[sharpshadow]

Germany is steadily reducing the legal hurdles to install balcony solar plants. Now one does not have to ask the landlord for permission, no tax, 800W allowed, etc..

Berlin grants one 500€ with the purchase of a balkony solar plant.

[animal531]

Here in South Africa our main electricity supplier has been failing for the last few years due to corruption, nepotism etc.

As a result solar power has really taken off for both businesses and homes.

[dbetteridge]

800W ... total?

I guess for apartments thats better than nothing, but wouldn't it make more sense to install them on the roof of the building and tie it into rebates for everyone?

[sharpshadow]

It’s for people which rent or own an apartment with balcony. Landlords and home owners can still install panels on the roof.

There are options to invest in solar farms which start to yield returns after some years.

[idontwantthis]

Do you run it as it’s own circuit or do you connect it to your main power somehow?

[sharpshadow]

Own circuit, main power, feeding it back to the grid for profit, feeding it back to the grid for free are possible options. The options come with additional costs.

In the latest round of new regulations they allowed the use of 230V Schuko plugs for balkony plants.

[idontwantthis]

That’s wild. There’s no way I could ever do that with a condo or rental house in the U.S. I would never get to touch main power.

[jupp0r]

I think all you do is connect the inverter to any wall outlet. Basically a male-to-male power chord.

[mikestew]

Surely it is something safer than a suicide cord,[0] especially if used inside where things like children live.

[0]https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/generators/why-s...

[phiresky]

It's a male end on the PV side, but every of these plug-in inverters I've seen only start outputting when they get the 220V 50Hz input, so they are inert as long as they are not plugged in. As far as I know they always rely on the grid frequency.

[marshray]

"children-like things" :-D

[ssl-3]

Grid-tied solar inverters, as a general rule, do not (cannot) output any power at all in the absence of grid power.

The act of plugging in a normal grid-tied solar inverter with a regular ass-plug[0] is just exactly as safe as plugging in any other electrical appliance is.

(There are other concerns, but the physical plug is not amongst them.)

0: https://xkcd.com/37/

[ssl-3]

It can be that simple in 240v-ish countries, where everything in a home is connected to the same two transformer taps outside.

Just install a dedicated branch circuit (or otherwise isolate it so that nothing else is using that branch), plug it in, and all the stuff in the house is indiscriminately somewhat powered by solar.

And...done. That's all there is.

Here in the States, things are a touch more difficult: Our normal residential power is 240v, but our regular branch circuits (and outlets) are 120v by using a center tapped secondary winding on the transformer as neutral.

So to power a house's stuff indiscriminately in the US with a plug-in inverter (or two) would require two different outlets that are each on different transformer taps, or a 240v outlet.

Using a singular regular 120v outlet in the US will only cover about half of the regular stuff in a house, and will never be able to power any 240v loads.

(And, yeah, we have standardized 240v outlets. But they're almost never found in a home except behind major appliances like the clothes dryer and/or electric range. We also have standards for smaller outlets that would be suitable for small appliances like a toaster or a kettle, but they're almost non-existent in the wild.

It'll be a long while before we get approved plug-in grid-tied solar here.)

[Maskawanian]

If the sine waves don't line up, you are in for a very bad time. There is a reason crossover switches exist, please never do this.

[moooo99]

That won’t happen since the inverters are all tied to the grid frequency

[Always42]

Yikes