Solar Balconies Take Europe by Storm(hackaday.com)
61 pointsby lxm8 hours ago9 comments
  • adrianN6 hours ago
    I have 2kW of panels on my balcony and 4kWh of batteries. I'm happy with the setup. I expect it to pay for itself in just a few years. The only thing I wish it had is open APIs to control the inverter and the batteries, ideally over bluetooth, so that I'm not forced to use an app.
    • effdee5 hours ago
      If port 502/TCP is open you can probably access it via Modbus protocol. Implementing a Modbus client is trivial.

      My rebranded Fox ESS hardware has it enabled and there's even official documentation of the so-called "registers".

    • herbst3 hours ago
      I use victron devices and a litime battery + an esp32 of your choice and some LLM magic to read and relay data from Bluetooth to web.

      For both victron and litime plenty of examples exist, including home assistant integrations.

    • xigurat2 hours ago
      Solakon One has a quite decent API you can control without cloud being involved...
  • inejge3 hours ago
    Hehe "Balkonkraftwerk", available from Lidl for €250 (see TFA). This makes me unreasonably happy for some reason.
  • ChrisArchitect5 hours ago
    Related:

    Iran war sparks renewables boom as Europeans rush to buy solar, heat pumps, EVs

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601310

  • testing223217 hours ago
    I really hope these become legal in Canada.

    Right now it seems Utah is the only jurisdiction in North America where they are

  • bamboozled6 hours ago
    The only negative thing I feel about all of this is that we're doing now. Once the glaciers are farked, the snow is going and the mass die offs are started. Better late than never they say, but why the hell didn't we just invest in this in the 1990s?
    • SoftTalker6 hours ago
      Solar panels were expensive and not very efficient then.
      • bamboozled5 hours ago
        Do you think more investment / subsidies weren't possible over the last few decades?
        • Tade0an hour ago
          They were and Germany was actually going in that direction, but it took the manufacturing scale of China to create an incentive to introduce the hundreds of minor changes necessary to get costs down.
    • GoToRO4 hours ago
      Lobby from the other people selling energy: the not green type. They have the money, the lawyers, the ads, everything. Balcony solar power is only allowed now due to energy shortage.
    • thebeardredis5 hours ago
      [dead]
    • onetokeoverthe6 hours ago
      [dead]
  • thebeardredis5 hours ago
    [dead]
  • mudil5 hours ago
    Is this supposed to be a revolutionary European invention?
    • WithinReason4 hours ago
      "In 1839, the ability of some materials to create an electrical charge from light exposure was first observed by the French physicist Edmond Becquerel"

      So yes

    • widdershins4 hours ago
      Neither the title nor the article implied so.
  • SoftTalker7 hours ago
    > They come with small inverters to convert the DC output of the solar panels into AC power, which plug straight into an existing home power socket.

    Hopefully these inverters are smart enough to cut the feed if the AC mains power goes out, to avoid backfeeding utility lines that may be under repair.

    • jacquesm5 hours ago
      You can't buy an inverter that is certified that doesn't do this. As well as a whole raft of other safety measures and grid quality measures besides.

      See for instance:

      https://www.netbeheernederland.nl/sites/default/files/2024-0...

      Every region has their own set of rules which requires inverter manufacturers to have a bunch of different settings depending on where the inverter is installed.

    • couchand6 hours ago
      Fortunately they do, and in fact the article makes that clear. +1 for reading to the end of the paragraph that was quoted.
    • InvisibleUp6 hours ago
      Yes. Any system that’s UL 3700 (or more generally IEEE 1547 / UL 1741) compliant mandates anti-islanding by shutting off the power within two seconds of grid loss.
    • telotortium6 hours ago
      I think this is why they're supposed to be limited to 800 W, but is that enough to avoid serious danger to utility workers when a whole apartment building or neighborhood is full of these?
      • namibj5 hours ago
        Central Europe has more buried electrical systems and nothing is safe until it's actively grounded so hard it'll arc flash the idiot who broke you LOTO before you even feel a clear tingle.

        The 800W is about grid management impact limitation to levels that do not warrant the utility imposing any "but we first have to upgrade the substation before we can get you your local transformer with the higher speed EV charging and McMansion winter full heat pump setup" delays before you are allowed to turn it on/grid-tie it.

      • adrianN5 hours ago
        They are limited to prevent fires. They sit behind the breakers so any power they feed in allows more current on the cables before the breakers trip.