We have them here in Germany and let me tell you: they do work, they save money, they are easy to install, and no, they won’t burn your house down.
Honestly the biggest problems with them are landlords trying to stop you from installing them.
UK housing stock is significantly more shitty though, so the risk there is probably higher.
I don’t think the downvoters understand your comment.
Germany was greatly destroyed in WW2, much of their housing stock was built post WW2. That didn’t happen in the UK, the Blitz didn’t destroy a huge amount of national housing stock, only specific pockets.
We have lots of Georgian and Victorian housing which has had upgrades over the years of vastly varying standards and quality. My wiring certainly isn’t up to scratch.
Breaker boxes, or fuse boxes as they used to be, aren’t designed to protect humans from electrocution as many believe. They’re designed to prevent house fires. If things don’t go as planned electricity can very easily melt wire insulation and start fires. Can we trust every homes wiring that could have been installed anywhere between 1920 and now to still be safe when used in a different configuration than normal? Current spikes in ring mains that have never had that much current before?
I’m all for the increase of solar power, but this needs to be done very carefully or people will die in preventable house fires.
Edit: to be clear, I am for these panels but unless the home was built in the last 20 years it should be thoroughly inspected before any work is done and done so by a qualified person. I’ve been out the industry for a long time now but there are ways of testing wiring insulation such as these meters by Megger.
These solar panels deliver 800W peak. Water kettles, hair dryers, flat irons, space heaters all need more power. If the wiring is good enough for these appliances, it should be good enough for such a solar panel.
People dont get the problem, with a plug in solar panel you can have something behind a fuse draw more current than what the fuse sees. If your panel provides 800w and you have other appliences in the same circuit behind the fuse that pull high current they can pull nearly the max of your fuse through the fuse and all the current of your solar panel which would be more than the wiring can tolerate without the fuse blowing. That doesnt take into account that that the wiring could not even be capable of handling max current of your fuse as others here pointed out with shitty wiring that has been done in old houses where at some point someone just changed a fuse without really updating the cables in the wall.
My grandpas house in france had so shitty wiring that i would have never trusted it to be safe. Flat cable with broken isolation and no protective earth and a horrendus subpanel.
Just do what the Americans do, require it to be on its own circuit. Put in a 5a fuse and Bob’s your uncle.
It is not an actual problem.
It’s not that simple.
This is what The Institution of Engineering and Technology has to say:
Yeah but there are a lot of shitty old buildings with shitty old wiring here.
Using the hot water tap in my kitchen nearly set my building on fire last year when the mini boiler under the sink shorted out after having melted all the insulation around the wires leading to it. That oily fishy smell of wires burning still haunts me.
I’m all for the increase of solar power, but this needs to be done very carefully or people will die in preventable house fires.
This is not an actual problem in Germany, nor in other countries.
What happens still more often are houses destroyed by gas explosions. Here are some real examples for the latter. Those pictures are one more reason to get a heat pump fast.
But it’s a risk in the UK, for the reasons the comment explained.
The landlords don’t put obstacles to these because of any fire risk, but because they don’t want to cede control. In the same way as you are here technically not allowed to attach a flag to your balcony, or put an anti-war poster in your window.
And that’s only a relevant problem, because in Germany a far higher proportion of flats are rented than in the UK. That has to do with work mobility (when you lose your job, you are expected to look in other cities, too), and also with the fact that in Germany, an own custom-built house will often sell at a substantial loss.
To get optimum power, you would want to tilt the solar panels. But this may also be contrary to existing planning rules.
The thing is that the actual surface area of the panel is by now not a dominant part of the cost. More things like fixture, inverter, cabling… You could install three panels instead of two to make up of the tilt. You will still need an inverter which limits at 800 W. But it is starting to become economical to include batteries with such installations. For example from the Anker brand.
I know, I know. “BUt bAtterIES cAn exPLODE!!”. Don’t fall prey to appeals for fear. Reality is nicer than that.
Everyone doing the “it works in Germany” dance needs to remember that the UK, almost uniquely, has ring main domestic wiring, which presents unique safety challenges.
(Specifically, in-wall wiring that is under-rated compared to the fuse that protects it (e.g. 24A wall wiring on a 32A fuse), which is only safe if the ring is in-tact (no undetected breaks) and, critically for this application, the load is evenly distributed around the ring.)
Yes, it can and should be made to work - but it is not as straightforward as “herp derp works in Germany so yolo”.
We are talking about 800W peak, that’s not even 4A.
A fifty percent increase in the margin for failure, you say?
Oh well, that’s fine then. No need for concern.
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Yes, I absolutely have understood that. I also understand that that means the assumptions that a ring main are built on - that the distribution of load around the ring will be even in relation to the supply point - no longer apply.
In a ringmain, any individual stretch of the inwall wiring is under-rated. A single two-gang wall socket (with 2 perfectly legal and standard compliant 13A fused appliances/multisockets plugged in) can draw more current then the cable in the wall is rated for. It is “safe” because it relies on the current being drawn, on average, equally from both sides of the ring. If you plug a generator in that is closer to the socket, that is no longer true - more current will be drawn on the shorter path to the generator than the longer path back to the fuse box. An already marginal system is now unsafe.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, and I hope it will be done, but it works in Gemany is a fucking stupid comment that we keep seeing but is irrelevant because Germany (and almost everywhere else on Earth) has a completely different domestic electrical system.
A single two-gang wall socket (with 2 perfectly legal and standard compliant 13A fused appliances/multisockets plugged in) can draw more current then the cable in the wall is rated for.
13A at 230 Volt are 3 kilowatt…So, you’d need to connect 6 kilowatt. Today, the only common home appliances that draw so much power are electric stoves. (Yes there was the idea to heat more electrically using nuclear power, in the 1970s) The other way would be to heat the whole flat with electricity. That is possible in some circumstances (heating broken), but does not happen at times where you have a lot of solar power.
And on top of that, the problem with the ring main system that you describe is not specific to using balcony solar. You can bring down any extra risk back to the previous level by reducing the main fuse by 3.5 A, or about 10%.
Are you labouring under the misapprehension that the sun doesn’t shine in the winter? That sounds like fossil fuel industry FUD…
Look, why - national stereotypes notwithstanding - are you apparently incapable of saying “oh, right, I don’t realise that, I understand that comparisons with Germany are not particularly useful, but I hope they find a way to make it work”, instead of endlessly doubling down on your pig-headed ignorance?
National stereotypes notwithstanding.
Are you labouring under the misapprehension that the sun doesn’t shine in the winter?
Looks like this.
By the way - Explanation of the term FUD. Who is appealing to fear here, citing theoretical risk with no actual facts?
Everyone doing the “it works in Germany” dance needs to remember that the UK, almost uniquely, has ring main domestic wiring, which presents unique safety challenges.
So, if this is really not safe by principle, why do people not put in smaller fuses to begin with? Whether they use balcony solar or not?
If you are really afraid of it, you can put in a smaller main fuse which has 3.5 A less - about 10% of a standard UK home installation. But 32 A is a lot, that system was designed for electric heaters. If anything, in the UK installations should be safer today because of the wall plug fuses.
“That system” was not “designed for electric heaters” (I have no idea where this ridiculous myth comes from, ) it was designed to cut costs because copper was expensive after the war.
In-plug fuses do not make it safe, they help mitigate two critical flaws: the first, that a faulty appliance can draw 32A through a 13A cable without blowing the distribution fuse, and secondly (relevant to this case) they make it harder - but not impossible - to unbalance the ring by plugging too much load into a single socket.
But it’s only a mitigation, it doesn’t make it safe. A standard two-gang wall plate on its own is all that is required to overload the inwall wiring (26A from two sockets on a 24A feed protected by a 32A breaker.) Adding 4A of feed-in as well is a significant bump to the risk of an already unsafe system.
And sure, nobody is going to notice the problem on day 1, and as long as the only electrical appliances you use are mobile phone chargers there is never going to be a problem. But a while down the line when the householder decides to plug in a couple of the new AC units they feel they can now justify because they’re powering them off solar, whose maximum draw just happens to coincide with maximum solar production, that’s when the smoke will come…
(And that’s ignoring the ubiquitous DIY’d spur off the ring for the conservatory or extension, or the accidentally broken ring when someone replaced a wallbox and now they actually have two 24A radials on a 32A fuse - all far from uncommon in any UK house that ever had a home improvement nut living in it.)
To me, that looks like scaremongering from the fossil industry. The same as rhe claim that EV cars have not enough reach or often burn up, killing their passengers.
Or that wind power plants kill bats.
Or that with wind and solar instead of going full nuclear, the lights would go off in Germany.
Then you’re an idiot.
