Going Off Grid with ONLY SOLAR! - No Battery Needed

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[pavek]

It's surprising for Italian viewers how US houses are so full of wood and tender material you can easily take apart or drill into. Here everything is either concrete or terracotta bricks and tiles. Plus most of the houses in cities do share walls at each side with another building, except single households in the countryside or very expensive parts of the city.

[Zarod]

The fluent overlap between voice-over and live audio is very well edited. Great video

[ThreeTwentyTech]

Does the town home scratch at a level 6 with *deeper grooves* at a level 7?

[oneupkoopa]

Just installed 6kW of solar. Going to wire it up on Monday. Excited!!

[stevegeoff]

In Australia, we have about 1/3rd of all houses with solar, and it’s growing. 5 years and it pays for itself.

[WHATSINSIDEFAMILY]

We chose to have the backup run to our Golf Simulator if the grid went down. Priorities.

[paulroling]

One reason solar inverters turn off when the grid goes down is that they need to be synchronous with the phase of the AC grid. When the grid fails, you need something to keep the 50/60 hz going. The most tricky part is what happens when the grid turns back on again and your backup system is out of phase...

[human_brian]

In Florida, HOAs aren't allowed to prohibit solar panel installation. I'm in the process of designing my solar installation, I don't want it on my roof because that'll cause my insurance to increase dramatically due to hurricane load stress potential. I'm look at around 10-11kW of solar and that should take care of most of my needs during the year, it should average out to net zero.

[MrHanichak]

We've had our Enphase system for about a year now in January. Personally, I love the control in the app that allows you to control the power delivery of the battery backup and or where the power is going. So if you want to and you know it's going to be a bright sunny day, you can always be off-grid or you could be tied to the grid. It's all up to you!

[WillProwse]

But at night, production goes to zero. The total hours that this system can run loads when the grid is down is 5-7 depending on latitude. Imagine running a fridge for a few hours a day. I don't think this feature is worth the added cost and installation work.

I think running an ac coupled battery or UPS w/ traditional micro inverters would be more useful than this system. Especially in the city.

Another option is to install traditional grid tie system, then have an electrician install a generator transfer switch for critical loads. Then power generator input with UPS or battery back up. That way you can actually run your fridge all night long when the grid goes down.

[ollierinko]

Why the Micro-inverters though? The obvious use-case of "often partially shaded" doesn't seem to apply in the slightest for that roof.
And even then, new panels don't really create a performance hit to the whole string on partial shade anymore.

[owenquinten]

As a European I am still amazed that you have the switch for the whole system on the outside of the house. Anyone can access it?! Same goes for the meters. Great video as always, thanks a ton for making! Wanting to make a small system myself for only my fridge but I don’t think it makes sense nor do I have the technical know how:)

[mathevideos]

As a German the quality of US houses never ceases to disappoint me.
The roof of my garden shed a more solid construction and (I guess) way better insulated.

[tundraskateboarder]

Two things:

First, simply adding the feature to power the house from solar during an outage shouldn't cost an extra $7000; you could run your regular solar setup to power your whole breaker box, as long as you have an automatic disconnect for the grid. All that's needed is for the main breaker to be thrown.

Second, what purpose do the micro inverters serve, other than the AC voltage being easier to move along wires vs DC? If you put in a battery bank later, you'll be converting DC to AC at the panels, then converting that AC back to DC to charge the batteries, then converting that DC from the batteries back to AC for the house. How is the loss of energy from inverting three times not too wasteful?

[chrisarnone]

Why not add batteries for the $6-7K ( or use that money toward batteries), instead of the backup feature. Sure it sounds nice, but for around $10k, you could get at least 1 battery which would do the same. I haven't done the pricing so I may be way off here. Just wondering.

[AndrewDescalso]

Thats a clean looking set up. You mentioned adding a battery to the system in the future. Do you know or can you calculate how much energy loss will happen from the multiple DC/AC conversions. Panels are DC, micro inverter is AC, then you would have to invert back to DC for a battery backup, if I am understand this correctly. Great Channel, Thanks!

[diySolarPowerFunWithRay]

Great video explanation. Crazy more complicated than your home solar setup. I think I'm going to install something similar to what you have on your house(the grid tie system) and then have a emergency panel which will be powered by a smaller solar array and battery bank(connected by a "All-in-one Power System").... during stormy days and if my battery bank gets low I can have the "All-in-one Power System" send power to the emergency panel from grid or generator.. I'll post a video but I'm sure it won't be as well filmed as yours :)

[craftminer]

Awesome set up! May I suggest caulking the AC disconnect on the outside of the house so water cannot enter via the hole where the metal flex is. I didn't see it in the video but the siding is still prone to water damage without it. Running bead on the top and sides should do the trick.

[waleedmehmood]

We are missing your electric truck Humvee videos!!

[mp]

$6-7k for off grid power ONLY during sunlight hours seems steep imo. I know batteries are much more expensive than that--but I've heard that some EVs are allowing you to plug in to their batteries to use for house power. Could you do a vid on what that would look like? I firmly believe EVs are the future, and if they could save me an additional $10k on house batteries (or $6k for a setup like you showed here) they'd make even more sense.