he did to those around him. Until old age, when he mellowed considerably.

The Ukrainians don't hold any of this against him. Together with Garath Jones, he is one of two holders of the Ukrainian Order of Freedom (awarded posthumously) for infiltrating Ukraine during the Holodomor and penning articles that revealed the chaos of Stalins terror-famine and its death toll to the west.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/02/exposing-stalin-famine-in-ukraine-muggeridge-1933

He shared the family trait for dementias of one form or another and died of it in 1990. 

Hopefully I don't inherit that trait. 

Speaking truth to power, though...

Remote learners not learning

The article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/opinion/college-university-remote-pandemic.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Guest%20Essays

An excerpt:

"Ms. Capizzi’s comments echo those of the sociologists Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, who in their 2014 book, “How College Works,” found that students learn when they’re motivated, and “the strongest motivation to work on basic skills comes from an emotionally based face-to-face relationship with specific other people — for instance, the one-on-one writing tutorial with a respected professor who cares about this student’s work.""

Hahnian advice to a former student

 

Some of our former students were complaining on FacePlant about the picture above. 

Said one, and I quote exactly, right down to the missing semi-colon, "I always knew my degree would be worthless one day, this picture is proof."

Well OK, then. Not a happy camper, obviously. 

This hurt a little and so deserved a careful response, and I made one. This is what I wrote:

"Can you read, write, think, and figure at an advanced level? Could you do so, or do so quite as well, before attending college? That's the correct measure. As matters stand in the world of higher education, most degrees are becoming worthless thanks to the kind of race-to-the-bottom competition we are experiencing, particularly in the online institutions. The knowledge, skills, and disposition to conduct reasoned inquiry at an advanced level will never be so, especially as the added students are generally not learning. It's less to do with the extrinsic value of college, especially now that more than half the population will attend, and more to do with the internal process of becoming a fully reasoned human being."

Look, there's no denying that the effective closure of the original campus and the death of its experiential college program is a blow. And not just to our fond memories of the place. There are every few colleges that worked as hard as the old Unity did to provide experiential education. There was good reason for this. Like many if not most of our former faculty, I'm committed to Kurt Hahn's vision. Experiential education works where other education fails, by engaging with the whole person. It works where other systems fail. 

And that is why the old Unity College is so much better than the new online-only one.

Over the decades there were literally thousands of Unity College graduates that met the standard outlined above that would not have met it or would have had to work much, much harder to meet it had it not been for the experiential approach.

I expect there are very few graduates that even begin to meet this standard now. Online degrees may be more immediately accessible for folks that have jobs and careers and families. But are we sure that these folks are actually adding value to their higher thinking skills? Online degrees are accessible, I'll concede, but is education?

There's a difference. A philosopher's "difference that makes a difference."

I tend to think that if you can get any educational value at all out of an online degree, then you'd have probably done about as well to just read and consider and read and consider some more, all on your own. If you're that kind of self-starter, if you can actually learn and improve with only the minimum of low intensity attention that you get from an online degree, then you probably could have done about as well or just a little worse on your own.

And if you're not that kind of a self-starter? Well, you just bought a credential, didn't you?

Not an education.

Selling credentials in place of education is just a high-end con job, one that will almost certainly get found out sooner or later, generally by the student who suddenly discovers later in life, when it probably most matters to them, that they do not actually have the higher learning skills they paid for.

Students, staff, administrators, and most especially board members who cannot comprehend this difference ought not to be involved in higher education.