Anyone have any idea what these “blips” are in my solar production? I thought they could be planes flying over, but they’re consistently about 6 minutes apart and drops my solar by about 600 W initially and then 300 W. Only lasts about 2 seconds over all. Thoughts??
I am guessing you have micro inverters…
I have 2 large inverters and 47 panels and see a similar pair of blips every 15 minutes. The generation drops 600w-1500w for less than a couple seconds for each inverter (about 30 seconds apart) If I had to guess, I would say it is the inverter dumping the caps and refreshing, but I really have no idea what the root cause is, just that it is coming from each inverter. Shutting off one inverter reduces the output by about half and eliminates 1 blip. Turning the inverter back on and shutting the other inverter off creates a new blip and eliminates the remaining blip. If you have microinverters you likely have enough of them to create the higher number of blips per minute you are seeing.
Again this is just a guess based on the 2 blips I see on my setup.
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That’s interesting; I don’t have microinverters, but maybe, like you said, it’s just a characteristic of the inverter. What do you mean by “dumping the caps”, you mean capacitors? I think I need to do some research into how an inverter does it’s job. I have 24 Solaria panels mated to a single SMA SunnyBoy 7.7 Inverter. Perhaps a call to SMA is in order…
It definitely appears to be a common artifact of the inverter. The blips are in every solar output graph I have seen so far. Yes, by “caps” I was referring to capacitors. The inverters “simply” converter the DC power from the PV cells into A/C power that closely matches what we get from the grid.
Now that I think about it though, there has to be some synchronizing of the phased output from the inverters. Maybe the short pause is the inverter taking a few milliseconds to ensure its output is synch’d to the grid… not to mention sensing if the grid is still there… Power outage on the grid side will shutoff the inverter(s)
Got me thinking… 
Yeah that’s interesting, because, you’re right, it would have to bring power onto the grid in phase. I think for my own sanity, I’m just going to chalk it to up the magic that goes on inside that box in the basement!