Michael Raines Solar Panel Installer
- Michael Raines The Colony
- Good Points of Plug and Play Grid-Tie Wall Outlet Inverter for Solar Panels
- Downside of Plug and Play Grid-Tie Wall Outlet Inverter for Solar Panels
Michael Raines The Colony
I like to keep referring to Michael Raines. Again, he is one of the cast members on a TV show of the Discovery Chanel called “The Colony”. He is an actor, a fabricator — and a solar panel installer. The guy is a skilled fabricator, on the show he was responsible for putting together a generator, constructing a daisy-chain battery bank and ultimately, scavenging solar panels to set up an awesome off-grid complete alternative energy unit — with very little resources available to him.
I was researching Michael the other day to learn more about him, and I discovered his homepage here Official Michael Raines homepage. On his homepage you will see a wicked 7 kilowatt custom made electric bike.
As I was sifting through his website, I discovered a cool solar panel setup he had, and wanted to write a post about it. The system he put together is found here grid-tie with wall outlet plug and play inverter solar panel. The interesting thing about this solar panel is it does something that you are not supposed to be doing — but its cool nonetheless. It is a grid-tie inverter. However, it doesn’t work quite “legally”, actually legally might not be the right word. Doing it this way will void your fire insurance if they find out. Doing it this way could theoretically give the power company the right to shut off your power if they find out.
A conventional grid-tie inverter that you are supposed to be using will normally be hooked up on the far-side of your circuit breakers and transfer directly into the power meter and then into the electrical grid. Instead of doing that, his setup plugs directly into a wall socket.
Will that work? Yes. Is it a good idea? Well — assume for a moment that your home has a certain base amount of energy that it is always consuming. Theoretically, it would not hurt if the peak of your solar panel would never exceed your base usage of power (on the same circuit). All of the power you feed directly into your wiring would be immediately consumed by other appliances. On the other hand, if your power generated by your solar panels exceeded your power use — it may start spinning your power meter backwards. It also may blow out your wiring in a way that would not be protected by your circuit breaker.
Good Points of Plug and Play Grid-Tie Wall Outlet Inverter for Solar Panels
- Lets face it, you have a fat chance of being able to officially set up net-metering with a homemade setup. This may get you in on net-metering on the down-low with a plug and play grid tie setup.
- If you do not produce enough energy to make your meter spin backwards (i.e. you are using more power than your solar panel generates) — it would never even make it past the meter (it would still spin forward, just more slowly).
- Its easy and cheap and convenient — no expensive grid-tie setup to be concerned with, no installation of a grid-tie inverter required.
- If your system is small, they will probably never find out.
Downside of Plug and Play Grid-Tie Wall Outlet Inverter for Solar Panels
- It will void your fire insurance if they find out.
- The power company would be entitled to remove you from the grid if they found out.
- You may actually cause a fire if your output exceeded your internal home wiring.
- Depending on how sophisticated your local grid is, they will be able to detect if your house is generating electricity.
Why do electric companies care? There are a few issues, for one the electric company wants an “anti-islanding” functionality on your solar panels. This means if the grid loses power, or if they deliberately remove power from the system so they can work on it — they don’t want to get zapped by your system that is still generating power, even though the local grid is turned off. In addition, they want your solar panel equipment to be able to withstand a certain level of power surge. This is part of the process of obtaining a UL (Underwriter Laboratories) listing, which your equipment obviously won’t have if it is homemade or bypassing proper grid-tie best practices. These grid-tie inverters that are plug and play into a wall outlet, I’m 99.99% certain they are not UL approved. And obviously, nobody (including you) wants to burn your house down by overloading the internal circuitry of your home.
I wouldn’t recommend you do this, but there are many forums available out there where people discuss it. Credible solar panel companies sell the equipment — I guess they are taking more liability for selling them than I would be for recommending them.
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