Lowes selling solar collectors

Cite?

December 14, 2009 Lowe's is the first major retailer to offer many of these products in one place, products that range from power monitors and small solar chargers to a solar panel system. The Energy Center will be in additional U.S. and Canadian stores in 2010.

Never made it to my Lowe's store

What is a 120f receptacle?

It's similar to a 120v recepticle but uses folts instead of volts. Folts are greener.

snipped-for-privacy@aol.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Home Depot does something that's perhaps similar. Lowe's doesn't in Jersey, AFAICT.

aka "friendly volts".

mostly paid for by the people in your country who don't have one...

Anyone find out the pricing on this? I could not find it on Lowes website.

Hell Toupee wrote in news:j47ocb$6n5$ snipped-for-privacy@speranza.aioe.org:

for a 3KW array,you better have some sort of transfer panel. just as you would for any whole-house generator. it could save someone's life.someone could throw the breaker and think the wiring was safe to work on,while the solar array was still supplying power and keeping the system "live".

also,will all those separate inverters stay synchronized?

Yes, they will. They monitor the line and sync with it. A small microprocessor that only adds a few dollars of cost takes care of all that complex computations required to do so. I also believe they will automatically shut down if regular AC power is lost.

I would like to know how they do that, though. If you have ten of them plugged in, how do they tell the difference between commercial AC power and each other?

It is pretty simple, A little PV inverter is not going to change the grid.

These things need to see something on the line side before they put out. That is where they get their clock.

I bet, if you did want to use them off grid, you could bootstrap them with a regular battery inverter.

So, you are basically saying that as long as the load is high enough to exceed the output of the connected panels, they will shut down during a commercial power failure. (And, the load will likely be high enough since they will be trying to power the grid). I guess that makes sense, but what if you have a bunch of them and their output exceeds the current load? Perhaps your home is the only one on a particular transformer and the fault was an opening of the primary feeding your transformer? For example, a tree falls and knocks down the primary near your house. Wouldn't the panels keep running and thereby energize the high voltage side of that transformer? (I have no experience with these panels. I am just speculating about how they might work. Please correct me if you know how they really work) Maybe they form a mini-grid and quickly drift off frequency. That could be detected and used to force a shut down.

I seriously doubt code is going to allow these panels to be connected without an automatic disconnecting mechanism. Where are you guys getting information that says otherwise? All I've seen on these new panels is that they contain the inverter in them and they are easy to hook up. To me that sounds like a modular, easier to install system, but I don't see anything more on exactly how they are installed, connected, etc.

if they don't detect the grid, they don't send power out.

Anyone find out the pricing on this? I could not find it on Lowes website.

aioe.org:

As someone else pointed out, since each panel has it's own inverter, if the inverter is all that's doing the sensing, then how could one panel know that the power it's seeing is coming from the outside grid and not another panel. All I see here is a lot of speculating and no real data on how these panels are actually installed.