urbanism

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I just found out about "balcony solar" which is, by and large, illegal in the US (web.archive.org)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Apparently this is all the rage in Germany (and China) where you can buy a kit at the supermarket for 500-600EUR and then you simply hang the solar panels over your balcony and plug them in to a wall outlet to reduce your net usage.

I was trying to do research on why we don't have this in the US and it doesn't seem like there are any particularly good reasons for it other than sclerotic response to "new" technology.

Seems like an incredibly cool idea to make apartment dwelling even more sustainable.

non-archive link: https://www.dw.com/en/mini-plug-in-solar-panels-are-they-worth-it/a-66240262

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

plug them in to a wall outlet to reduce your net usage.

Yeah I think that's why they're illegal in the U.S. The electrical systems for a lot of homes are old as hell and this can start a fire. It happens all the time with people using generators and male-to-male power cords and plugging into the wall to feed back the power to the electrical circuit

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

In theory shouldn't a smart enough inverter be able to handle this well (to be clear, the German models come with an inverter)? Surely Germany has plenty of old wiring as well.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Maybe (I am not an electrician) but it's also sort of a fire/shock hazard to have a device putting out electricity that has a male plug.

The plugs in Germany/other countries might have a better design when it comes to that, the ground connection is on the sides rather than directly across from the positive connection so it's a little less likely to short stuff out if it just falls out of the receptacle.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

If the (smart) inverter is on the line that connects into the wall outlet it could easily stop the flow in the event that it doesn't detect anything from the grid across its terminals. I expect this is a solved problem, but like I said, I just found out about this tech.