What exists right now for someone who wants to make a very small solar project?
A family member of mine was hoping to put 1 or 2 panels on the roof of their ADU to power maybe just the small window air conditioner in it, or at least offset a lot of its energy use. Is there anything practical for doing this that doesn’t cost multiple thousands of dollars?
In my imagined setup, there would be 1-2 panels on the roof connected to a cheap consumer battery (something like a small ecoflow). The appliance would try and run only off the battery, but if the battery charge level dipped to low it would have some controller that would switch it to grid power until the charge level was back up. I would not want to feed any power into the grid, but I wouldn’t want the person living in the space to have to manually switch the power source between the battery and a regular outlet.
I have no concern that the panels will outproduce daily household demands. That is just absolutely not going to happen. Totally understood there.
My concern is that it is a quite small house. It only has 4 major electrical appliances – a fridge, a 110V window AC in the ADU, a bigger 240V central AC unit, and a cooker. It’s easy to imagine minutes or hours at a time, when none of these major appliances are running and we’re just contending with trivial draws. If it’s noon on a mild day, no one is home, and all those thermostats are satisfied, what happens to the extra excess the panels produce?