Evolution of the E-Panel

year or so later after having created the Trace C-40 solar charge controller, there were finally
enough Trace components to build a standardized system.
Enter the 400 pound gorilla, the Trace Power Panel. There was a fair amount of risk in
developing the Power Panel. The industry certainly needed something that was standard, but we
worried that professional installers would feel like they were being cut out of some value added
income. In reality, they made profit on the Trace wiring simply from price mark up. Recently I
reassembled my old Trace dual power panel for the picture at the front of this article. NEVER
AGAIN! It didn’t get any lighter and I didn’t get any younger.
The only non Trace product on the Power Panel was the AC bypass switch made by Square D. In
1997, I began building a house in Arlington near the Trace factory. I thought that it might be
wise to use an inverter to provide all the power during the construction phase just to see how our
customers lived. During the construction phase I learned a few things about the Power Panel that
needed some attention.
1. There was no way to hook up the Trace 240 volt autoformer in a clean tidy manner.
2. The back plate should have been made up of two pieces so it could be sold as a separate
piece and shippable via UPS. This also meant that the back plate needed to be made from
a lighter gauge steel. The 12 gauge steel back plate was very heavy all by itself.
Trace AC box / T-240
Well, the house got built and the Trace AC box / T-240
did in fact make it into the Power Panel, but I have the
only Trace split apart back panel in existence! Trace
decided not to offer the back panel as a separate piece.
The AC box as it was called when mounted on the
Power Panel also had room for the T-240. This box had
room for two AC bypass switches as well as AC input
breakers and the T-240 breakers. The T-240 was used
only for single systems as it was for step up or step
down only. One thing we did when converting the old
T-220 into the new T-240 was to get rid of all those taps. I never did figure out how to wire the
T-220, so the new T-240 got rid of all the wires that weren’t really necessary. I also never
figured out why Trace would not sell the AC box without the autoformer?
A few more years go by, a few more inverters are designed and then on July31, 2000 the new
owners of Trace, (Xantrex), decided to lay me off. As you can imagine, I was not pleased that
Xantrex had laid off their chief mechanical engineer in Arlington, especially since I had paid for
and owned about 1% of the company.
The very next day while filing for unemployment I decided that there were still too many good
ideas swimming around in my head, so I was just going to have to start my own company and
compete with Xantrex. Enter OutBack Power Systems!
The first ten months was spent in my home office designing sheet metal boxes to go with the FX
inverter as well as the Trace DR, SW and Vanner RE series inverters. The OutBack inverter was
still two years away from production, but the mechanical design was being worked on. By the