FlintHills
New Member
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 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.