Solar Notes

A reader of UrbanSurvival.com made the following comments yesterday:

George, a quick note on sourcing alt. power. Sun Electronics (www.sunelec.com) in Miami is THE place to buy solar panels and inverters. Learned about them from my brother-in-law, a long-term cruising sailor. Great prices, and they have stuff in stock. They have tremendous volume, lots of business to S. America, apparently.

Don't expect them to help with installs or educate you on basics, they are too busy. I exchanged some emails with John Kimball, the Pres of Sun Electronics and he said he was working 7 days a week from 7am to about 2- 3 am (!!!!!) they are that busy.

Seems a lot of folks wonder if "The Grid" will be stable much longer, myself included. My system is NOT grid-tied, don't want anyone messing with my stuff, I even plan on wiring separate household circuits to be completely isolated.

Your point of not telling your power company (or local gvmt) about your PV system is well-founded, I hope to keep my panels hidden from street view also. I have a 48 volt system I am in process of installing, with 6 Evergreen/SUN 190w panels and a 3600 watt Outback Inverter. Battery bank consists of 8 L16 6 volts in series, purchased locally from Batteries Plus+.

The BEST place to buy cable that I have found is (really, this is not a joke) a place called Genuinedealz.com in Brunswick, GA. Great prices, FAST shipping never an order screw-up, although I seem to remember they used to be in KY. I am also a (currently land-bound) liveaboard sailor so tend to go marine grade with everything I do.

My background is in electronics so it is a lot more fun doing this for myself than for an employer or client. Keep up the great writing about "the great de-leveraging" - sounds like a PT Barnum call to get folks to head to the exits. Hmmmmmm, how appropriate..."

Just to make sure we're clear on a couple of points here: 1) If you don't know with absolute certainty what you're doing with electricity hire a professional licensed electrician to do the work. and 2) As long as you are not using the grid-tie function,. an inverter-charge can be used without notifying your power company - it's just a great big scaled-up uninterruptible power supply. However, when you turn on the grid tie function, then you've got regs and rules to comply with.