Quote:
Originally Posted by davidmash
I misunderstood the first part. My apologies.
If I have a off the grid house with solar panels, I get power from the panels do I not? Assuming yes, why can that not be done on the grid and just have a switch, like they do for a house that has a generator, which cuts off power from the grid?
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You have misunderstood a lot. An off-grid home running solar panels has a huge battery bank. Your house is powered from the battery bank in this case. The solar panels are charging the batteries. You do not take power directly from the panels in any case at any time. Ever.
You also cannot have the solar panels operating in parallel with a generator. The inverter will cause the generator AVR to literally go crazy. The generator must have a load on it and the inverter does not understand that, if you back-feed the generator hard enough, you will cause the windings in it to fail. The grid-tie inverter is not designed to "share load" with a generator, it is designed to dump the maximum power it can back into the grid. Seen it happen many times by people who thought they were clever enough to trick the grid-tie system, it isn't pretty and the load in your home gets real unhappy when it does.
If you want a true backup system, you need a generator. Even off-grid solar systems have a backup generator for when the system is down for maintenance or on cloudy/snowy days when there isn't enough sun to keep the battery bank charged.