The STEP™ Micro-Converter is a panel-level DC-DC micro-converter that steps up each solar panel’s potential to the 380 V DC High Potential Direct Current (“HVDC”) bus of the PowerBloc® nanogrid.

The STEP micro-converter is an integral part of the PowerBloc and provides unprecedented performance for solar arrays.

STEP works with any customer-specified solar panels. It uses an innovative two-stage switching network to achieve over 95% conversion efficiency. Each STEP delivers up to 380 W of power, and there can be up to 30 STEPs for 10+ kW of solar power per “branch.”

The standard PowerBloc can have 11 branches, for over 110 kW of solar in total. But just ask and we can do 30 branches for over 300 kW of solar power.

YouSolar’s power line communication, which we nicknamed CARP, talks to a lot of STEP micro-converters. With 30 branches each with 30 STEP converters, that is 900 micro-converters.

“CARP Talk” is YouSolar’s power line communication that sends and receives data to the STEP™ micro-converter.

To avoid “cross talk” on multiple branches communicating to hundreds of converters, YouSolar now uses a newly patented way to avoid crosstalk. While there may be a lot of carping on our lines, each STEP attentively listens!

Every day is the first day at YouSolar. Every day we have new ideas for the PowerBloc. Every day we make the PowerBloc better.