Enphase Energy’s Ensemble

Enphase’s newest and eighth generation microinverter, the IQ8, debuts with a new “grid agnostic” system. Enphase has now officially stepped into the hybrid PV system arena with energy storage under the name Ensemble. With convenient features like smart phone monitoring and virtual assistant integration with Alexa, Enphase is giving homeowners easy control and understanding of their system and its performance. 

Ensemble’s AC battery provides you with energy during a grid outage, and continuous solar energy production. Solar production during an outage is crucial to recharge your battery and power loads in the home when the sun is shining. Whether you have an outage lasting hours or days, Enphase’s Ensemble is capable of powering you through. 

Ensemble is expected to be released mid 2020 and will be compatible with existing IQ6 and IQ7 systems. If you have an existing installation and are interested in battery backup we’d be happy to provide you a quote. 

Here’s an informative video by Enphase introducing Ensemble:

What is a microinverter?

A microinverter is a small inverter that typically connects to only one solar panel. A microinverter solar energy system will have a microinverter placed under, and connected to, each individual solar panel on your roof.

Why use a microinverter?

Microinverters offer several incentives over their string inverter counterparts: Microinverters are great at reducing the impact of shading. Should you have trees or structures casting shadows over your installation area micro’s will minimize the losses. Micro’s also operate completely independent of each other. Each solar panel then has the opportunity to reach peak performance without its neighbors bringing it down. In contrast, string inverters utilize strings of several solar panels all connected in series. When a solar panel in a strings’ performance is low it has the potential to bring down its neighbors with it; reducing the output of the whole string of solar panels.

Why use anything other than a microinverter?

Microinverters are a great option for smaller systems, say less than 10kW, where shading will be an issue and, formally, when battery backup was of no interest.  On larger system installations microinverters quickly become more costly to install. There are other options to minimize shading losses, such as optimizers, when utilizing a string inverter for bigger solar energy arrays.

For more information check out other pages on our site:
How solar energy works
Solar FAQ