- cross-posted to:
- futurology@futurology.today
- cross-posted to:
- futurology@futurology.today
Title reads like at ad, but this is a new way to reach energy independence. I actually have a small EcoFlow device and it’s pretty good for the price.
I hope this tech can be made available in the US soon.
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I would, but i’m not allowed by the HOA the hang shit on my balcony.
Fuck’n HOA assholes.
My balcony is also on the right side of the building too, it would be perfect.
Vote.
I ran my small HOA for 1 term and people came at me, bitched about stuff and I got them to come to a meeting where the other homeowners could express their concerns about the proposal and we’d come to an agreement and write up a change. It was no big deal. We even negotiated group rates for shared services and made it so that the costs of the HOA were offset by the savings from the services.
On the other side of the coin, when I left my position to give somebody else a turn at the process I largely automated, they ran it into the ground and bankrupted it while chasing a personal grievance against the city.
Somehow, the HOA attracts power hungry nobodies but they can be voted out if you’re willing to work at it. Also, talk to your neighbors. My guess is that there are others who would back your proposal.
Aren’t you supposed to be the land of the free?
Plug-in systems are built around a microinverter that feeds solar energy back into the home via a standard wall jack.
What the actual fuck?
The PowerStream has three proprietary ports: one that connects to your MC4 solar panels
Disqualified.
Proprietary, overpriced, with flashy visuals and apps, and a massive marketing budget. They’re the Apple of solar generators.
Plug-in systems are built around a microinverter that feeds solar energy back into the home via a standard wall jack.
What the actual fuck?
What’s wrong with that? That’s how basically any balcony solar system works.
The cables in your walls are designed for a certain maximum current before they start to heat up. This current is limited by your breaker.
Now if you introduce a plug in solar setup your current is limited by your maximum breaker capacity + whatever your solar setup can generate.
So if I’d use the specs from the article and apply it to a normal dutch home situation: 16A breaker, + 800W at 230V, which means ~3.5A = 19.5A max. which is probably still fine for short durations.
But now some genius doesn’t read the fine print and hooks up 2 or 3 on the same circuit. There is no electrician that tells him that’s dangerous because it’s all self installed and he doesn’t know any better. And all of a sudden you are up to 26.5A and you got glowing, smoking wires in your walls…
Also, emergency service hazard. The PV won’t turn off if firefighters take out the mains, which makes a house potentially inaccessible during an emergency.
Surprisingly, no. Most inverters in the EU must come with island protection. Meaning that if there is no AC from the grid it immediatly switches off the inverter or the battery, there is no stand alone operation.
There are some systems that allow it but they are rare here and require the mains side to be fed trough the inverter itsself ensuring it’s never back feeding into the grid when there is no power with the same island protection, or less commonly there is a transfer switch of some kind also eliminating the issue. And either should obviously have a main kill switch on the breaker board for emergencies that also switches off the in home power with 1 action.
But most importantly, either of those options is not plug and play and will require an electrician that hopefully does know what he’s doing.
Does the island protection with if you have two inverters running independently? (legally or not)
Yes, because the frequency of the grid is also a trigger for shutting off the inverter. Inverters generate a frequency which indicates a “non healthy grid” that trigger the shutoff of connected inverters.
Wow that’s interesting. I hate how much power my pool eats up in the summer, I’ve been looking for something economical to help run it off of clean energy since the pump runs during peak solar hours anyway.
You can do that today with their setup I think. You would need to plug the pump into one of their batteries and run their solar panel to the battery. You’d also put the battery on grid power.
The article is focused on an inverter that pushes energy back to the grid, something we don’t have yet at this market level.
If you just need the energy for the pool, a small setup without battery is all you need. Saves you half the price. Panels and inverters are around 900€ in Germany. Putting a battery on it makes another 1,200€ and it makes sense only, if you need power in the evening.
Yeah, non-USA for this atm, as much fun as it would be to plug such a system into an apartment.
I believe that the US requires that a direct-feed system has to plug into a physical kill switch setup to prevent back-feed of power during an outage.
Still pretty neat, though!
Same for the EU.
Solar inverters also need to follow the grid frequency
They don’t follow the grid frequency because the EU or US regulations require it, they follow the grid frequency because physics demands it.
In this house we obey Ohm’s law!
These systems automatically turn themselves off during an outage.
That’s great, but it doesn’t matter unless it has the physical cutoff that’s required to bring that kind of system up to the current electrical code for such a system.
Physical shutoff via relays is required by the standard. We’ve just been through a scandal where a manufacturer skimped out on putting them in and had to recall the devices.
