Hi, I’m Sam.
I work as a field service engineer in the renewable energy industry, where my day to day job is diagnosing, troubleshooting and repairing commercial and residential PV systems. Most of my work revolves around fault finding on inverters, battery systems and communication networks, but every now and then I end up repairing the hardware itself too.
If you’ve landed on this site because of a strange inverter fault, chances are I’ve either seen it before or I’m just as curious to understand it as you are.
Why I Started This Website
One thing I’ve realised over the years is that there’s plenty of information available on how to install a system.
There’s a lot less information on what happens when something goes wrong.
Manufacturers usually give you a fault code and maybe a sentence explaining it. That’s helpful, but it rarely tells you why the fault happened or how someone actually tracked it down.
That’s what this website is for.
Every case study on here is based on a real fault I’ve investigated. I try to document not only the solution, but the thought process behind getting there including the wrong turns, the dead ends and the occasional moments where a fault makes absolutely no sense.
Because that’s what troubleshooting is really like.
What You’ll Find Here
This isn’t a sales website or a collection of copied user manuals.
Instead you’ll find things like:
- Real-world inverter fault investigations
- Battery and BMS communication issues
- Protection and safety faults
- Power electronics and hardware failures
- Installation mistakes I’ve come across
- Troubleshooting methods that have worked for me
- The occasional side project or experiment when I find something interesting enough to investigate
Some faults are simple.
Others have taken days or even weeks to solve.
Those are usually the ones worth writing about.
My Approach
One thing I try not to do is jump straight to conclusions.
Good troubleshooting is really just a process of eliminating possibilities until only one answer is left.
Sometimes the fix is exactly what you expected.
Sometimes it’s something completely unexpected like an LCD panel causing a BMS communication fault.
Those are the cases I enjoy documenting the most.
Why NexusIGT?
NexusIGT has gone through a few different lives over the years.
Long before this website existed, I was already working in the renewable energy industry. Outside of work, I’ve always enjoyed building things whether that was home servers, networking projects, electronics, or simply figuring out how things work.
NexusIGT originally started as a personal project for hosting game servers from a machine at home. Over time those servers evolved into a self-hosted web server, and eventually into what you’re reading now. Today, this website is still hosted from my own Raspberry Pi 4, sitting at home.
The name may have stayed the same, but the purpose has changed. Instead of hosting games, NexusIGT has become a place where I document real world faults, repairs and technical investigations from the field. My goal isn’t to rewrite manufacturer manuals or chase search rankings it’s simply to explain how a fault was diagnosed, why it happened and how it was ultimately resolved.
If one of these posts helps another technician solve a fault a little quicker, or saves someone from going down the same dead-end that I did, then it’s done exactly what I hoped it would.
Get in Touch
If you’ve experienced a similar fault, found another way of solving the same problem or simply spotted something I’ve overlooked, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.
No one knows everything in this industry, and some of the best things I’ve learned have come from conversations with other technicians.
You can contact me on sam.smit87@gmail.com