What exists right now for someone who wants to make a very small solar project?
A family member of mine was hoping to put 1 or 2 panels on the roof of their ADU to power maybe just the small window air conditioner in it, or at least offset a lot of its energy use. Is there anything practical for doing this that doesn’t cost multiple thousands of dollars?
In my imagined setup, there would be 1-2 panels on the roof connected to a cheap consumer battery (something like a small ecoflow). The appliance would try and run only off the battery, but if the battery charge level dipped to low it would have some controller that would switch it to grid power until the charge level was back up. I would not want to feed any power into the grid, but I wouldn’t want the person living in the space to have to manually switch the power source between the battery and a regular outlet.
Sorry to be stuck on this, but this is a small house with only a few big appliances. Even in the summer, it’s possible there will be times when no AC nor refrigerator is running a compressor and all the lights are off while the panels are producing.
I have no illusions a small system will produce more daily energy than the house consumes. Agreed 100% – that is just not going to happen. My concern is about what happens if it momentarily does so? What if it is outproducing any demand for a few minutes? Will the panels just produce nothing if there’s no draw, or could something bad happen?
Appreciate your replies. Your post from earlier has been bookmarked for me and I want to try doing pretty much exactly that, but as a novice, my top priority is to not break anything.
A big danger is when the grid goes down and you start feeding back into the grid and create a hazard.
A hybrid inverter charged with solar is probably the way to go.