Just solar panels on your roof might not be enough. In my country it’s a standard practice to wire things in such a way that when grid power goes out PV panels won’t work either. Apparently ability to keep power during grid blackouts is significantly more expensive. So you might have solar setup and still be fucked during extreme weather.
Yep, it’s the law everywhere AFAIK. It’s an extremely important safety feature because if it’s missing, linemen working to fix the issue would not be able to power down the line, or worse, would disconnect it from the grid and start working on it without realizing YOUR house is still energizing it.
The inverter does that job, and it will also shut off your solar if the mains voltage is too high for instance (this prevents “solar neighborhoods” from driving the line voltage unreasonably high, and even then I’ve heard of people seeing 250V+ in their homes on really sunny days). A “funny” side-effect of that is that the most sensitive inverter in the neighborhood will always be the first one to trip, so that guy always gets shafted when solar production is at its peak.
However (while I haven’t looked into detail into this yet), I believe it should be perfectly legal to have a closed system with solar panels and a heat pump, as long as they never touch the mains.
Besides, even if your power goes down when disconnected from the grid:
That’s not exactly unavoidable. Inverters have web interfaces nowadays, so I’m pretty sure you could easily tell it “this is an off-grid installation now”. Yeah, it’s illegal, but in the extremely unlikely case for my area that I’m without power for several days (that’d be WWII levels of “oh shit” for me), I’m flipping that breaker to cut myself from the grid and jailbreaking that bitch.
Assuming no societal collapse (which is the argument I’m really considering here, the rest is mostly fun hypotheticals), having a regular solar setup is still a huge asset because it can easily offset your A/C bill in the summer, and (part of) your heating bill in the winter. You might not live completely off-grid, but it greatly smooths out the financial aspect, and means not every hike in electricity/gas prices will be a “oh shit can I heat myself this winter?” moment.
Just solar panels on your roof might not be enough. In my country it’s a standard practice to wire things in such a way that when grid power goes out PV panels won’t work either. Apparently ability to keep power during grid blackouts is significantly more expensive. So you might have solar setup and still be fucked during extreme weather.
Yep, it’s the law everywhere AFAIK. It’s an extremely important safety feature because if it’s missing, linemen working to fix the issue would not be able to power down the line, or worse, would disconnect it from the grid and start working on it without realizing YOUR house is still energizing it.
The inverter does that job, and it will also shut off your solar if the mains voltage is too high for instance (this prevents “solar neighborhoods” from driving the line voltage unreasonably high, and even then I’ve heard of people seeing 250V+ in their homes on really sunny days). A “funny” side-effect of that is that the most sensitive inverter in the neighborhood will always be the first one to trip, so that guy always gets shafted when solar production is at its peak.
However (while I haven’t looked into detail into this yet), I believe it should be perfectly legal to have a closed system with solar panels and a heat pump, as long as they never touch the mains.
Besides, even if your power goes down when disconnected from the grid: