Running Your Electric Meter Backwards 526
kog777 writes to note a story in International Business Times about "net metering," or generating your own power without disconnecting from the grid. Forty states have laws allowing individuals to do this, and many of them offer subsidies and tax breaks for people who do. From the article: "When the sun shines bright on their home in New York's Hudson Valley, John and Anna Bagnall live out a homeowner's fantasy. Their electricity meter runs backward. Solar panels on their barn roof can often provide enough for all their electricity needs. Sometimes — and this is the best part — their solar setup actually pushes power back into the system."
You can do the same thing... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:You can do the same thing... (Score:5, Informative)
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Grump
Net metering rules (Score:5, Informative)
Click on a state, look under Rules, Regulations & Policies for net metering rules.
You can also look on my website http://www.jointhesolution.com/mdsolar [jointhesolution.com] so see utility rates.
Click on the map then click on a state. If you see the utility listed you can do net metering there.
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Braking with the clutch out and in gear prevents wheels locking up if driving on slippery roads. If the clutch is in, nothing is forcing the wheels to spin except ground friction, and the wheels can skid more easily if there is very low ground friction (ice/snow). If the clutch is out, and transmission is in gear, the engine is turning the making the wheels spin. Been there done that.
OT, sick day scams... (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely I wasn't the only one who was bothered by this.
Digits (Score:4, Funny)
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0.002 lightyear = 3.76223988 × 1012 rods
Re:OT, sick day scams... (Score:5, Funny)
I think Bill Gates has one with three digits, and it's in kilometers, not miles. The car was custom built, and they explained there wasn't room for more digits. Gates, of course, said (and who doesn't see this coming) "No problem. 640k should be enough for anybody."
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Re:You can do the same thing... (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks god for social security.
Re:You can do the same thing... (Score:5, Funny)
What is the story? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:What is the story? (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, when I read the title I thought the story was about some kind of hacking box. I do not remember what "color" is it but I do remember once reading some schematics for a box that modified the phase (or something similar) of the AC in your house when you plugged it and made your meter (only if it was analog of course) go backwards. The only thing I remember about the diagram is that it required a HUGE capacitor.
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http://www.answers.com/topic/three-phase-electric
http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/tech/threeph.htm [du.edu]
Price issues (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that you would be getting paid retail value for the power you are selling to the company. Looking from their point of view, you should actually have two meters, one to meter the power you buy from them at retail price, and another to meter the power you sell to them, at whatever price they buy power. Otherwise, if everyone started generating their own power part of the time, the power company would go bankrupt.
Re:Price issues (Score:5, Funny)
So, what's the downside, then?
Re:What is the story? (Score:4, Informative)
realities? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:realities? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the end, I think the choice is whether you want to help make the world greener, or you just plain don't give a rats.. most people don't give a rats ass, and so solar panel prices will stay up. Maybe the goverment should make it mandatory that new buildings have solar panels installed (does that already exist)? Here in Aus, new buildings have to have solar powered heating and sunlights.. but then again, we live in an oven of a country..
Re:realities? (Score:5, Funny)
Have you ever lived in Southern Califorina? If there is ever a could in the sky people run off the street to take shelter in the nearest building. Don't ask what happens in a freak rain shower! Drizzle of doom...
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I've never lived there, but I learned about this "drizzle of doom" phenomenon a few months ago when I stumbled across the following article on a San Diego news website:
0.02 inches of rain pummels the area [signonsandiego.com]
Storm Watch! (Score:5, Funny)
Welcome to KCAL 9. We're sorry we had to cut away from this evening's high speed pursuit but we have received word that Ventura is experiencing scattered sprinkles. Johnny Mountain is down in the trenches, reporting from the eye of the storm. We'll hear from him after this break, if he's still alive!
Re:realities? (Score:5, Interesting)
Although solar cells aren't cheap, the prices have come down, and efficiency has gone up over time. It's kinda like buying a computer... If you're waiting for the fastest computer to come out before you buy yours, chances are you're reading this on a TI57 programmable calculator.
If you buy now, your savings start now. If you cover the cost of the cells in saved energy bills and rebates from the power company, then the fact that a 'better' system comes out later doesn't hurt you that much.... Once you have covered the original cost, you can always replace the system with a new one, and you really don't lose anything. (but you get the satisfaction of preventing the waste of a few barrels of increasingly precious oil, and slowing global warming by just a smidgen).
Before you do something, ask yourself "what would happen if a million people did this"?
Re:realities? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:realities? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:realities? (Score:4, Interesting)
like computer evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
The appeal comes with the similarities to computer evolution and balance (mainframe/personal) and the internet (grid computing). People can keep telling me it isn't worth it or will never happen (or will be super-inneficient), but I'm always going to hold out for that internet-like energy grid. All your Googles
Prepay your electric bill, or buy the electric co. (Score:5, Insightful)
All you have done is pre-paid your electricity for the next 5-10 years
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60 months worth of your electric bill, call it an average of $100 a month, is $6,000. If you "pre-pay" that by rolling it into your home loan ("Build me a house and make sure it has a pool and solar power!"), it will end up costing you more (rough guesstimate is $7,300). If instead of buying photovoltaic cells you buy shares in your local electric company, you'll get about $120 to $240 a year in dividends (power companies often have a 2-4% yield), and your while your photovoltaic cells depreciate every year and require maintenance, your shares will probably appreciate and you'll never have to patch them up. (You'll have to pay the electric company for those 10 months of the year that dividends don't... then again, you get the security of knowing you'll never have to pay them extra just because its cloudy.) When you move in 15 years, rather than uninstalling or replacing them at your expense, you can just sell them and take your profits.
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In the end, I think the choice is whether you want to help make the world greener, or you just plain don't give a rats
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I don't give a rat's hindquarters for Green theology but don't mind conservation. Thats why I buy shares in companies which own nuclear power plants. Its cleaner than solar and has economies of scale. Yes, I said cleaner than scale: the energy cost from constructing solar panels keeps them net-energy-negative for about a decade (!) and when they die out after just over a decade (!) you have to dispose of them, and per megawatt hour generated you'll have to dispose of a heck of a lot more solar panels than radioactive waste. I don't invest in solar companies because at the moment they still haven't licked the whole "Making our products net energy producers" problem and until they do my only hope to profit from that investment would be hoping solar's massive government subsidies continue and expand. While I think that is certainly possible, I feel that if the current or a future administration wants to dump a couple billion into the solar industry, my nukes will get a similar largesse.
Sidenote: If you have an aversion to nuclear power, I understand and accept that. I don't eat meat on Fridays in Lent and we can both agree that our separate faiths are mutually harmless. One piece of advice though. Spend your money on a decent job of insulating your house -- you'll require less kwh from the grid, and on a per-dollar basis you'll save more kwh spending on insulation (and installation) than you will on buying solar power.
Re:Prepay your electric bill, or buy the electric (Score:3, Funny)
No you didn't.
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Yes. Note that the articles
- mentions putting it on the barn, not an house. Barn is probably way larger in roof surface.
- no analysis of cost/benefit as you say.
- falls into the pseudo environmental category. If the production of something with a green principle is quite environmentally damaging, and the "green" benefit is low, the net result can still be _more_ polution. That's about the first thing they learn you in any engineering course about the environment, yet journalists seem to miss that en-masse.
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1 - the stuff is expensive, but the cheapest way is the grid-tied no storage setup like this, It's very common and has been done for decades, only recently have laws been passed to allow it in most places. Many have done it anyways and simply stopped the meter from spinning.
2 - It requires a lifestyle change. You cant be the typical American power pig. You have to reduce your consumption, replace things with higher efficiency, actually turn thing off. Having that
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Now, or you'll die waiting for the "perfect" system. You don't have to do it all at once. Start with some small panels to just run the pump for now.
Re:realities? (Score:5, Informative)
This is however only true on average. If, for example, you live in an area where you get tax-breaks or subsidies for installing, then this can be enough to break even. In Germany, for example they have a "100.000 roofs" program where you're guaranteed a price about 3 times market-price for the power you produce for the next 15 years. That is *more* than enough to make it profitable.
Solar water-heaters on the other hand are beneficial. Especially if you live in an area with plenty of sun *and* have a large family that likes to frequently shower in the summer, it can be a huge win. There are substantial savings from installing them at the same time one installs roofing, so your best bet is probably going to be to install them at the same time your roofing needs replacement anyway, rather than separately.
The *most* beneficial investment however is building/buying a well-insulated house with balanced ventilation. This saves power in summer for AC, and in winther for heating. And a well-insulated house doesn't have higher maintenance-costs than a poorly insulated one.
Re:realities? (Score:5, Interesting)
From my own experience, I paid to get insulation pumped into the roof a couple of years after I moved into my first house in the early 90's, no tax breaks or subsidies at that time so I paid the full price. It cut my heating bill in half (well, almost) and it paid for itself in less than 2yrs. Not sure about this, but I think it is compulsory for new buildings to be insulated here in Australia, they all seem have it built in.
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I pay around $.099/kWh and around $.128/kWh with the facility charges, etc. figured in. If you're still on the grid while using solar, you'll still pay those facility charges, but will save a little on sales tax. Consider the facility charges as payment for using the grid as a battery as long as they pay retail for your extra juice. Ignore my babbling in the original post.
http://solarbuzz.com/SolarPrices.htm [solarbuzz.com] shows residential solar power at $.37/kWh in a sunny
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Insulation is so good that these days, heating is the least of your problems. A friendly family of mine is living in a 2-story-energy-efficient (certified) house, they never need any heating (middle europe), normally they have cooling problems.
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Don't start spewing that garbage. If you make 3x market value, the taxpayer is paying the other 2x over market, plus the bureaucratic overhead, too.
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Years ago, my grandfather had a steel drum painted black on the roof of the well ho
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The gist of the program is that they will buy, install and maintain a solar electric system for your home. You then sign a contract and agree to pay them for the electricity generated by the solar system. You can sign a contract for 1, 5, 10 or 25 years and you get a fixed rate per Kilowatt throughout the contract period that is your current rate off the grid at the time of sign-up. So if you are currently paying 10 cents a
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From thier FAQ: "You do not pay the security deposit [$500] until after the solar engineer comes to your house and designs your system. They will show you exactly what the system will look like and only after you sign off on the design do you pay the deposit."
Like any contractor they send a guy around, he gives you the speil and you pay a deposit, so I guess you can ju
Re:realities? (Score:5, Informative)
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The only time when they should have a negative impact on the population of fish is when the reservoir is filling and you force a drought downstream.
But I agree - we need all the energy we can get and any combination of zero-em
Windmill (Score:3, Interesting)
This is far from an impracticable technology. In the days of wooden ships, the Dutch used to buy English ships that had become waterlogged (yes, they do
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yeah, but (Score:3, Funny)
Tell that to the boy scout who tried to build a reactor [amazon.com] in his backyard.
Non conventional (Score:3, Informative)
while back here in third world countries we use other non-conventional ways to save on energy bills like
Bribe the Electricity Engineer or
Tap electricity directly from pole without any meter
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Where the icy cold beer is on the house (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Where-the-icy
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Sorry there is nothing widespread about use of solar energy in Australia. Nor is it likely there will be much incentive (beyond tokenism) for the home owner to invest.
Here is Australia we have coal, and lots of it. We want to sell it. We have lots of uranium ore. We want to sell that too. Our government is reciting a mantra that these energy sources are clean, when handled properly, and there are never any problems. Our governments are prepared to rip up world heritage areas to get at these commodities
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Yes, that solar program is limited to Sydney and as the linked SMH.com.au article says the people in the program do it for the love rather than the money. I'm not aware of any other states that are doing it. The Aussie Government does give a $4K rebate for Solar Home Owners, but its chickenfeed compared to what they're investing the nuclear and coal industry.
It really does work. (Score:5, Informative)
The panels generate approximately 7.5kW AC (8.8kW DC). The total cost was $65,000 but with a grant from the State of California and State tax credits, the total cost was reduced to just over $31,000. Since then I have been paying only the minimum price for electricity service (around $5 a month) to cover the cost of the meter rental. As electricity rates have increased a bit (and no doubt will continue to increase) I calculate that I will recover my costs approximately 8 years after installation, and I will then start to save money. The life of the panels should be around 30 to 40 years
It's worth remembering that you need to make certain your roof is good for the years the panels will be operating, so for some it will also mean installing a new roof first. That wasn't an issue for me as I have an ornamental metal tile roof that should last much longer than the panels.
Essentially, I use the power utility as my batteries - during sunny days I generate much more electricity than I use and the excess goes into the grid, and then I use power from the grid on rainy winter days and during nighttime. I get credited for electricity sent to the grid, and yes, the meter really does run backwards.
One neat trick is that I don't have to generate the equivalent of all the energy I use to break even. I'm on a utility company plan where the electricity I use during peak summer times (noon to 6pm) is very expensive - around three times normal rates - but off-peak usage is about 70% of normal rates. But I get credited at the rate in place at the time of day the electricity is generated. Because my installation generates the majority of the electricity during the peak times, I get credited for those KwH at the high rate and when I need to use electricity at night I pay the reduced rate. As an example of how effective this is, last year I generated 12,400 KwH and I also used 3,600 KwH from the utility company. But at the end of the year I had a credit balance of $380.
There's one gotcha there - if you have a debit balance at the end of the year, you have to pay it. But if you have a credit balance, that gets lost. Ideally you want to generate just enough electricity so that your adjusted balance is zero, but that's pretty hard to judge. In any case, you want ample extra capacity just after installation as the panels reduce their efficiency by about 0.5% to 1.0% per year.
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Is there another method that's more reasonable for joe sixpack?
Re:It really does work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Government has no right to steal from me, or you, to pay for this guy's pipe dream. If he really wanted to do it, he should have done it with his own dollars, not robbing the tax payer of anything.
Of course the average greenie socialist here would mod me down, but I speak the truth -- there is no such thing as a free lunch, and this guy will get one after only 8 years or so. On your back.
Re:It really does work. (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason taxes work when they do is that some things fall under the "common good". If we just asked everyone to pay only for services that benefit them personally, we'd have only private schools, few medicines, and likely no roads or traffic lights.
Some things just only work if everyone is forced to pay a bit for them. But look at the benefits in this case. If the government takes some of your tax money to pay all the people who want to make their own power, everyone benefits through lower load on power stations, decreased demand for power (which lowers prices!), decreased pollution and demand for foreign oil.
Obvious win-win.
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I fully support new power sources, and the very obvious cheap, long-lasting, safe, clean source is nuclear power. But greenie socialists killed nuclear power a few decades ago.
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In other news, this guys money compares nothing to:
"Last week, the House voted 264-163 to eliminate about $8 billion in tax breaks for the energy industry. The bill also fixes errors in leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that allowed some oil companies to avoid paying royalties to the federal government."
I say use the $8 billion for grants to everybody who can get one and get a solar water heater for their home. So why shouldn't Joe Aver
Re:It really does work. (Score:5, Insightful)
That might be because taxation actually removes our money from our own use, whereas duplicating digital data does nothing of the sort?
You're right though, it's not stealing. "Taking money/possessions from a victim under threat of violence" Sounds more like armed robbery.
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Have you considered replacing one of your inverters with one from Outback Systems to fee your critical load (bath, hall, bedroom lights, freezer, fridge, computer, & TV?
They have a very nice grid tie system using batteries which is power outage proof.
http://www.wholesalesolar.co [wholesalesolar.com]
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Baseline: 11.34c
101%-130%: 12.98c
131%-200%: 22.94c
201%-300%: 32.14c
over 300%: 36.96c
Baseline usage is 11.9 kwh per day in summer, 12.6 kwh in winter.
For me, before I installed the panels I was regularly running into the "over 300%" category, and that was one of the reasons that solar made sense for my particular situation.
Also, I didn't spend $65k on the installation, I spent $31k. If you take out a loan
Greenhouses too (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Greenhouses too (Score:4, Informative)
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Not just that; they use the generated CO2 as well; the plants need it. The sad thing is that NL power companies pay really shitty rates for energy fed back into the grid, something like 1/5th of the regular rates.
A more interesting development for greenhouses is the heat exchanger. Greenhouses need tremendous amounts of h
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Also, the generators are thoroughly insulated and because of this particular application (greenhouse), the excess warmth is directly used. This results in an extremely high energy/warmth ratio.
Augh. Doesn't. Make. Sense. (Score:2)
Augh. This doesn't make sense. No, not the whole solar setup, but the phrases above. If the meter is running backward, then the system is feeding excess power to the grid. If the meter is running backward while the system isn't feeding power to the grid, it's broken or manipulat
You can do this without solar panels. (Score:5, Funny)
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Rewireing a meterbase often with aluminum wires is a great way to form high resistance points in the wire. Can you say house fire?
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I couldn't tell from the literature, but I think they can measure the energy flowing into and out of the house, so they can charge different rates for net metered power (e.g., you pay them 10 cents per kwh for incoming power and t
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Solar Living Center will teach you how (Score:2, Informative)
They sell a book Solar Living Source Book [solarliving.org] (now in its 12th edition) which tells you how to take your home off the grid using solar panels, plus they offer courses http://www.solarliving.org/workshops/ [solarliving.org]. They also run the Solar Living Center [solarliving.org], which is a sel
net metering to start your own backyard e-trading (Score:5, Interesting)
A. peak rate at $0.40/kWh and off-peak at $0.20kWh
or
B. fixed rate at $0.35/kWh
Now two neighbours sign up for the two different rates, and start their own little energy trading:
Off peak, Neighbour A buys at $0.20 from utility and sells to neigbour B for $0.35. B resells to utility.
During peak hours, Neighbour A buys from B at $0.35m and sells to utility for $0.40.
With a 400A service, they can 800,000kWh a year and make a profit of $80k!
Have fun
Re:net metering to start your own backyard e-tradi (Score:2)
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At which point your meter would be read monthly and you only have one choice of rate (peak/off peak).
I would give your suggestion only 28 days before the power company moves in and changes your plan.
ZombieEngineer
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- The neighbors claim to be pushing 96KW of power onto the network, while in reality they're just shunting it from A's tap then back through B's tap, resulting in a net draw due to resistive and transformer losses. 96 missing KW won't go unnoticed.
- Nothing you can legally put on residential property will generate 96KW of electric for any length of time. This will generate suspicion.
- Funny, A's meter runs back while B's runs
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So you're not allowed to park a car on a residential property ?
A car engine, if connected to a generator, could do it.
Re:net metering to start your own backyard e-tradi (Score:3, Insightful)
Making money from electric co (Score:4, Interesting)
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And even if people do it - so what? It just means that they increase the peak capacity of the grid as a whole. The power companies would want to encourage that sort of thing.
Re:Making money from electric co (Score:4, Insightful)
The forces of nature. That is, physics and economics. Physics because it limits the efficiency of storing energy in batteries to impractical amounts, economics because batteries that size are frickin' expensive.
Only efficient at industrial scales (Score:2)
This method is actually used, and yes, it only makes sense if you're in the mountains and can pump water between two lakes/reservoirs.
Some
Catch Up (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure how well Solar Power works here though
Hydro is good for this. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think some time later the regulations might have changed and the power company would no longer pay him, but at least he still had electricity that was essentially free.
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I'd sooner go with wind turbines... (Score:5, Interesting)
This would seem like an excellent alternative... (Score:4, Interesting)
Citizenre free solar (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.jointhesolution.com/makepower [jointhesolution.com]
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It's not a million miles away from the cheap inverters and UPSes you can buy. One important point is this - it must have an incoming mains supply to work. If there is a power cut, it will shut down, and most aren't smart enough to just disconnect from the grid and leave you on standby power. Why? Well, because it needs a phase reference for the incoming mains, and if the power goes down it has no w
Re:Not with your home's current electrical setup. (Score:5, Informative)
It would be possible to build an inverter that would disconnect the incoming mains supply in the event of a power failure, and "slip" the inverter until it's in phase before dropping it back in, but you'd need something like a 100A contactor for that to work.
Actually, they drop it because grid-tie inverters are REQUIRED to disconnect from the grid when the grid goes down. This is to prevent backfeeding the disconnected island and frying a lineman who's trying to fix the downed wire for your block and thinks the lines are dead when YOU kept them live. (Those pole-pig transformers work just FINE in reverse, so a lineman might grab a line with 12,000 volts on it and a couple kilowatts to keep it that way while he's dancing and trying to breathe.)
Now the EASY way to do this is just to monitor the frequency and voltage, and shut the inverter off when it goes out of spec (meaning the grid is probably dead and the line only looks hot because of the inverter backfeeding it).
For a couple grand more, in the case of some good inverters that are designed for it (such as some of the Xantrex models), you can add a box with a relay, a phase-difference monitor, and a subsidiary "brain" board (or get an inverter with the function built in). (Actually the box in question usually also has the line monitoring circuit and combines with inverters that are otherwise stand-alone non-grid-tie.) That box will disconnect the inverter-and-keepalive-lodds from the line and let it keep going during an outage, then tell it to drift phase until it matches and hook it back up once the grid is back and has stabilized.
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But even if they didn't, you're not using the right comparison.
First: There are two basic kinds of power: Low-quality heat and high-quality stuff like shaft horsepower or electricity. To go from the low- to the high-quality form you have to pay the "carnot-cycle tax". Most of the energy used to make panels is in the form of heat - to smelt metal, refine silicon, and the like.
If you want heat from the sun for an industrial process you DON
Re:Slightly off topic, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
No. Do the math. From the post it looks like you are advocating a 12 volt system for the house. Right now a 20 amp breaker feeds a 12 AWG wire just fine and you can plug in a 1500 watt hair dryer in the bathroom which is maybe 40 feet from the meter. At full load, the voltage at the outlet may drop a couple volts so you are talking 12 amps current at 2 volts in the wire or 24 watts lost in the entire length of wire.
Now the 12 volt version. From 120 volt to 12 volt at the same wattage (Volts * Amps for a resistive load) you will now need to draw 120 amps instead of 12 for the blow dryer for the same 1500 watts. If you were dumb enough to try using the same 12 AWG wire the 2 volt drop is now 20 volts. OOPS.. We seem to be short 8 volts in the negative direction to get 120 Amps to the bathroom outlet at zero volts. Lets see if it were possible the 20 volt drop in the wire at 120 amps would be 2400 watts of heat in the 40 feet of wire. Can you say HOT!. Maybe we need a larger wire size. Maybe a size big enough to handle the original voltage drop of a couple volts. Our original setup at 120 volts has less than 2% voltage drop. At 12 Volts we now have a little under 20% voltage drop. Hmm we need to go to even bigger wire to reduce the voltage drop to less than
You do the math. Find a copper wire table and find out what AWG wire is required to handle 120 Amps with only
When you are done with the math you will understand why we use 120 volts and some countries use 240 volts. You may get electricuted in an accident, but you don't need welding cable for your hair dryer.
My 1KW inverter in my car uses Welding cable for leads and the length is kept to under 3 feet total to keep the voltage drop within limits.