Making Solar Energy: Guy Marsden’s Grid-Tied Solar Powered Home

Posted by carrie_roll

Guy Marsden has done some incredible write-ups for other solar and alternative energy projects. He’s in the process of designing and installing a grid tied PV system. This means that the solar electric system he’s building will operate on its own and will also feed electricity back into the grid. He’s documenting the process in detail on his website, and what he’s shown so far about how he will make energy from the sun is something we all can learn a lot from.
Really, go and check this out. You can learn a LOT about solar PV systems from what he has on this site already.

From Guy’s web site

The only disadvantage of installing a grid-tied solar system like this is that there is no battery bank. So when the utility power fails the inverters automatically shut down to protect the line workers. So we will still need to rely on our automatic propane backup generator during power outages. Last winter we were running on propane generated power for a total of 7 days due to 2 heavy snow storms, Maine winters can be brutal. This cost us several hundred dollars in propane, so the trade-off of a battery less system can get expensive on occasion. But in the long run it is less expensive than installing and maintaining a battery bank.
Several other factors influenced our decision to go solar now, low mortgage rates, recent drop in the cost of solar panels, and the federal tax incentive that allows us to take 30% of the cost of the system off our federal taxes.
So my next task was to figure out how many panels I would need, and where to put them all. Go to the next page to see what I learned.

Really, check out Guy’s Solar Panel Grid-tied system here

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