Solis ILeak-PRO 01–04 (Alarm 1034) — Leakage Current Protection

⚠ DANGER — this fault involves lethal voltage. Do not attempt a DIY fix. Call a qualified technician.

What it means: The inverter measured current escaping from your system to earth and disconnected. Solis logs it as alarm 1034 and the LCD shows ILeak-PRO with a number that tells you how much: 01 is a sudden leakage current above 30 mA, 02 above 60 mA, 03 above 150 mA, and 04 means the system has a continuous leakage current rather than a sudden one. Those numbers are not arbitrary — 30 mA is the same order of current that a residual-current device uses to protect a person. This protection is standing between a wiring fault and whoever touches the array next.

Why does Solis show ILeak-PRO01?

• Damp weather raising capacitive leakage. Solis's own field data puts stray capacitance on rainy days at roughly three times that of sunny days, and the effect is larger on big arrays mounted close to a metal roof
• Damaged DC or AC cable insulation, including cable run unprotected across a roof
• Water in conduit or junction boxes — Solis names this directly
• Poor or missing earthing and bonding of the array frame and the inverter
• Loose connections anywhere in the DC or AC path. The Solis manual's remedy for this row is to check the AC and DC connections and the cable connections inside the inverter
• Long, undersized cable runs out to the array
• A leakage detection threshold that is genuinely too tight for a large array in a humid site

The Pakistan factor

Leakage faults follow the monsoon here, and the reason they are more dangerous in Pakistan than the same fault would be elsewhere is earthing. A leakage path to earth on a properly bonded system produces this alarm and nothing else; on the many local installations where the array frame is not bonded, or is bonded to an earth pit that has dried out over the summer, the same current has nowhere safe to go and the structure itself becomes the path. Two local habits make the underlying fault more likely in the first place. DC cable is frequently run across roofs in open sun without conduit, and Pakistani UV strips the jacket off ordinary cable within a few summers. And roof drainage is often an afterthought, so junction boxes and conduit ends sit in standing water for weeks in August. If your ILeak-PRO alarms started this monsoon and you have never had the array earth tested, that is the job to book — not a threshold change.

How to fix it

1. Write down exactly when it happens and whether it clears on its own. This is the one diagnostic that separates a nuisance from a hazard, and only you can collect it.
2. If it appears only on wet or foggy mornings and clears once the array dries, that is the capacitive pattern Solis describes as typically normal for the conditions. It still gets mentioned to your installer, but it is not an emergency.
3. If it fires in dry weather, does not clear, or has started happening where it never did before, treat it as a real earth fault. Keep people off the roof and away from the array frame and conduit, and call your installer.
4. Do not sit there resetting it to keep the system running. You would be repeatedly re-energising a circuit that has just reported leakage at the level used to protect people from electrocution.
5. Do not open connectors, junction boxes or the inverter to look for the water yourself. The DC side is live in daylight and the inverter's internal capacitors stay charged after shutdown.
6. Have your installer inspect DC and AC cable insulation, open and dry the junction boxes and conduit properly, check every connector, and — most importantly — verify the earthing and bonding of the array frame, the mounting structure and the inverter. Ask for the earth resistance to be measured, not eyeballed.
7. Understand the difference from PV ISO-PRO before anyone conflates them. PV ISO-PRO is a test of insulation resistance made before the inverter starts; ILeak-PRO is a live measurement of current actually leaking while it runs. A site can pass one and fail the other, and in damp weather leakage faults are the more likely of the two to appear.
8. There is a technician-adjustable leakage threshold in the inverter's special settings. It is legitimate only after the wiring, the connectors and the earthing have been proven sound and the pattern has been confirmed as weather-driven capacitance — and only a qualified person should be in that menu. Raising it to silence an alarm nobody has investigated removes a protection that exists to stop someone being hurt. If an installer offers that as the first fix rather than the last, get a different installer.
9. If the wiring and earthing are sound and the alarm persists, or the inverter trips the instant it starts, that points at the inverter's own leakage sensor rather than your installation. Take the model, serial number, firmware version and installation date to the Solis service centre.