A friend said his engineer is quoting 690.12 for the rapid shutdown and that the inverter (with rapid shutdown) has to be on the roof, or I guess not farther then 10 feet from it. We just adopted the 2014 NEC. Is this not quite right?
If your design calls for strategically locating a conventional string inverter within 10 ft of the array in order to comply with 2014 Rapid Shutdown, then you do need to locate the inverter on the roof.
This is not necessarily the case for inverters in general, as you can use DC balance of systems equipment to comply with 690.12 in liew of placing your inverter immediately adjacent to the array. For instance, a combiner box with a contactor (like those from SolarBOS) or shunt trip breaker (Midnite Solar's design) on its output. Or a unit with string-level contactors, like those available from Bentek and Innovative Solar Inc.
Like others have mentioned, SolarEdge has module-level rapid shutdown (or 2-modules-level rapid shutdown) by design. and therefore allow you to place the inverter anywhere. Each optimizer blocks the full module voltage from extending beyond the optimizer during open circuit conditions, such that the maximum voltage is 1 volt per optimizer. The latest and greatest SolarEdge inverters come standard with a bleed-down resistor to comply with the timing part of 690.12, but you can buy a retrofit kit to fit their earlier models. For inverters like the 14.4k and 33.3k, this part comes standard. For inverters like the 9k-US, it is serial number specific.
