Designing Your Solar Installation

Once you have made your decision to create a solar panel installation using a Power-One Aurora power inverter, there are a number of different panel configurations you need to consider.

If your rooftop has different orientation, east & west for example, you may wish to split your solar panels into two different strings and take advantage of Power-One’s dual MPPT channels.

Dual MPPT (short for maximum power-point tracking) is technology developed by Power-One to maximize the energy harvesting during different hours of the day or changing weather conditions.

Your Power-One inverter is constantly checking for the optimum configuration of your solar panel’s output to ensure the maximum total energy being harvested.

Also if there is any areas of shading within your rooftop area you need to consider the configuration of your panels to minimize energy losses through full or partial shading.

Online Stringsizing Tool

Once you have chosen the specific solar panels and the Aurora inverter for your installation, you can use the online stringsizing tool on the Power-One website to help with your design.

The Online Stringsizing Tool is located within the Quicklinks section.

When opened, you will notice the simple five-step process to configure your solar installation.

Step 1 – Input information about the location of your installation

Step 2 – Include the temperature information for your location

Step 3 - Add in information about the specific type of solar panels. This includes the panel manufacturer’s name and part number of the solar panels.

Step 4 – Then you need to select specific model of the Power-One Aurora solar inverter.

Step 5 – You should select your preferred configuration (either Parallel or Independent MPPT) and check for its Utilization Factor. The closer to 100% the better.

From your data, the online stringsizing tool will automatically give you different configuration options. This will include variations for the dual MPPT channels.

You can then use this information to find the best configuration for your solar installation.