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by sarcher 2493 days ago
A Journal of Light Construction editor had a fire in his SolarCity panel set-up as well, and had a hard time getting it sorted out.

https://www.jlconline.com/how-to/electrical/solar-panel-fire...

and here's a follow-up: https://www.jlconline.com/how-to/electrical/solar-panel-fire...

2 comments

Really bad customer service.

And another follow-up.[1] The old panels get removed and the roof gets new shingles. But no new solar panels yet.

[1] https://www.jlconline.com/how-to/electrical/solar-panel-fire...

Didn't Solar City rely on local installation firms?
Solar City could presumably sue the local installer if they're to blame, but it makes no difference to the customer who bought a product from Solar City.
Sounds like they aren’t vetting them enough, training them enough, or the panels are just hard to install properly.
I love the fact they blame an animal nest...

That animal must have been sitting on its eggs, and carelessly smoking a cigar I guess!

No... The cause will have been overheating of the 'optimizer' (MPPT tracker which outputs a fixed voltage) when it failed to a high impedance state, probably due to water incursion. The fire will have happened on a sunny day, because it's the energy from the other panels which starts the fire.

Tesla really should have made more parts of the system non-flammable. Then the story would simply be that this guy's system stopped working (or even 1 panel out of 16 stopped working, so output was slightly reduced)