I have been researching solar for about a year now. We have had a couple of bids from companies that it would literally take 15 plus years for ROI. I have a enough experience with electrical and construction I feel fairly confident I can install my own solar system. Our house is 100% electric. I do NOT want to be off the grid. I just want to help offset our monthly expenses, with a some sort of battery back up when power goes out. I also don’t care that much about feeding back to the grid. So my main question is. Can I install a subpanel (with few items) with an inverter switch that automatically switches to batteries when the power goes out? Maybe this is not the right question. ?? Still new. Basically I want to hook up a few circuits that use panels during the day and maybe switch back to the grid at night and also switches over to batteries when power goes out. Is this even possible??? Would I still need permission from the electric companies? Thanks in advance!!
Solar with inverter switch?
- Thread starter MSypher
- Start date
FilterGuy
Solar Engineering Consultant - EG4 and Consumers
Welcome to the forum.
Did the bid include battery backup? If you are already on-grid, it gets pretty difficult to justify battery back-up financially.... but it is also hard to put a value on having power when the grid goes down.
I put grid-tied solar on my house 13 years or so ago and it has long ago paid for itself....but I had *very* favorable time-of-day billing. I was selling power mid day for the highest price and buying power at night for the lowest price. Sadly, that rate plan is expiring next year so my costs are going to go up quite a bit. I am debating what I am going to do.... and one of the options is to add batteries and do peak-shaving. (Run off of battery in the evening when the power is most expensive). Even though it would keep my bills down, the pay-off will still be a small forever (And that is if I do all the work myself).
I have not made any final decisions, but the system I am looking at using if I go for batteries is the Solark 8K. I would do exactly like you are describing with a 'critical loads' panel that would be driven by the solark and be able to run off the batteries.
