What that view doesn't show you is that on a cloudless bright day, I'm getting a peak of 4.5kW out of my roof, maybe half of it's rated peak power.
I have the same. My installation is 9.9 kWp. Now I know this is because they rate the panels at kWp, not kWh. A kWh is about 85% of a kWp, so in your case that's about 7.6 kWh your installation is able to produce. But that's ONLY at optimal conditions, meaning at the perfect azimuth angle, in plain sun all day long. This is only achievable with a solar tracker, never with an installation on a rooftop. Also, your installation is cut in half, meaning when the one 18 panels are at optimal conditions, the other 18 are not. All this combined gives you the numbers you see, even with a 9 kWp installation...
This is supposedly the big benefit for Enphase. Because each panel has its own inverter, a shadow on any one panel (e.g., from an exhaust vent on your roof) will cause only the one panel to produce less.
This is true, this is the big advantage of Enphase. That at the fact that you've already got AC on your roof, meaning you can use thinner cables, the fire hazard is almost non-existent, it's safe for the fire department if they ever have to hose your house in case of fire AND (the biggest benefit if you ask me) it's VERY easy to add extra panels if for some reason your energy consumption goes up in the future - kids growing up etc... : just add the extra panels to the string and that's it! (this is almost impossible with a regular central inverter, since it's always rated for a specific amount of power - and thus panels).
The only downside of the microinverter business is that Enphase's biggest modules only do something like 255W, versus the 350W panels that you can buy from LG and perhaps some other vendors by now.
That's indeed one big downside that I also had an issue with, but it seems you can still run panels up to 300 kWp on them. It's not recommended, but you can do it. A bigger issue I found is that Enphase only supports panels with 60 solar cells, not the more modern panels which use 72 cells (like Panasonic) or 96 cells (like SunPower). LG actually makes a 300 watt panel using only 60 cells, but I didn't go through with it in the end, for the reasons stated in a previous post. Besides, SolarEdge did support these 96-cell panels without a problem with their Power Optimizers.
I still believe the Enphase system is best around though. They just need to update their hardware.
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