I just finished this, my 3rd, converted rail. It now has 18 pair of panels and 18 microinverters. Before, it had about 14 pair of panels and 28 microinverters. The rail had not been fully populated because I ran out of inverter cabling. The cable had about four splices where I had used all available small pieces of cable. The "floor sweepings". Due to lack of supply of cheap microinverters, I had expected that to be my last use of microinverters; I've since been using the cheaper but much more troublesome string inverters.
I have at least two rails of 19 pair of panels still to convert. I estimate that I am paying about a 10% penalty in lost energy harvesting by doing the conversions. At mid-day, the shared inverters tend to get confused and stop working briefly.
The run length limit of cable is 17 microinverters. For longer rails, I have been feeding the cable run from both ends by running 14 ga romex to the distant end. The addition of the 14 ga should allow a string of about 30 inverters which, so far, is my maximum rail length.
My new project will have about ten rails each with 25+ pair of panels. I do not yet have a firm inverter candidate for that project so the first rail will almost certainly use the recycled/repurposed microinverters I have freed up with these conversions. Right now, it looks like I will have less than two rails worth of the recycled/repurposed inverters. To free up more microinverters I can start converting single face rails to two face. That will entail reorienting the rails to north/south. That is, changing rail locations.
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