Balcony solar panels can save 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill and, with vertical surface area in cities larger than roof space, the appeal is clear
Backflow isn’t an issue because the inverters don’t produce high voltage if they don’t see a frequency to sync to. Which is also how they get away with having exposed prongs. Which, consequently, means that those installations don’t make you independent from the grid. They also only feed into one phase, or better said I haven’t seen any three-phase ones.
You also need to register them with your utiltity, but it’s not a matter of asking for permission, just notifying them. The idea is that they should be able to deal with 800W backflow on a single phase easily given that you can easily pull 3600W on a single phase from a single outlet, district-level transformers aren’t unaccustomed to skewed loads.
There’s also no requirement for a modern meter, a good ole Ferraris one suffices – during backflow it’s going to turn backwards. Utilities don’t like having that little data to go on but again, it’s just 800W.
…and with that any and all preconditions but “outlet near or ideally on the balcony” are gone, and suddenly it makes a lot of sense to a lot of people because no electrician has to get involved, which could easily get more expensive than the hardware itself.
Backflow isn’t an issue because the inverters don’t produce high voltage if they don’t see a frequency to sync to. Which is also how they get away with having exposed prongs. Which, consequently, means that those installations don’t make you independent from the grid. They also only feed into one phase, or better said I haven’t seen any three-phase ones.
You also need to register them with your utiltity, but it’s not a matter of asking for permission, just notifying them. The idea is that they should be able to deal with 800W backflow on a single phase easily given that you can easily pull 3600W on a single phase from a single outlet, district-level transformers aren’t unaccustomed to skewed loads.
There’s also no requirement for a modern meter, a good ole Ferraris one suffices – during backflow it’s going to turn backwards. Utilities don’t like having that little data to go on but again, it’s just 800W.
…and with that any and all preconditions but “outlet near or ideally on the balcony” are gone, and suddenly it makes a lot of sense to a lot of people because no electrician has to get involved, which could easily get more expensive than the hardware itself.