Solar can be without local suppyer !!!

[Tony944]

SOLAR POWER What you need to know about Solar power that the slimy installers and=20 Solar company don=E2=80=99t tell you and don=E2=80=99t want you to = know!!! Solar Energy is nice clean and chip; but who dose actually benefit from = it??? Well yes every body dose benefit but most of it goes to Financial = Organizations;=20 unless you purchase it out right!! Warning The Kicker You can not have any power: if your power line is down In other words the Electricity must be on in order to have=20 power from Solar system =E2=80=9CHow nice or stupid=E2=80=9D What is purpose of Solar if you can not get power from=20 It while you may not have supply from you local Electric. Yes it will need that inverters would need additional circuitry for = which it=20 should not be big deal, perhaps extra $20.00 will do! But solar and = Electric=20 companies do not want you to have that,=20 because some or too many people would be taking advantage of self = sufficiency.

[Frank]

Anyone in this news group that knows anything about a home know that seldom does anything last 20 years without replacement or major repairs. All that payback will go down the drain then.

[gfretwell]

This is more than a simple "$20" circuit. You could certainly clock the inverter for much less than that but the rub comes in with transfer equipment that will satisfy the PoCo and be NEC compliant. You will also need some kind of automatic load management unless you are right there managing the load. It is going to take a lot of solar to deal with the locked rotor of an HVAC compressor, especially if the water heater or dryer is going.

[trader_4]

!!

Agree, it's not a $20 solution. The insurmountable problem is that when the grid goes down, if you were to rely on solar, what happens when a cloud goes by? Would customers want a system that can only supply backup power in the day, with enough sun and would they tolerate what happens when clouds go by? Would they put up with brownouts or total power cut out? Would there equipment? And it's no solution at night. That's why companies installing solar will tell you that with no grid, no batteries, you have no power to the whole house and why the eqpt is designed that way. In the other thread, Diesel did show an example of an inverter that will supply one isolated outlet with power without the grid. I can see that, for use for charging cell phones, charging a sump pump battery, etc.

[trader_4]

You can get power from it, you just can't power your house with it without the grid or a battery bank. What happens with a passing cloud? rainshower? cloudy day? With the grid, you're OK, without it you'll have brownouts or total shutdown, depending on the loads and sunshine.

The grid is actually your friend if you have solar. It supplies power when the clouds come by and at night. If it's bright and you aren't using all of the output, which would probably be a lot of the time, it's generating electric into the grid that THEY PAY YOU FOR.

[Diesel]

Shhh. don't tell the off grid systems they aren't supposed to work, or the ones that are on the grid but also have a battery bank for backup. For some silly reason, neither of them go dark if the grid isn't available. Yes, the last line was sarcastic.

[Diesel]

Especially if you don't use gas appliances and force everything to run on solar. :)

[gfretwell]

I can see it working somewhat with the right load management software and carefully isolated loads that get priority when it is browning out so to speak. Wide mouth inverters can handle the change in solar output and sustain the voltage but the current it can provide will drop. You would still want a little battery power to hold it while you are switching but you could survive and do an orderly shutdown on big loads. Once you get that sophisticated you might as well be looking at incoming clouds in real time. As I said this is far from a $20 solution. I have already said, the $20 solution might be a small battery inverter to clock the grid inverter and a main breaker interlock that would allow an emergency switch over but it might crash with a load spike or a cloud. If your bootstrap inverter was 1500w or so it might carry over short term spikes or interruptions in solar output. That is still hundreds of dollars not tens of dollars.

[gfretwell]

If you are burning fossil fuels you are not green, you are a prepper. The fact remains that grid tie inverters listed for the purpose do not run off grid unless you have transfer equipment and some hack to bootstrap them from an on site frequency source

[Diesel]

The client could be. The discussion never came up. I didn't claim the client was a tree hugger, either, though.

Yep, a hybrid inverter with a battery bank is a 'hack' and a half.