I am so glad to see that a current, active DIY solar forum exists! I recognize Will from the YT videos I have been consuming lately. I joined up when I was able to get my initial questions answered within a few minutes of browsing here. Great!
About me: I'm an engineering academic, good with theory and math & stuff, but as I get older I like spending more and more time getting my hands dirty. Am an amateur auto mechanic and fix stuff around the house. Lately I've been bitten by the bug of generating power and reducing my home power use from the grid; this seems a really attractive and fulfilling "Hobby." Am currently "doing my homework" and haven't bought anything.
I am wanting to start an experimental setup in my home or workshop to learn the ropes, expecting / hoping to power as much as I can on a small scale. Not for the entire house. One of the first things that occurred to me was that if I'm not generating enough power to keep the batteries charged all the time, I'd need a way to quickly and nicely (and autonomously) switch over to grid power, as I am not even remotely close to cutting the cord.
Some inverters have an AC input that seems to fulfill this exact purpose, but reading reviews online I see that they are often not at all good for an experimental setup like mine. For instance, they're setup to use the AC input almost exclusively, switching to batteries only when the AC is cut off because of a power outage or because your boat unplugged from the shore. Which is the opposite of what I want. Even worse, Amazon is fairly hard to navigate...even typing "sine wave inverter automatic transfer switch" yields results that are 90% wrong, e.g. car inverters. So I have to back out one level and do a general web search for practically everything.
Fortunately another post in this subforum (for newbs) directed me to Will's video about the Moes ATS. Holy cow, that's EXACTLY the kind of thing I was looking for. Yay! Here's hoping this forum continues to be a good place to get good, current ideas for the DIY power generation enthusiast.
Thanks all!
About me: I'm an engineering academic, good with theory and math & stuff, but as I get older I like spending more and more time getting my hands dirty. Am an amateur auto mechanic and fix stuff around the house. Lately I've been bitten by the bug of generating power and reducing my home power use from the grid; this seems a really attractive and fulfilling "Hobby." Am currently "doing my homework" and haven't bought anything.
I am wanting to start an experimental setup in my home or workshop to learn the ropes, expecting / hoping to power as much as I can on a small scale. Not for the entire house. One of the first things that occurred to me was that if I'm not generating enough power to keep the batteries charged all the time, I'd need a way to quickly and nicely (and autonomously) switch over to grid power, as I am not even remotely close to cutting the cord.
Some inverters have an AC input that seems to fulfill this exact purpose, but reading reviews online I see that they are often not at all good for an experimental setup like mine. For instance, they're setup to use the AC input almost exclusively, switching to batteries only when the AC is cut off because of a power outage or because your boat unplugged from the shore. Which is the opposite of what I want. Even worse, Amazon is fairly hard to navigate...even typing "sine wave inverter automatic transfer switch" yields results that are 90% wrong, e.g. car inverters. So I have to back out one level and do a general web search for practically everything.
Fortunately another post in this subforum (for newbs) directed me to Will's video about the Moes ATS. Holy cow, that's EXACTLY the kind of thing I was looking for. Yay! Here's hoping this forum continues to be a good place to get good, current ideas for the DIY power generation enthusiast.
Thanks all!
