Sungrow Solar Inverters

Sungrow Power Supply Co., Ltd. was started in 1997 by Cao Renxian, who left a teaching post at Hefei University of Technology to build power converters for renewable energy. The company is still headquartered in Hefei, in China’s Anhui province, has traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange since 2011 (code 300274) and employed close to 14,000 people in 2023.

It is one of the two giants of the inverter market. Wood Mackenzie ranked Sungrow second in global PV inverter shipments for 2024, with 148 GWac delivered behind Huawei, and first in the United States, India and the Middle East. Its largest overseas factory opened in Bangalore, India, in 2018.

Sungrow inverter range

Two letters open every model code: SG is a grid-tied string inverter and SH a hybrid that charges a battery. The next letters give the segment — RS for single-phase homes, RT for three-phase homes, CX for commercial and HX for utility plants — and the number is the AC power in kilowatts.

So the SG-RS string inverters span 2 to 10 kW, the SH-RS hybrids 3 to 10 kW, and the SG-RT and SH-RT lines cover three-phase homes from 5 to 20 kW; the SH-T hybrids go to 25 kW. Commercial SG-CX models reach 150 kW and the HX utility units 350 kW, and a small S-series microinverter line runs from 450 W to 2 kW.

What Sungrow is known for

Range and headroom. The same maker covers a 450 W microinverter and a 350 kW utility unit, and it builds battery storage systems too, so a hybrid and its battery can come from one supplier. Most string models accept panels worth 1.5 times their AC rating, and the SH-T hybrids twice.

The flip side for home buyers: support comes through installers and distributors, and the early residential generations were designed around smaller panels than today’s. The older RT hybrids also start tracking only at 200 V, which rules out short strings.

Fitting panels to a Sungrow inverter

Start with the phase. The single-phase SH6.0RS allows 600 V and tracks from 40 to 560 V with 16 A per tracker, so eleven 48 V panels — about 580 V at −10 °C — are the practical maximum. Three-phase SG10RT-P2 and SH10T units accept 1,000–1,100 V and take 32 A per tracker, comfortably above any large-format panel.

Current is the trap on the earlier three-phase generation. The SG5.0RT and SH5.0RT take just 12.5 A per tracker, less than the 13–14 A working current of a 182 mm-cell module, so those strings clip every sunny noon; the P2 revision raised the limit to 16 A. Check your panel against the exact model in the string calculator — it tests cold-weather voltage, the MPPT window and per-tracker current.