Power the house in a power cut

If the power is cut in my UK home and I throw the main breaker couldn’t I power the ring sockets by a simple 13amp UK plug to plug cable and connect the EB60?

:wink:

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That’s a useful link.

They are also illegal in most places.

You need a transfer switch or an interlock.

I think the answer to that is no. Although I don’t understand enough to attempt to explain why, I think (from various discussions I’ve had with electricians) that it would introduce potential for electric shock.

What we’ve done (and it caused some knee-jerk reactions from electricians, but ultimately they’ve agreed it’s 100% safe):

We have our AC200Max sitting in a nice, clean, cool room with no kids and dogs. The simplest way to explain what we’ve done is to say we’ve laid extension cables to all the rooms where we want solar power.

However, to make it safe and seamless we’ve run the cable (correctly rated cable) through the loft and cavity walls and rather than extension sockets we’ve used standard 3 pin plug electrical sockets (from B&Q, Screwfix etc). So it LOOKS like a standard socket but rather than connecting to the consumer unit it plugs into the generator at the other end.

We actually have 2 AC200Max and between them they pretty much run the house all summer. Even now we’re getting a few hundred watts a day - so free tv, computers etc.

We can decide at the generator end what to plug into a generator and what to plug into the mains. So throughout the house it’s seamless. You just need to make sure you’re not overloading the units by plugging in too many high draw devices at once.

The huge benefit of this over installed home backup systems is that when solar is scarce you can manually decide what runs from the mains and what runs from solar. All inverters have a running cost - if all your running is a fridge the overhead from the inverter can use more energy than the fridge. By doing things our way you can run the low draw items from the mains and save the solar for things that can be run efficiently (so kettle, toaster etc).

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