What is the budget?
The two large items are a 40 amp stoven and a 30 amp dryer. Everything else is lights and plugs (standard stuff - microwave, occasional hair dryer, computers and electronic hardware, LED lights, etc.)
I don't think what I *need* is a unicorn, I think what I *want* most definitely is.
You have basically specified a home with an average level of electrification, and you would basically need a 10kW inverter and at least 10kWh of battery to run all that. That is pretty expensive in the scheme of hybrid
There is a difference between power and energy too. Stove takes a lot of power to run but doesn't use much energy. Dryer takes both. Dryer can be halved in energy and quartered in power by going to a heat pump dryer (also at the cost of taking more time to try)
Those 120V loads will mostly take low power but lots of cumulative energy. With the exception of the hair dryer and microwave which could well 1800W or VA. I think they are required to stay below 1800VA to be OK to run on household 15A circuits
You could put furnace air handler on the list of slow and steady loads that add up.
Trimming off the big power items will allow inverter to be cut in cost. Low power/high energy is most compatible with ROI. Because you want a lot of energy use to potentially offset (energy = money avoided to pay on bills), and low power allows smaller wires, lower output current batteries, smaller inverter.
The entry level decent inverters are like 6000XP or SRNE10K (there was another 10K a lot of people here were testing, I don’t keep track of those in detail because I am interested only in CEC and 9540 tier hybrid inverters for my home). One 5kWh battery would be enough to serve all but the dryer and stove stably during the day, and likely you will have close to 5kWh to draw from overnight. My house takes about 500W on average, probably down to 200W when people are asleep.
3 or 5kWh is also a standard size node for vendors (5kWh is server rack). Which falls out from the size class of the battery cells and from the power and capacity requirements. In the past the cheapest Enphase battery has been 3kwh and maybe 2kW of output. Now their latest starting increment is their battery named the 5P, which is 5 kWh / 3.84kW. While I don’t have interest in Enphase, I have found a lot of value in following their products and doing competitive analysis, since they pick products to sell that can get them the most mainstream customers. On average a NEM3 install likely includes a 5P, though a Battery 3 is probably sufficient to power all 120V daytime loads and buffer the solar
I would love to have an inverter - or components - that is relatively small for PV (I'm only planning about 2.5kW solar)
What is driving this 2.5kW limit? That is 6 panels.
You can try punching into PVwatts to get a month by month (ie seasonal) daily output from those panels.
but has the ability to provide enough battery power (watts and amps wise) AND be able to supplement grid power during peak usage time. All without the risk of backfeeding the grid.
The conclusion of the above thread is that you can’t really shrink the inverter to achieve inverter power output reduction with a double conversion system (and I sort of sketched a mathematical proof when I figured this out for myself). And you can’t use a parallel system because that can backfeed.
You can use a double conversion system to keep up on energy basis.
