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Old August 21st 15, 12:23 AM posted to rec.radio.amateur.antenna
Dave Platt[_2_] Dave Platt[_2_] is offline
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First recorded activity by RadioBanter: Dec 2014
Posts: 67
Default 2m antenna and Micro Inverters

In article ,
wrote:

I have nothing to do with solar systems and what I know is based on
the research I did to decide whether or not such a system made any
sort of sense in my situation.

I did not find any system that would maintain power in a grid outage
that did not include some sort of backup power, i.e. either a battery
storage system or an autostart generator.


I think that's difficult to do, unless you have already converted to a
pure-DC system and have devices which can tolerate brownouts.

Solar-panel systems have a somewhat funky power-delivery curve. If
you try to draw more power than they can deliver, their output voltage
drops like a rock. For some sorts of loads (incandescent) this may be
tolerable. For surge loads such as motors, it's bad... the motors can
stall, or bog down, and may burn out. Some classes of load (e.g. many
switching power supplies) will start drawing *more* current as the
voltage drops, in order to continue delivering the required amount of
power to their load... and the solar panel's output voltage drops
further, current load goes up, voltage drops more... THUNK.

So, driving inverters or other variable loads directly from a
solar-panel array, without at least *some* stored energy to handle
spikes in load or drops in supply (cloud-over-the-sun) is a tricky
problem to solve, and I believe it's very likely to result in a system
which simply isn't reliable. If you're going to spend a hefty chunk
of money for one as a back-stop against grid outages, that probably
isn't a satisfying result.