With self-install solar panels, and a €150 plug-in adapter that feeds power directly into electricity sockets; a DIY home power system is becoming popular in Europe.
A plug-in balcony solar system for uncertain times.
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This particular type of home solar implementation runs into a scalability issue where each piece is hard-limited by the ampacity of the outlet its plugged into, so at a certain point it can only scale out to be plugged into more outlets and take up more space.
Also, having a system thay feeds into an outlet is quite scary, since the male side of the plug is energized. I get the convenience of this "plug and play" sort of device, but I'd much prefer to see something hardwired and enclosed.
Safety wise it's perfectly safe. The male end is only energized if it detects that it's actually connected to the grid, then it matches the sine wave of the grid. It can't just electrocute you if you unplug it and touch the exposed pins.
NEC allows for 20% of the main breaker for solar backfeded. Higher then that and you have to go for a line side tap and bypass the breaker box completely.
Huh, I wonder what the safety features are. From a skim of the article, it's detects power demand somehow, so maybe that helps.
Also, I'm concerned for linesmen, because somebody is going to buy this and not tell their company that they are energising the local grid, rather than just consuming. Europe apparently has some kind of solution, but nothing stops you from using it elsewhere.
From the article, it says it automatically shuts down if it detects a full power outage for exactly that reason
Yeah, legally that's what it needs to do at that point in the system. if you want a solar system to be energized during an outage, you have to have what's called a "Grid-forming" inverter (as opposed to grid-following) and it would likely need to connect up at the utility connection point
Grid forming inverters are for solar generating plants. They are allowed to start up an unenergized grid. At that level they are a part of the utility grid.
For homes to run of of solar when the grid is down you need to do islanding. This is a seperate beaker box feed directly by the solar and battery. This allows the house or a portion of it to stayed powered without putting power back to the grid and endangering any linemen working on the grid.
I'm really curious how it can tell what's being drawn in a fool-proof way, without actually putting energy out.
“Ampacity” — I don’t know if that’s an actual word but you perfectly described what the bottle neck is. I like it!
It is! Here in the US, that's the word used by the National Electric Code to talk about current carrying capacity
Do "ampacity" and "amperage" mean the same thing?
Not exactly. Amperage is "amount of current", ampacity is "ability to carry current"
So ampacity is fusion of amperage and capacity?
you got it 👍
Also called a portmanteau, like internet, malware, or genome.
