Solar Backup

Solar is the only backup source that refills itself, and the one most often misunderstood. A roof full of panels does not keep the lights on during an outage unless the system was specifically built to do that, and most were not.

This section covers the part that does work: charging a power station from panels, sizing an array to the capacity you need in a day, portable panels against rigid ones, MPPT against PWM controllers, and what a winter sun angle does to the output you were counting on.

It also covers plug-in balcony solar, which is standard in Germany, newly legal in a growing list of US states, and still one of the least accurately documented topics in the field. Where a rule depends on jurisdiction, the jurisdiction is named and the statute is linked, because a Utah answer is not a Virginia answer and neither of them is a German one.