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Instead of being hard-wired to the mains, it is just plugged into a mains outlet.
Balcony solar panels
- Thread starter nsaspook
- Start date
It's neither new nor ordinary.
The feature that is captured by the label "balcony" is that you can just plug it into a normal outlet and draw power from it without requiring any modifications to your house wiring. This makes them very portable and easy to set up. But there are issues and not all of them can be resolved by a properly-designed balcony module. Perhaps the easiest to see is local overloading of the wiring. Say you have a 15 A circuit that you plug the module into and it is rated to output 10 A max. The circuit has a 15 A breaker that is there to protect the wiring on that circuit, but it can only do that if all of the current in the wiring on that circuit flows through the breaker. So say you plug in two space heaters on the same circuit as the balcony unit and each space heater draws 12 A. Your circuit might be completely happy supplying 24 A to that outlet, with 10 A coming from the balcony unit and 14 A coming from the breaker. But the wiring is overloaded and could cause a fire. There are other problems as well.
The system design goals are different. Has to be somewhat portable, with low(er) total install cost and power, plug and play and safe for a regular appliance consumer.
My design baseline system setup is 3 400W panels with a AC energy meter for power production and load data. There are also separate power monitor plugs (using WiFI or Thread/Matter) for things like space heater/aircon loads for excess draw monitoring and control (throttle GTI power from the solar and inform the user what's happening so the can move those devices off circuit to increase solar power into the supply circuit) for single circuit power limitations.
https://www.evehome.com/en/eve-energy
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