New way to create stringplans in Helios

In Helios, there now is a new way to create a stringplan. This new method ensures string plans are designed in a faster and more efficient way and makes it easier to understand for the installer of the system.

Prefer to keep things as they were? No worries, the old way of making a string plan with the string groups from the laying plan will remain available to you in Helios. This can be chosen in the upper right corner of the string plan page in Helios. In addition, the (expected) yield calculation will continue to take into account the string groups in the layout plan to avoid combining any bad string groups with the better performing panels.

The new stringplan method will be the default, but should you prefer the old method this can easily be selected via the profile preferences menu by ticking the box next to “Design strings with string groups”.

Above you can see how a string plan looks like using the new way.

Inverters show all MPPTs and their strings by means of the following number coding: 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, etc. In this case this stands for MPPT 1 with string 1, MPPT 1 with string 2, MPPT 2 with string 1, etc. This allows all strings to be shown separately.

To make things easier, several equal strings can be entered in the light green area. This can be done by indicating at “strings” and “panels” how many strings of how many panels you want to enter. After doing this you can click on ‘Set’ and the values are entered for this inverter.

See example below:

To copy a certain string and panel combination from one inverter to another, click the “Copy” button for the inverter with the correct combination. This way, all inverters can easily be filled with the correct string combination and the last inverter can be filled with the “i” for the total string distribution of the project.

New maximum cable length calculation tool

An easy feature we added is the maximum cable length calculation that we put behind each string. Please note that the cable length is the length of the entire cable (+ and – side) excluding the panels. So this includes the cable in order to keep the induction loop as small as possible.

We hope this will make it easier for everyone to add a string plan to PV-systems. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact your account manager.