I'm thinking about starting a grid tied residential solar project with a smaller budget, with plans to expand to a larger hybrid-inverter + storage system down the road.
We have a house with a detached garage. The garage has a 40a sub-panel which is connected to the house's 100a MEP. Our largest load is a 220v 16a EV charger, which is in the garage. In the whole time we've lived there, we've never used more than 3kw at a time in the main house.
I'm thinking of starting by paneling the garage, because we may want to do some roof repairs on the main house within a few years. In order to take advantage of the already-buried 220v AC lines between the house and garage, I think that it would make sense to do the DC-AC conversion at the garage, either with a grid tie inverter or microinverters.
Because the garage sub panel is 40a, at 220, I could send about 7kw from the garage to the main house (32a.) Obviously at 120, that's cut in half, so converting to split phase at the garage is the goal. I'm attracted to the idea of microinverters because there will be some periods of intermitted shading on parts of the array.
In the future, I'd like to add arrays to the house roof and install a hybrid inverter with battery storage (not in the garage: probably right next to the MEP on the house.)
A few questions:
Does anyone have experience with split phase microinverters? Are there split phase microinverters other than the newer Enphase models?
If I go with (Enphase or other) microinverters on the garage, would there be any issue connecting them to a hybrid inverter, similar to this layout from a Sol Ark manual?
Any general ideas about this strategy? Anything I'm missing?
Thanks in advance!
We have a house with a detached garage. The garage has a 40a sub-panel which is connected to the house's 100a MEP. Our largest load is a 220v 16a EV charger, which is in the garage. In the whole time we've lived there, we've never used more than 3kw at a time in the main house.
I'm thinking of starting by paneling the garage, because we may want to do some roof repairs on the main house within a few years. In order to take advantage of the already-buried 220v AC lines between the house and garage, I think that it would make sense to do the DC-AC conversion at the garage, either with a grid tie inverter or microinverters.
Because the garage sub panel is 40a, at 220, I could send about 7kw from the garage to the main house (32a.) Obviously at 120, that's cut in half, so converting to split phase at the garage is the goal. I'm attracted to the idea of microinverters because there will be some periods of intermitted shading on parts of the array.
In the future, I'd like to add arrays to the house roof and install a hybrid inverter with battery storage (not in the garage: probably right next to the MEP on the house.)
A few questions:
Does anyone have experience with split phase microinverters? Are there split phase microinverters other than the newer Enphase models?
If I go with (Enphase or other) microinverters on the garage, would there be any issue connecting them to a hybrid inverter, similar to this layout from a Sol Ark manual?
Any general ideas about this strategy? Anything I'm missing?
Thanks in advance!
