Comment on ‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
hanrahan@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Not allowed in Australia without legislation anyway,.owners groups would shit their pants.
And they plug them into thier mains electrical systems how ? I can see them charging a battery and you get an inverter to run something from the battery but that’s not the same thing.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
They have an inverter that increases the voltage to 230V and then you can plug it into a regular outlet. The cables don’t care in which direction the electricity flows. It only becomes an issue at the power meter, but newer ones prevent backflow and usually these small PV systems don’t produce enough to not be consumed by always on stuff like refrigerators anyways.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 week ago
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 supplier, 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.