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Enphase/generator puzzle

FlintHills

New Member
Joined
May 23, 2024
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8
Location
Kansas
I may have boxed myself in to having to buy an Enphase smart switch. Glarg.
I put an addition on a house. Before thinking of solar, I knew I wanted to preserve previous owners' ability to feed some house loads from a portable generator in the detached garage. (Stand-by wasn't in the cards/budget.)
Meter is on pole 60 yards away. I trenched in two runs of conduit, one to addition and one to garage. Manual transfer switch on the pole. Otherwise no connection between house and garage.
Garage conduit contains three No. 2 wires (to make 240v feed with neutral) and three No. 6 wires (for generator to feed backwards during outages).
It's about this point in construction that I decide that a net-metering PV array just makes sense. Three-car garage faces due south with no shade and can produce ~8kW from 24 395W panels. The local renewable energy gang does group buys of Enphase stuff and is full of helpful people, and I have forgotten about what exactly is in the conduit. I've got heat pumps and an electric kitchen, bring on the future.
However ... I don't see a way to make a single set of 6 wires send PV to the house while preserving generator access, unless I jury rig an additional manual switch in the garage or pony up for Enphase's "Enpower" switch. It accommodates generator and batteries and can parallel in useful ways, once I get around to batteries. The transfer switch on the pole will have to go, I know.
Oh, and the rural electric cooperative declined my array as being too big, so I'm setting all the inverters to "no export."
I realize that grid-tied isn't the focus here, but you all seem to know how to make electrons happy, so I put the matter before you.
Sorry for the length.
 
I don't have Enphase inverters but researched them extensively and decided to go with something else as all their equipment seemed to follow the same principles Apple uses. Everything is proprietary and if you want to connect anything else to it, it has to be bought through them at a premium price. If you're looking to use the solar as a backup when the grid goes down, then I believe the Empower switch is the only way to do it as it has load shedding capabilities that the system requires and is the only box that can communicate with the rest of the Enphase equipment from IQ combiner box to the inverters themselves.
 
Thanks for this; sorry for the delayed response. We were hanging the panels this weekend. I've reached the same conclusion you have, but maybe the electrician will magick a solution. :rolleyes:
I did discover that my decision to panel most of roof's square footage didn't leave much room for actual feet (of installers) toward the end. But it all ended well.
 

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