Tigo optimisers

Hello
As I was mentioning in a different post my new system is getting poor winter results due to moving shade from trees and also partial self shading on the second and third rows due to the van der valk valkpro+ mounting system.

Has anyone had Tigo optimisers retrofitted and were they worth the extra expense? Did they make a noticeable/worth while difference?

I've seen all sorts of conflicting information. Some say they're the best thing ever, some say there's no point due to solar panels having bypass diodes and others say that the benefits are around 3 to 4% at best.

Cheers

If your inverter is top quality and MPPT and your panels are split cell with bypass diodes there will be negligible or no benefit from adding optimisers. Take any one of these options away and you might see some improvement but you won;t really know until you've spent the money.

We had them fitted when the panels went up, so the cost-benefit will be different for us (assuming it will be costly for you to add them). I wanted the power optimisation, and I wanted the ability to have some panels shaded without it killing the whole array. But I also wanted to be able to monitor each panel to ensure they were working, as expected. Do I think it makes a huge difference in terms of optimisation? Possibly 5-6% perhaps? But I probably do need them on the panels which get shaded.

If it is easy for you to add them, why not try a few on the shaded panels, to see what happens (but probably not worth buying the extra hardware, which is required to monitor the panels). Or would it be easier/cheaper to address the shading issues instead?

Please bear in mind that I never had panels without optimisers, so my opinions will be swayed towards them, rather than against them 😀.

One other factor to consider: They do seem to produce some RFI (Radio Frequency Interference), so if you are a serious daytime radio listener, they may cause you some problems. I had to connect an external FM aerial to my wife's bedside radio.

Thank you for your input.

Ulven , there is @joshgreenuk who has Tigo optimisers and is having problems with solar generation since loading the beta GE firmware that is trying to solve the %SOC problems.

See this other thread, and his reports.

https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/1342-new-givenergy-inverter-bms-firmware-beta-testing-chat/348

Simon_C FWIW, pre-beta, I am happy with them.

I have them on all 18 panels but currently not on the Beta firmware - did have a panel failure though which blew it's tigo optimiser and it's replacement before they realised it was the panel fault.

I've got TIGO (TS4-A-O) on all my panels with a TAP and CCA. Everything was installed when the panels went up.

Just looking at the stats they have saved me about 3%. I wanted mine mainly to keep an eye on the panels, and I only have a few problems with shading early and late in the day. Will they pay for themselves ..... maybe over 10 years but I like being able to see what is happening to my arrays.

One note of warning though. I had "big" problems with TIGO communications and some panels being bypassed completely because the software in the optimisers was faulty. I was only able to really spot the problem because I was monitoring string voltages via HA, although I did see the some of the TIGO's go offline occasionally via the TIGO portal. Once I reported the problem the support team were very quick to sort it - and they did some sort of firmware update to fix the problem remotely. No problems at all since then.

You can find quite a lot of info on the the firmware problem online e.g.
https://diysolarforum.com/threads/cs-370-1-2-cut-panels-tigo-ts4-and-shading-solis-25kw-inverter.34780/

It may be that the latest supplies are all fine, but I would certainly ask any installer quite a lot of questions before buying any of these to make sure they had the latest firmware!

p.s. I'm not on the GE Beta trial.

Thank you for your replies