Price: £1700 inc VAT (May 2025)
For several years we have been searching for a decent DC to AC inverter for use with our solar PV system.
We have tried several, and none have been particularly good in terms of logging and remote control.
As we have already several MorningStar Charge Controllers and they are good quality, it seemed sensible to try one of their inverters.
Unfortunately, the largest one they had "only" does 2500W, but is rated for 5000W for < 4 seconds, 3750W for up to 1 minute, and 3000W for up to 3 minutes, which is pretty good.
They also seem quite efficient and this model only uses 10W on idle, which is a lot better than a 5000W one we have by a different company - that uses 100W when doing nothing!
There is also a "standby" mode, where if the output is less than 8W, then it will in effect turn off the output for a short period before checking again.
In this mode it would use less than 2.8W, which is very good.
I did use this mode to start with, but caused problems with the NetIO PowerBOX I had connected, as the output would keep turning off and on again (which makes sense in retrospect), This would eventually have probably broken the PowerBOX and of course the PowerBOX would lose network connectivity when this happened.
Documentation is good and similar to their charge controllers.
The inverter itself is quite large and very heavy, and is probably a "Low Frequency Inverter", although this is not mentioned in the documentation.
As we do not know a great deal about the modbus protocols, a friend very kindly wrote a C program to retrieve values (link will be provided once the release is stable!). We will use this to store usage data to create dashboards.
There is no web GUI, so you have to either the Bluetooth app to change some of the settings, or modbus (for the rest, which includes changing the default IP address).
Interestingly, when we first enquired about the device in August 2024, the person that replied to my questions said that configuring it was "not for the faint of heart", and to check back in 6 months to see if the phone apps had been updated to allow IP address changes. At least they were honest, but it's rather strange that they have some decent software for their charge controllers, and nothing for this product, nearly a year later.
The Android app looks quite good, but isn't perfect by a long way. For example, you never actually pair the device, so both Bluetooth and Location have to be on for the app to find the device, even after the first connection.
There is no error if either (or both) of these are not enabled. There is no way of naming the device, so they just show up as follows:
This won't be very helpful if you have several in the same vicinity.
In the app you can see some of the settings and change them, and it also gives a nice display of the DIP Switch configuration:
There's no way of using the app unless you are connected to the device via bluetooth, which would have been useful to check on historical data or current settings etc.
Once the problems of the device hanging are fixed, or at least a decent work-around has been figured out, we will be using Grafana to create some dashboards, as well as set up some alerting.
So far we have had a peak usage of around 2kW, and in total it has powered 37kWh over a couple of weeks, with no issues.
Although this was not a cheap device, I am impressed with its features, and is certainly a lot better than any of the other inverters we have tried so far.
We are in touch with MorningStar to try and resolve the problems of the device crashing when modbus commands are issued in quick succession.
