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I've seen it mentioned that it could be possible to daisy chain the 3,500W Renogy charger/invertor output but I haven't seen exactly how you might do that or any mention in the manual.

  • How would you go about daisy chaining this or any other invertor on the A/C side?
  • Is there a limit to how many you could chain or is it just limited to your output copper?

Set-up we're looking at is an array of solar panels on top of some parking shade combined with some lithium batteries to power some guest accommodation. Each guest unit is expected to peak around 2000W.

We could do one charger/invertor per unit. However, it seems like a bit of a waste to do it that approach when if you had x3 your 10.5kW peak could probably cover 8 units happily.

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  • This tends to be very product-specific. The documentation is unclear about whether you can use multiple of these units together, so I'd recommend contacting them to ask.
    – LShaver ♦
    Commented Jan 29, 2022 at 15:36
  • Unless you're somewhere that has no electricial regulations at all it's very likely that a commercial install like yours will need to be done strictly according to both code and manufacturer guidelines. I don't know about Renogy but Victron charge extra for inverters that can work in parallel, but for those the limit is quite large (more than 10 IIRC... I wanted four). So the answer is: whatever Renogy say it is. Then work out whether you can do that while complying with your local electrical codes.
    – Móż
    Commented Jan 30, 2022 at 2:53
  • What's reasonable for power draw depends a great deal on where you are, and the state of the guests. In the UK with 13A per wall socket you have to assume guests will be plugging in 3kW heaters or hair dryers or welders. In Japan you might reasonably budget 1kW for the same thing, but you will also need to have a mcirowave, kettle and fridge available so there's another 2kW or more. But on top of that I assume there's an air conditioning load and I'm not sure you're including that?
    – Móż
    Commented Jan 30, 2022 at 2:56

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To me, it looks like much better idea to have multiple 3500 watt circuits. Not necessarily one circuit per guest, but let's say 2 guests per circuit for example. If you're using 230 V voltage, that's bit below 16 amps. So it means you can use ordinary Schuko connectors and 1.5mm2 cables. For 120 V voltage, the output already would be bit below 30 amps, which probably can't be used with standard cables and standard connectors.

If you parallel the outputs of 3 inverters, that's 46 amperes at 230 V and 88 amperes at 120 V. It would require 10 mm2 cables at 230 V, and 25 mm2 cables at 120 V. Have you seen those cables? 10 mm2 is thick, especially if you have three inner cables (ground, neutral, live) in a composite cable. One 25 mm2 cable is as thick as car jumper wires and a mains cable requires three cables for neutral, live and ground. Or actually one cable in a mains cable would be probably thicker, as with higher voltages you need more insulation.

In addition to the huge cables, you need connectors capable of delivering that current. Ain't going to be easy to find them.

In contrast, if you limit each circuit to below 3500 watts, standard cables and connectors work just fine.

If the inverters were smaller, let's say 1000 watts, I would encourage to parallel them if at all possible to get near the limit of ordinary cables and connectors (3600 watts at 230 V), but paralleling 3500 watt inverters to get over 10 kW is entirely different, the copper need in cables would be ridiculous.

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