SunWize | Power Independence

Why SunWize?

For nearly 30 years SunWize has been designing and building reliable industrial power solutions for governments, small businesses, and Fortune 500 companies.

Our team has extensive experience manufacturing reliable energy systems for extreme environments, sensitive loads, and other challenging projects. Our stand-alone solar systems, grid-tied battery backup, and hybrid power systems are custom designed and built to our customers exact specifications.

As a SunWize customer, you will be assigned an experienced account executive who will work to understand your specific business needs, and walk you through our five-step process. Want to learn more? Visit our Why SunWize page.

Capabilities & process

Our Engineering Team considers the location, terrain, wind, saltwater exposure, weather exposure, and other environmental factors in order to address any additional structural requirements. All of these factors are evaluated and included in the proposal so there are no surprises in store for you when it comes to system installation and deployment.

If you're looking for turnkey systems, OEM integration, or something custom, we can help.

Interested in learning more about our process? Click the next tab to learn about our site analysis process.

Location

Understanding where a customer's equipment needs to be powered is an important step in any solar project. Not only will the site dictate the amount of solar resources available (and thus the size of the needed solar array), it may also affect other design factors, including:

1. Hardware or coatings for marine or corrosive environments
2. Array support structures with proper wind speed ratings
3. Temperature compensation programming for batteries
4. Risk of shading due to vegetation or obstructions
5. Site layout or ground penetration limitations

You can learn more about the importance of location in this video.

Solar Resources

Not all solar resource data is created equal. The reliability of your system will only be as good as the solar data your design assumptions are based off of. That's why, as a rule of thumb, SunWize uses ground-based solar collection data from trusted sources like NREL and the National Solar Radiation Data Base (NSRDB).

Designing off-grid industrial systems is different than most residential and commerical systems, which use average annual solar resources. Since the equipment we power typically needs to run reliably 24/7 and 365 days a year, we must design to the worst case solar resource month, typically December, for year-round reliability.

Equipment Loads

The next important step in the design of any solar system is properly understanding the loads of the equipment to be powered. Similar to the accurate solar resource data we discussed on the previous tab, systems will only be as reliable as the load data the design assumptions are made from.

In some cases, properly characterizing the loads can be a challenging exercise before even considering design. You can learn more about this in our understanding loads tech-note. It has several examples and covers some common questions, such as a why a 100W solar panel will not run a 100W load!

Electrical Specs and Proposal

In addition to understanding the total size of the loads, we will look at the power requirement of each piece of equipment. This will typically be DC or AC voltages, but sometimes may be a power-over-ethernet (PoE) specification, or a motor rating in horsepower.

We're ready to finalize our design for a quote! We'll recap design assumptions from what we've reviewed so far:

1. Location for environmental considerations and solar resources
2. Load assumptions or values for equipment being powered
3. Required voltages and power inputs for customer equipment
4. Any fitment constraints or other limitations
5. Properly sized solar array and battery bank for the application

Design

While there are many criteria that affect the reliability of a solar system, the ones below generally have the biggest impact.

The first is Array to Load Ratio (ALR), which defines, on an average monthly basis, the ratio of power produced by the solar array to all power consumed by loads. Typically this ratio should be between 1.2-1.4 or higher, meaning that on an average day during the worst solar resource month of the year, the solar array produces between 20%-40% more energy than the loads consume.

The second is battery autonomy, or the length of time the loads can run with no energy input from the solar array (or other energy source). 5-7 days of battery autonomy, or more, ensures that your system will not be adversely impacted by any prolonged cloud cover events or storms. You can learn more about good solar design principles on our Solar Sizing - IEEE 1562 tech-note.

Drawings

Once a purchase order is received, we follow a rigorous process to ensure the system is built accurately to spec. The process typically starts with a new drawing number request within our engineering que. The drawing will be assigned to one of our engineering staff for completion while also considering the ship date needs of the customer.

Fitment of the complete system and all major components will be laid-out in CAD to ensure there are no space constraint issues. Next, the electrical wiring line drawings will be finalized. The final package will be reviewed and approved and then delivered to production.

Product Reservation

Once an order is confirmed in our system, inventory will immediately be physically reserved to the job. If any items are back-ordered, it will trigger purchase orders for the needed equipment to be placed. If needed, material may be transferred between our warehousing and manufacturing locations in order to improve lead time or cut down on costs.

If any special sub-assembly work is required, such as kitting or labeling, those tasks will be handled as work-order tasks within our system. This can help us complete custom processes, tasks, or assembly steps for our customers consistently and with fewer errors.

Assembly

When engineering drawings have been completed, they are sent to the appropriate personnel at the East or West coast location that the order lines will be manufactured from.

We're ready to begin assembling our power system, per the engineering drawings completed for this project. We'll also be assembling and completing other tasks to finalize the order.

1. Uploading of completed customer documents
2. Appropriate instruction manual
3. Equipment fittings and spacing
4. Electrical safety
5. Intended user operation