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How to tell if a panel or microinverter in your system is underperforming

One of our customers asked us a simple question: “Can I fit better optimizers? I feel like the panels could give more.” Before recommending anything, we looked at the data from his system. The surprise was that the problem wasn’t the whole installation: one of the two microinverters was producing only a third of what it should, while the other worked perfectly. For months, half of the panels had been working far below their potential, and from the outside you couldn’t tell.