jaggedben
Senior Member
- Location
- Northern California
- Occupation
- Solar and Energy Storage Installer
The concern is not really about the PV, it's the round-about way they went about adding 40 amps of solar to a 100 amp service. I hope the drawing helps, I left out the grounds and neutrals so it would be less confusing.
The general concept of what they did was completely valid. In fact I almost posted an initial reply to this thread to say "They did nothing wrong!" And if you leave out the grounds, neutrals and bonding, then you don't see what's wrong. But when you look at those details they really screwed the pooch. Most of it comes back to the fact that they tried to reconfigure a meter main combo which is not meant to be reconfigured in such a fashion. If this house had possessed separate meter and service panel enclosures, they could have made it work.
The most difficult issue I see with fixing what they have done now is isolating the neutral bar in the original panel. It would need to be isolated from the neutral lugs in the meter base and it's probably manufactured with a busbar that connects straight through. Modifying that would be a much more serious violation of the listing than removing the factory conductors to the original main breaker. (By the way, we haven't mentioned it yet, but the neutrals and grounds in the original panel would also need to be separated to different terminal bars.)
It's not a good situation now.
I think you're dealing with someone who knows their solar code pretty well but does not have a background as an electrician. There's no 690 or 705 problems here, but glaring violations of key parts of 230, 250.6, and 300.
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