Newsletter - April 2010

Are you at Full Throttle? We are.

Over the past six months, we expanded our manufacturing facility, strengthened inventories and raised $40M in financing to support further growth. In short, we've been gearing up to support our installer customers, and now we are kicking off April by launching the Full Throttle sales promotion.

Details on Full Throttle can be found here. The promotion ends July 31st, so there's no time for spinning your wheels!

Enphase in Ontario

Enphase now offers microinverter systems that satisfy Ontario's domestic content requirement and therefore qualify for the FIT and microFIT programs. For more information, visit the section of our website on Ontario-qualified Enphase products.

In this photo, Enphase CEO Paul Nahi (second from left) cuts the ribbon on our new Ontario manufacturing line with (from left to right) EC Sykes of Flextronics, Adam Webb of Sentinel Solar Corp., Dr. Helena Jaczek, MPP Oak Ridges–Markham and Tony Shamata of Flextronics.

Do You Know?

There are some great new white papers available on the Enphase website:

• Utility interactive What does "utility interactive" mean, and what protections does it ensure? Read more
• NEC requirements for DC disconnect A look at the NEC requirements on using connectors as AC disconnects in PV applications. Read more
• Utility reconnection timer A summary of requirements for Utility Protective Functions in Utility-Interactive inverters, specific reconnect timer requirement and methods of timer verification.Read more

What Installers are Saying

We would like to thank all of our installers for contributing to the first ever Enphase Installer Survey! We were blown away by the high response rate, and we can now share with you some of the interesting ideas and trends we noticed:

• Newcomers and Veterans Agree on Enphase. Enphase has proven valuable to both solar first-timers and solar old-timers. According to the survey, our largest customer group did their first solar installation in 2009 and the second largest Enphase customer group has been doing solar installations for more than five years.
• Most see significant energy harvest gains (click on chart above). Of the installers tracking energy production, 90% observed an increase of more than 5% with Enphase, and 12% of installers noticed an increase of more than 20%.
• There are many reasons to consider Enphase. 100% of installers said energy harvest played a role in their choice to use Enphase, but installers had a number of other reasons for choosing Enphase, with ease of design/installation and ease of monitoring ranking high on the list.

Helpful Hints: WEEB and "Read This First"

• WEEB
  CSA recently completed the evaluation and approval of the Wiley Electronics WEEB grounding washers for use with the Enphase Microinverter. Now, you have an alternative to installing a continuous grounding electrode conductor and connecting it to each microinverter chassis. With WEEB, a grounding washer connects the microinverter to grounded racking.
  
  A new application note on the Enphase website details the installation procedure for the WEEB grounding washer, and lists the Enphase-compatible racking models with grounding washers available.


• Read This First
  We’ve created a new document to help with the installation process. Please see Read This First, which summarizes the three key steps to installing an Enphase system.