Adding Solar panels and Backup batteries to my home

[dan.kirkpatrick]

ive been eyeballing going solar and tieing excess into the "grid"//question i have is if you have a power outage and your "grid tied",,can it be switched to run just your home? or if there isnt enough power can i tie in my harbor freight 9500 gen?//do you have to have a big expensive battery bank to be on your own system? marv might know the answer

 

[gouch]

ive been eyeballing going solar and tieing excess into the "grid"//question i have is if you have a power outage and your "grid tied",,can it be switched to run just your home? or if there isnt enough power can i tie in my harbor freight 9500 gen?//do you have to have a big expensive battery bank to be on your own system? marv might know the answer

My daughter has her solar tied to the grid. If the power on the gid goes out the solar shuts off for safety reasons. The power company doesn't want their linemen to get electrocuted by solar generated electricity going into the lines as they're working on them.

 

[Caseknife]

We have grid-tied solar with a propane 22K Generac as back-up. As @gouch said, if you are grid-tied, when the power goes out, your system shuts down.

Avista works on a bank system with power production and the fiscal year is April 1-March 31. The excess power that is produced in the summer will go into a bank and then will be consumed in the winter when your consumption is greater than production.