How to wire a 230V dual-phase installation?

[No4nz]

I live in New Zealand with an uncommon switchboard setup and am contemplating adding a Gen2 Vue (with solar coming). A large house some distance from the street with pool/spa resulted in a dual-phase supply. So I have 2 meters, with 2 phases from the street, into a single electrical panel.  This is similar to a split-phase system but with a couple of differences. Typically an NZ street will have 3-phase supply, with individual houses having a single 230V 60A phase, with the phases rotating every 3 houses. So for a dual phase house I’m presuming my phases are not opposite but 120 degrees apart. The other difference from a split phase is that we never use the 2 phases together (230/460) like is done in the US (120/240).

Having read your Gen 2 Vue installation guide, you cover a number of options but not quite this one, but I presume the phase angle difference would not matter if I followed the split-phase standard of 8a or 8b, with 2 200A CTs and connecting the black and read wires from the harness to breakers for each phase, with the blue and white wires going to the neutral bus bar (which is bonded to the earth bus bar in our standard).

Also, I have several RCD devices in the switch panel (Residual Current earth leakage Devices) which monitor both phase and neutral and trip if there is loss to earth. I’m picking that CTs are still connected to the phase on the load side and will work normally even with these present?

 

[Emporia Support]

@No4zn,

Thanks for the detail.  We have a minimum phase angle separation when you are setting up for solar net metering.   While we haven’t had any customers report to us that the 120 degree angle was not enough, most of these were three phase applications.   We certainly would be able to manually lock in your phases, a requirement for net metering, if during your set up you were getting a error indicating ‘two voltages on the same phase’.   As mentioned if you are installing two 200A sensors then the you would follow the steps for 8a/8b.

As for the RCD breakers which are the same as US AFCI(arc fault circuit interrupted)  you can install using these breakers by terminating our white wire from the wire harness on the same breaker that the black wire from our wire harness is on.   The black powers the Vue and therefore you need to have the neutral from out power harness matched to the same breaker so it doesn’t fault.

“If you are going to use an AFCI/RCD (Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter) breaker, you need to ensure that the black and white wires from the Gen 2 wire harness are both installed on the same AFCI/RCD breaker. Black needs to go to the hot/live and white to the neutral on the breaker. The red wire can be installed on another AFCI/RCD without any modification (since it is not pulling any power) and the blue wire will need to be installed on the neutral bar.”

Please feel free to contact our support team should you have any further questions.

Cheers,

Marty

[Author]

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