Off Grid Solar Inverters and On Grid Solar Inverters
OFF GRID ONLY INVERTERS: Are battery-based inverters. There are two possibilities for off grid inverter systems Either AC Coupled or DC where a charge controller sends DC power to your battery bank, then an inverter converts the DC to AC for the home. They are not "Anti-Islanding" and cannot "sell" to the power grid
GRID-TIE INVERTERS: Grid-tie systems have no batteries, DC power from the Solar Panels goes straight to the inverter, then is used in the home as regular house AC power. Any extra AC power can be sent back to the power company through a special two-way "net-meter" to the power grid. Your meter can run forward or backward depending on whether you are currently buying or selling power.
HYBRID INVERTERS: Can do the work of both off-grid only and grid-tie inverters. A hybrid inverter system can connect to both a battery bank and the utility grid, letting you draw from, or send power to, the power grid. Of course they can be stand alone and not hooked to the power grid at all.
The most common grid-tied inverter takes high voltage DC and outputs to the electrical grid during the day, thus “storing” your energy production there enabling you to “take it back” at night. Of course any electricity that you use during the day comes directly from your own production. In this way you can eliminate your electric bill entirely, or at the very least drastically reduce the bill. 85% of all the grid tied systems we design are exactly this system. The only drawback to this design is that when the grid goes down the system must shut down as well. Grid-Tied systems will not enable you to continue producing electricity if the grid goes down since there will be no grid to store the electricity you produce. It could very easily lead to an accident if someone happened to be repairing that grid to get it operational again!
About 15% of the grid-tied systems we design are battery based, while they are designed to normally “sell” to the grid reducing or eliminating the monthly electric bill they are further designed to allow the house to run independent of the grid in a power outage. These systems employ a bank of batteries as a temporary storage device to carry you through a power outage. Typically battery banks are designed to provide 8 to 12 hours of power without the need of a generator supplementation. For areas that may experience prolonged outages frequently, a backup generator can be integrated with the system to infrequently supplement the batteries as needed.
The last type of inverter system is the Off-Grid or independent system. This type of system when properly designed is completely autonomous from the power grid, thus allowing you amazing flexibility as to choice of location on the planet. With the notable exception of Alaska, Northern Canada and the Antarctic during the 6 or so weeks in their winter, an off grid system can be properly designed to provide clean abundant power anywhere on earth. You are basically your own power company. Really the only thing you’ll miss out on is the frequent power outages that grid customers experience because the sun comes up every day and your power never goes out.
An inverter system includes one inverter or more plus, an electrical distribution (breaker) panel, a system controller (brain), some type of system/battery monitor and other optional devices like an automatic generator start module. Don’t try to design this yourself. We are experts in the design of these systems and we can tell you all your choices for the equipment you’ll need.
Call Toll Free 888-826-0939 if you have any questions about Inverters
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