Widow Maker

[SUNRAY]

I'm a bit surprised that with all the mention, in this thread, of the dangers and problems associated with feeding power on to the grid that no one has yet mentioned that this is now an extremely common occurance with all the solar panels etc that have been installed recently.

I'm amazed the genny would keep running when simply connected to the grid as has been suggested might happen.

Surely the majority of households in the blackout area will have load connected to the supply, and your attempt to backfeed your individual property without isolating the supply would result in the genny seeing a huge load and simply stalling out or blowing a fuse?

Can anyone explain why that wouldnt be the case?

What you describe could very well be the case, one such installtion on a local farm was causing lots of such issues until I demonstrated switching off the main switch. Then later installing a changeover switch to do away with the widow maker.

 

[JohnW2]

I'm a bit surprised that with all the mention, in this thread, of the dangers and problems associated with feeding power on to the grid that no one has yet mentioned that this is now an extremely common occurance with all the solar panels etc that have been installed recently.

In that regard, I've often wondered how 'totally foolproof' all the PV etc. systems are - i.e. how certain one can be that they will never try to feed power into a seemingly 'dead' network.

Kind Regards, John.

 

[SUNRAY]

I'm a bit surprised that with all the mention, in this thread, of the dangers and problems associated with feeding power on to the grid that no one has yet mentioned that this is now an extremely common occurance with all the solar panels etc that have been installed recently.

In that regard, I've often wondered how 'totally foolproof' all the PV etc. systems are - i.e. how certain one can be that they will never try to feed power into a seemingly 'dead' network.

Kind Regards, John.

Ooops missed that

 

[SimonH2]

In that regard, I've often wondered how 'totally foolproof' all the PV etc. systems are - i.e. how certain one can be that they will never try to feed power into a seemingly 'dead' network.

I think the answer is ... you cannot be certain.

It will be interesting to see if we start to see any incidents related to embedded generation. Even if the inverter shuts down on loss of mains, that doesn't mean it can't still put dangerous voltages onto it's terminals. So I could imagine someone without too much knowledge knocking off the main switch and thinking "I'm OK, the whole house is dead" - only to find the painful way that there's some high DC voltage that's leaked across the PV inverter.