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In Sweden the same applies, at least if you have panels that can feed back excess into the grid for payment. In case the main grid goes off, your equipment is

by IcePic 4y ago

In Sweden the same applies, at least if you have panels that can feed back excess into the grid for payment. In case the main grid goes off, your equipment is supposed to stop working so that it doesn't feed power backwards into the grid while some person is trying to fix whatever broke, so unless you have a battery/UPS and a large switch to flip, your solar panels "die" along with the grid. The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up.

CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
>The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up. Totally separated solar panels would also mean you barely have any electricity on that circuit for half of the year. Another option is an inverter that can sense the net and switch that flip automatically, but they are more expensive and still not legal everywhere because it's not really needed in Western European countries.
raesene9 4y ago
Adding a battery and switch is the obvious solution to the problem. I'm in the UK and ended up going for the Powerwall 2 and Tesla Gateway, alongside our panels. The installation had to be certified by the electricity company to ensure that it operates safely in the event of a grid power outage, but (in theory as we've not had a power cut since installation) it should all work fine.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Nevertheless you should regularly test it, at least once a year. Many a datacenter outage could have been prevented had there been more regular testing of all the components involved.
moring 4y ago
> The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up. AFAIK the latter part is now less and less true in Germany because the price for selling excess back is only a fraction of the cost of getting power out of the grid, so people are installing batteries, heat storage and controllers that switch heavy consumers like their heat pump according to other loads in their house.

by IcePic 4y ago

CorrectHorseBat 4y ago

>The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up. Totally separated solar panels would also mean you barely have any electricity on that circuit for half of the year. Another option is an inverter that can sense the net and switch that flip automatically, but they are more expensive and still not legal everywhere because it's not really needed in Western European countries.

raesene9 4y ago

Adding a battery and switch is the obvious solution to the problem. I'm in the UK and ended up going for the Powerwall 2 and Tesla Gateway, alongside our panels. The installation had to be certified by the electricity company to ensure that it operates safely in the event of a grid power outage, but (in theory as we've not had a power cut since installation) it should all work fine.

mschuster91 4y ago
Nevertheless you should regularly test it, at least once a year. Many a datacenter outage could have been prevented had there been more regular testing of all the components involved.

moring 4y ago

> The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up. AFAIK the latter part is now less and less true in Germany because the price for selling excess back is only a fraction of the cost of getting power out of the grid, so people are installing batteries, heat storage and controllers that switch heavy consumers like their heat pump according to other loads in their house.