another hiccup to going solar?

[ultrarunner]

The be prepared part of my nature seeks to limit dependancies especially when it comes to security such as domestic food production and defense.

The only way to be independent is by being self sufficient and maybe that is as simple as getting out of the way and other times it may require a little forward thinking with a sprinkling of incentives to kick-start…not as a reward but instead with the goal of survival…

 

[orezok]

Ah, but we've had electric without wind or solar. We don't NEED them, some people WANT them, that's a big difference when we are talking about spending other people's money.

Yeah, but when the Chinese/Russians hack our power plants, wind and solar may be all that’s left.

When the grid goes down I’ll still have power.

 

[ddbackhoe]

Yeah, but when the Chinese/Russians hack our power plants, wind and solar may be all that’s left.

When the grid goes down I’ll still have power.

You sure about that? All of the grid tied systems I know of go offline when the grid is down

 

[ericm979]

There are some newer systems with solar + battery + inverter that can function with the grid down.

 

[ddbackhoe]

There are some newer systems with solar + battery + inverter that can function with the grid down.

Only the batteries will. They function as a backup generator until they lose their charge.

 

[ultrarunner]

A few invertors have a single outlet for critical loads... with enough sun the outlet is active even with grid down and no battery... I can power a refrigerator.

 

[ddbackhoe]

A few invertors have a single outlet for critical loads... with enough sun the outlet is active even with grid down and no battery... I can power a refrigerator.

during daylight……What about the other x.x Kw’s of panels you had installed?

 

[MAX-24-Dean]

A few invertors have a single outlet for critical loads... with enough sun the outlet is active even with grid down and no battery... I can power a refrigerator.

SMA Sunnyboy inverters come to mind. And a good product too!

 

[bnold]

You sure about that? All of the grid tied systems I know of go offline when the grid is down

There are ways to make this work, but most not approved for standard grid tied inverters.

Hybrid inverters with some battery storage are becoming more commonplace.

My grid tied inverter (non hybrid) has some real intelligence if I wanted to go all out.

My utility currently has very favorable back feed rates, so battery storage makes almost no sense currently. My energy storage is diesel.

My current utility outage backup is diesel standby generator, currently my transfer switch trips a micro switch that opens a derate circuit for my inverter, basically when switched to gen, the inverter is programmed to 100% derate (turn off). This is largely because my generator isn’t rated for backfeed.

(Some generators are, but the % is pretty low)

There is instrumentation available for my GT inverter that I could install to maintain a user selectable load on the generator (say 20%) and the inverter would provide whatever it could to my home system with solar but maintain that 20% on the gen. Couple of grand in electronics from Fronius to make that work.

If long outages were commonplace here, I’d consider it as a means to save fuel.

But longest outage has been about 4hrs in my lifetime, so not terribly concerned with investing more to make that a reality at this point. Only during the Tx freeze did we have multiple days of outages, but I was never out more than a few hours with the rolling outages.

 

[ning]

You sure about that? All of the grid tied systems I know of go offline when the grid is down

As others have said before and will again, there are microgrid systems which form a separate micro grid when the main grid is down.

Mine does this with battery and/or generator backup; the solar can continue to generate power as needed.

Now, you know otherwise.