A small plug and play grid tied solar setup.
Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2012 7:16 am
http://ken-nect.blogspot.com/
Scroll down to see one man's efforts at offsetting his power usage. "Plug and Play" is defined here as:
1. No roof installation, no way it's going to cause water leaks into your home.
2. No changes to your AC home wiring.
3. There's no battery backup, and all the issues that go with it.
Now the grid tie inverter used in the article is not UL approved, and so he had to make some adjustments to his installation, but a unit called the XET XPX-A1000 is out there that does have UL approval.
http://shop.solarpowernrg.com/XET-Micro ... -A1000.htm
There are 2 important safety concerns in this project.
1. If the AC entering your home experiences a power outage you don't want the solar setup to put AC back on the lines while repair crews are working on them.
2. The system plugs into a normal wall outlet, so a male plug is feeding power, with exposed connections.
Neither is a real issue here, The unit will not output any power until it senses AC, which it needs to do to be a gridtie setup, otherwise how would it would it synch up its AC power to the grid?
Of course in this simplified setup when you don't use all the power created it goes to the utility companies, but it's a very small amount and they don't pay much for it anyway, so frankly the simplification may justify giving the extra to them.
Scroll down to see one man's efforts at offsetting his power usage. "Plug and Play" is defined here as:
1. No roof installation, no way it's going to cause water leaks into your home.
2. No changes to your AC home wiring.
3. There's no battery backup, and all the issues that go with it.
Now the grid tie inverter used in the article is not UL approved, and so he had to make some adjustments to his installation, but a unit called the XET XPX-A1000 is out there that does have UL approval.
http://shop.solarpowernrg.com/XET-Micro ... -A1000.htm
There are 2 important safety concerns in this project.
1. If the AC entering your home experiences a power outage you don't want the solar setup to put AC back on the lines while repair crews are working on them.
2. The system plugs into a normal wall outlet, so a male plug is feeding power, with exposed connections.
Neither is a real issue here, The unit will not output any power until it senses AC, which it needs to do to be a gridtie setup, otherwise how would it would it synch up its AC power to the grid?
Of course in this simplified setup when you don't use all the power created it goes to the utility companies, but it's a very small amount and they don't pay much for it anyway, so frankly the simplification may justify giving the extra to them.