Hello all you bad cappers!
Just ran across this forum and would like to get your expert opinion on an issue from the solar power world. As a life long electronics type, I have been contending with my solar power forum friends that the new micro-inverters from the Enphase brand are doomed to failure because they have the audacity to think that they can go 10 to 20 years with electrolytic caps inside of a sealed box mounted on a hot roof beneath solar panels. The company swears up and down that these are "hi-rel" caps and they've done accelerated testing on them etc, and has the whole industry trusting them to the tune of 100's of thousands of units per year. Not me baby - give them a few more years in the field and watch out. Sorry, I can't give you the details, but you get the idea. Each unit runs as much as 250W converting 30Vdc to 240Vac, the caps are like 1000uf, running at 60hz.
I don't know maybe I'm just paranoid, but my first summer job was working at Tektronix in the precision cap department and I've seen bad caps in every kind of consumer electronics. I watched VCR failures for about 10 years and maybe a 100 versions that it took some Panasonic engineer to learn that Elec. Caps aren't spec'd at high frequencies like 50kHz and don't work as good there.
Just ran across this forum and would like to get your expert opinion on an issue from the solar power world. As a life long electronics type, I have been contending with my solar power forum friends that the new micro-inverters from the Enphase brand are doomed to failure because they have the audacity to think that they can go 10 to 20 years with electrolytic caps inside of a sealed box mounted on a hot roof beneath solar panels. The company swears up and down that these are "hi-rel" caps and they've done accelerated testing on them etc, and has the whole industry trusting them to the tune of 100's of thousands of units per year. Not me baby - give them a few more years in the field and watch out. Sorry, I can't give you the details, but you get the idea. Each unit runs as much as 250W converting 30Vdc to 240Vac, the caps are like 1000uf, running at 60hz.
I don't know maybe I'm just paranoid, but my first summer job was working at Tektronix in the precision cap department and I've seen bad caps in every kind of consumer electronics. I watched VCR failures for about 10 years and maybe a 100 versions that it took some Panasonic engineer to learn that Elec. Caps aren't spec'd at high frequencies like 50kHz and don't work as good there.
do we know what they actually use in the units the sell?
But today, I’m making an exception here. Why? No idea. Perhaps only because the repair details are still “fresh” in my head… which is ironic, given this is a 16 year old monitor that hardly anyone will care about today. It is new to me, though. 
I picked it up last November from someone on my local Craigslist. It wasn’t very close to where I live, but was close to a family friend that I had to go visit anyways. So after watching the posting on Craigslist for a few weeks and seeing it getting...
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