Balcony Solar

[NikLiverpool]

I started reading from the beginning of the topic and I must admit I am more confused now.
For example the chance of feeding back to the grid in case of a power cut. I am pretty sure that the ecoflow kits need live wires or they switch off.
Or in my case with the piwerwall if there is a power cut my home becomes an island and in theory it should happily carry on generating.
As I said before I need to dig further into this...

 

[Bam Bam]

Ok. Aware of this, been following this thread, have solar and maxed against what our maximum inverter limit is in NI (3.68kw) so could else be away around that limit?

You'd have to check the rules when they are released. But will NI have different regulations anyway?

At present my understanding is that you are supposed to inform your DNO if you have an inverter connected.

 

[Bam Bam]

I started reading from the beginning of the topic and I must admit I am more confused now.
For example the chance of feeding back to the grid in case of a power cut. I am pretty sure that the ecoflow kits need live wires or they switch off.
Or in my case with the piwerwall if there is a power cut my home becomes an island and in theory it should happily carry on generating.
As I said before I need to dig further into this...

From what I understand there are two broad concerns, but perhaps there are others I have missed...

There is a the potential backfeed issue (devices don't shut down when the grid goes down like they are supposed to). Hopefully the technology will stop this, if all the devices are of suitable quality and they don't get fooled into assuming that the grid remains when it is not. This is a risk to line workers.

Then there are the concerns about the internal wiring in people's homes not being capable of handling the extra load and overheating, which is a risk to those in the home.

Anything I've missed?

 

[Giller]

You'd have to check the rules when they are released. But will NI have different regulations anyway?

At present my understanding is that you are supposed to inform your DNO if you have an inverter connected.

Hmmm. I’m not jumping in on theses, in NI with our grid you can’t have more than a 3.68 inverter because of the infrastructure, I’ll see what happens.

 

[poldark]

Not perhaps relevant but I'll share it as it is fact, not conjecture.

I have a three bedroom house in Brittany, I paid €899 last year for a 1960W (4x490W) plug and play solar kit, fully compliant to French law.

Two are mounted vertically, in lieu of a fence for a portion of a patio roughly Westerly for the afternoon sun. The other two are ground-mounted on simple aluminium frames, angled so one is aligned ideally for the early part of the day and one for midday.

The grid tie inverter is connected to a socket on a dedicated circuit fortuitously within 3 metres via a cellar window.

The issue of the simple systems is a lot of generation is "lost" without batteries to support, which is what is now being heavily promoted with bidirectional AC coupled batteries.

Anyway, as I was asked recently by a friend if they were doing well I had a check of the data. I was very surprised to find that if I had been able to store and self consume all the generated output (admittedly ignoring conversion losses) just these four panels would have covered 93% of my modest consumption between April - Sept (admittedly the prime six months of the year).

Their current alignment is to provide base load cover for the greatest period, so when I buy supporting batteries in the next couple of months ( likely the new Jackery SolarVolt3 at circa €1500) they can be adapted and maybe output slightly more.

I believe around 400k of these sort of kits are now in use in France. The added bonus of the new batteries is they have AC outlet(s) that can provide back up supply to 2400W in the case of an outage.