Can't wait for a barrage of Facebook posts from profiles with a Union Jack on the picture to suddenly tell me why these are bad and that instead we should continue to fellate oil industry CEOs.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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Since there are so many doubts here in this thread: They do work. We have millions installed here in Germany. They are not burning down houses. They are not electrocuting linemen. They can withstand storms and will not fall of your balcony if you're not a total idiot. They are cheap as fuck and will totally pay for themselves. You do not need some fancy plug, a normal Schuko is fine. Not sure if your british plugs are like Schukos. You will totally save a lot of money.
The "not burning linemen" is simple to do. Inverters on solar panels will already automatically turn off if there's no mains voltage detected, same can be implemented on plug in solar.
Our 3 pin mains plugs/sockets are superior to Schuko/Type F, you can't for example just shove a screwdriver into the holes on the socket the live pin on the plug goes into.
Schuko are also available with shutters (and in some countries, it is mandatory. Surprisingly, Germany is not one of them.)
All the power sockets in my house are shuttered Schuko (i.e. you can't 'just shove a screwdriver into the holes' - it requires simultaneous pressure on both pins to release the shutters.)
I have one since December that i had put together by myself because of the railing dimwnsions. 630W, very good orientarion, on a sunny day produces around 2,5-3kWh. And that is in the winter. It should pay itself in max 3 years. I can only recommend it.
A sunny day in UK, isn't that once every three years?
probably, but i dont live in the UK, should have written it
One big problem with plug in solar (or batteries) is that they deliver more power than should be available, behind the fuses.
With an 800W panel, an appliance could draw about 3.5A more before tripping the breaker, which can cause problems.
It's not very likely, but it's also not the case that governments are just reluctant for no reason. These things being installed poorly is also quite a problem, Germany has had more than a few smashing down from a balcony.
That's why the power you are allowed to install is limited. And also why they shut down without powet in the socket. The safety issue was a big concern and it took years of deliberation in Germany to get to that point. You can be assured that if something like that is allowed in Germany, it is pretty safe. The safety bodies are watching these issues with hawk's eyes, and these are professionals which know what they are doing and which move things into a good direction.
Honestly I am surprised why these things are not much more popular in any region where you need climatization in summer - they deliver power when it is most needed, and grids are at risk to fail.
Edit: Addition: If you are concerned, that the panels create more power than the wiring in your home can hold, you can reduce the power in the fuse to the grid. Say, you have a fuse to the grid that allows 32 Ampere, but the wiring holds only 24 Ampere. In addition, you install two balcony panels which have a total of 2000 Watt, or 2 Kilowatt.
Now, what you do: To be on the safe side without the panels, you reduce the fuse to the grid to 24 Ampere, so that the grid can never deliver more than the wiring in your home can sustain. Now, you factor in the panels: 2000 Watt at 230 Volt yield 2000 W / 230 V = 8.7 Ampere. Now, you subtract these from the 24 Ampere that your wiring can hold, and you get to 15.3 Ampere which you can put as the limit to your fuse to the grid. You can round that up to 16 Ampere (which is, by the way, the bog standard rating for household fuses in Germany).
The above number is equivelent to 3690 Watt. That should work, because nowadays the only appliance which draws a lot of power is the electric stove - nobody heats any more using pure electrical heaters since they are just too expensive.
The UK though has the added spice of the uniquely unsafe ringmain wiring standard, in which 24A cable in the wall is protected by a 32A breaker at the distribution panel. It's only "safe" if the load is evenly balanced around the ring, and the ring isn't broken (that's why UK plugs need fuses in them - to make it harder to severely unbalance the ring by pulling 32A out of a single socket, and equally to try and protect the appliance cable if a short or similar tries to.)
I've not sat down with a pen and paper to work out how having a generator somewhere on the ring affects things - presumably the authorities have...
It's probably okay, in the usual UK buildings, for the first 24h you'd be cooking the dampness out of the wall.
But doesn't the plug based amp mitigate the very problem you're worried about at the appliance level?
Isn't that what I wrote?
It's an imperfect mitigation, though - the typical fuse in the plug is 13A, so you only need two fully loaded sockets and you're already in trouble. Fortunately these days nobody is plugging in 3-bar electric fires or immersion heaters, and it's quite hard to find those kinds of loads outside the kitchen, so it's less of a practical issue, sure. (This is also why UK electrical code recommends that any load greater than 2kW should be given its own radial instead of being plugged into the ringmain. It's not unusual for the kitchen to be on a dedicated radial (or two) even if the rest of the house is on rings.)
(You could instantly make UK wiring a lot safer by just eliminating the over-rating of the breakers - i.e. if you have a 24A ring, put a 24A breaker on it. In the olden days that would probably have caused nuisance trips (3-bar fires and all,) but these days I doubt anyone would notice.)
Your implication in how you wrote was that the appliances are at risk. However the built in fuses in the plugs should mitigate that
One thing about the old standards is that, as you said previously, it might trip more with less efficient devices, however it was also a case that it wasn't trip switches, but fuse boxes with physical fuses. So it wasn't just a hassle, they needed replacement at expense, and a dependency on adequate stock.
Those days are gone, so yes, modern standards should be updated.
No, the implication was that the in-wall wiring was at risk.
The fuses in BS1363 plugs specifically are not intended to protect equipment, btw. They are there to mitigate the risks of ringmain in-wall wiring, and to protect the appliance cable from catching fire in a short. (That's why devices without a cable - e.g. wall-warts - don't have the fuse.)
Appliances always need their own internal fusing if they are to be protected. A 3A slow blowing fuse in a BS1363 plug offers no protection at all to modern electronics (and even that assumes the householder didn't just stick a 13A in because it was all they had to hand - the normal case.)
Yes, I understood your point. However, someone who has never seen a UK plug, or wasn't aware of the fuse would not. That's why I made it explicit. The main purpose may be to protect the wiring but my understanding is that the fuse does also protect the appliance, but yes, they should also have an internal fuse.
Are you saying the plug fuse offers no protection as they are already safer? I thought they help protect in case of a power surge or crossed wire. However it's a long time since I looked at UK power supplies, lol (actually Ireland, but it's the same, although I'm sure some regulations are different).
The fuse plug offers no protection because the average modern electronic (not electric - hairdryers etc.) appliance needs a much smaller fuse. 3A (the smallest UK plug fuse) is about 700W, at which point most things short of a kettle are already toasted. (That said, it's not really clear what "protecting the appliance" means - you can't push current, only pull - so if the appliance is drawing more than it should it's probably already toast. What you actually need to do is hopefully stop any components in a broken appliance which may go pop and start a fire doing so - and transistors and the like can go all twisted-firestarter at 10s of mA, let alone 3A at 240V.)
Let me try to reiterate more clearly: The purpose of the socket fuse is the same as the purpose of ringmain wiring: to allow saving copper on cheaper cable.
The ringmain has a big flaw - unbalanced loads can overload the in-wall wiring, because it uses cable rated less than the breaker protecting it. Fuses in plug sockets help make it harder to unbalance the ring (because the most you can draw from any one socket is 13A, no matter how many extensions you string together.) In "radial world", you have a 16A breaker on 16A wire, and all that happens if you trail extension leads together is you trip the breaker - so no need for a fuse in the plug.
Another flaw of the ringmain is that 32A breaker. If a device fails with a short, it can draw more than 7KW without the breaker tripping; that's enough not just to burn the cable, it'll weld the pins in the plug and socket. The fuse in the plug mitigates this - again, with radial wiring, no need, because the most you can draw is the 16A the socket is rated for without tripping the breaker.
The third helpful feature of the plug fuse was it allowed for cheaper appliance cable; think old-school lamps with essentially bell-wire cables. In the olden days in the UK there were dedicated lighting sockets (with round pins) for these, on a dedicated lighting circuit with a lower rated fuse in the distribution board - the house I grew up in still had a few of them - but with the move to BS1363 as standard, there needed to be a way to safely fit the new plug to those old lamps without burning the house down - the replaceable fuse allowed for this. It's not a coincidence that the other (than 13A) common fuse sizes are 2A and 5A - those were the ratings of the two different round-pin lighting plugs which the new plug & socket replaced.
None of these purposes of the plug fuse is actually protecting the appliance; they are all about protecting the ringmain and the cable. The fuses in the plug are simply too coarse (3A, 5A and 13A, of which even the lowest is far too much for modern electronics short of gaming-rigs,) and the fuses too slow-blowing.
800W is just 3.5A so probably can be managed
And also why they shut down without powet in the socket.
All solar systems do that, which is a good thing! It prevents lots of dead powerline workers. But that's not the only reason, solar converters need to "tune" their AC frequency to that of the grid. No grid? Nothing to match. No power.
It's also why, if you want a stand-alone system, you don't just need a really big breaker between your house and the grid, but also a different type of converter entirely.
prevents lots of dead powerline workers.
That's a persistent myth, and it drives me nuts every time I read it. If power line workers are working on something that is supposed to be dead, they treat it as live and work it with hot sticks until they have bonded all the phases together and to ground. This is done both at the point of disconnect and where the work is actually being done.
Even if they didn't do this, your little inverter is trying to backfeed the entire grid. The load it sees is indistinguishable from a dead short. Your inverter would overload and trip offline, even if it wasn't watching the grid voltage and frequency.
There just isn't a special risk to power line workers.
Hmmm, I'm not an electrical engineer, and really not a line worker, but I do workplace safety for a living. I was sure you're wrong, but it is indeed not listed anywhere in the sector's risk inventory here. I stand very corrected.
There is a generic "Make the site safe from both ends" risk mitigation though, and it makes sense that you take the same measures no matter what the source of the potential risk. Doesn't matter if the cause is "all the solar panels" or "Some absolutely moron did things wrong several decades ago" or just plain "shit broke yo".
There is a generic βMake the site safe from both endsβ risk mitigation though,
There is, indeed. One of the "sides" they have to consider is the possibility of a live line coming into contact with the disconnected line that they are currently working on. Lines crisscross frequently, and in the aftermath of a storm, a downed wire on one line could bring it into contact with and inadvertently energize another line.
The steps they take to mitigate the risk of an entire neighborhood worth of power being dumped onto the line they are working is more than adequate to mitigate the risk of backfed solar: They deliberately bond all phases together on the dead line, so any fault is shunted through the short and away from the workers.
I'm saying that the "risks" of backfed solar are far less than the risks that they already mitigate, and certainly do not justify keeping plugin solar off the grid.
(I am not saying that backfeed inverters don't need to mitigate the risk as well; I am saying that mitigation at the device level is one of several redundant safety measures.)
more than a few smashing down from a balcony.
Then again, it is cultural tradition to let things fall of a balcony in Germany.
They are cool, although there are risk connected to using them. In some cases an appliance can draw more power than the circuit is rated for without tripping a circuit breaker.
They are not legal in Norway, and with all houses being made out of wood it makes sense, but I guess the risk in UK or Germany is lower.
Technically they're "not illegal" in Norway if installed on a separate breaker. It's not as easy as in Germany, but it's possible.
They also can pose a risk for linemen and electricians. A circuit can remain powered even if the breaker or load break switch is disconnected. That is, unless they have a feature which disables power output automatically when grid power is lost?
A circuit can remain powered even if the breaker or load break switch is disconnected.
They are specifically designed so that this does not happen.
BTW part of the UKs standards for household wiring comes from a time where the idea was to heat with electricity from nuclear power. Which is one reason why each appliance also has an extra fuse in their respective wall plug - not a bad design.
That is not why UK plugs have a fuse in them. UK plugs have a fuse in them because the wiring standards date from a time when the UK was trying to save money and copper because of the war, so they allow for the fuse in the breaker panel to be higher rated than the actual wiring in the wall.
The fuse in the plug is to prevent a broken device, or overloaded power strip, drawing the full current the breaker will allow, causing the in-wall wiring and/or appliance cables to burn.
It's a terrible design. [ETA: Ringmains/UK domestic electrical distribution are a terrible design, I mean. The BS1363 plug/socket is a nice design driven by compensating for that.]
The UK plug is one of the best around. It's only downside is that it's chunky. By putting the fuse in the plug, the protection can be customised to what is attached.
It also is designed to be almost impossible to fall out of a wall socket. As well as mandating the pin connection order and safety shielding. The sockets are also gated, stopping children sticking stuff into them.
Even internally they are well designed. The live wire is the weakest link. If pulled, that will tend to fail first. It will, however be held internally by the neutral and earth wires. The earth will be the last to fail.
The side entry also means that the plug locks into place when the cable is pulled. If the plug or socket fails catastrophically, the earth pin will be the last to pull loose.
Itβs only downside is that itβs chunky.
Nuh-uh - it can land pointy-side up, that's a big downside for someone as clumsy as I am.
I would call that a feature! It means we can use them as caltrops if the French ever invade!
/s
You might even stand a chance against the Danish!
The french we can handle. The Danes... they fall in the same category as the Canadians, or the Scots. You don't pick a fight with them. If you must fight them, you run away throwing gold at them.
Based on my electrical engineering course the UK has one of the weirdest wiring standards in the world, having some of the shittiest baseline wiring and subsiquently trying to make up for it with some of the most stringent regulations around protection devices such as RCDs and additional fuses.
They are also weirdly patriotic about their plugs. Suggesting that BS1363 was driven by necessity of poor wiring standards rather than being a gift from God to her chosen people is tantamount to standing in the street and pissing on the Union Jack.
(Source: Am British. Well, was. BS1363 plugs are very nice. But honestly, Schuko is fine as well. They're just plugs.)
Wouldn't it be easier to have several fuses at the breaker panel?
Easier, but more expensive. The driver for the ringmain system was to save money (& copper) by using less & cheaper cable in the walls than an equivalent radial layout (as used everywhere else in the world.) It has half as many fuses and uses less wire than radials, with the only downsides being risk of fire and some horrible undetectable failure modes - what's not to love?
(e.g. Undetectable failure: if there is a break in the cable in the wall (bad DIY, say,) everything still works - because although you broke the ring, the other end of each half is still connected, and all your appliances still work. So now you have two 24A radials in your walls, connected to a 32A breaker, and nothing stopping one of those cables being overloaded (if the break is nearer one end than the middle, it's practically guaranteed that the longer half is overloaded.) Horrible design.)
Oh... That's... Not goodπ
All of these "balkonkraftwerke", as they are called in germany, are grid bound, meaning they instantly disconnect and stop working without the grid. There is zero danger to them.
Wait, how do these things work with the electrical grid in my house? I mean I understand how I can use the wires in my house to consume electricity, but how does it work when plugging in something that generates electricity?
Whether current is flowing into an appliance or into the grid depends on which of the two has the highest voltage at any given time. Current is the result of a voltage difference in a closed loop.
These batteries have a built-in inverter. The inverter can produce an output voltage. The electricity grid uses AC which means the voltage is not constant but rather always changing in a sine pattern. To control the current, the inverter can follow the sine pattern and increase amplitude to control an outgoing current, or decrease it to control an incoming current.
By the way, in many cases you don't want to power the grid. So these batteries usually work together with a sensor placed at your electricity meter. That way they can induce just the right amount of current to power your home appliances without sending something back to the grid.
the same way it works when they connect a new generator to the grid, or solar panels on your roof
thereβs nothing directional about a power point: itβs just copper wire
Yea but surely electricity does not just flow from my house to the grid, just like that? Also what if I plug in something like a solar panel, but I have no consumption on my own electricity? Surely it doesn't just flow into the grid, i.e. out of my house? Or does it?
That's what net metering is.
i know sometimes it does⦠it can even make your meter turn in reverse!
itβs pretty common for rooftop solar to supply the grid if youβre not using all their capacity
Okay haha, I did not know that. I wonder if that works where I am (Denmark). Not sure if we have regulation when it comes to this stuff.
Unfortunately there is directionality when it comes to the protection. I'd love to see a fault study of a house with a bunch of these on different circuits.
The circuits should have breakers.
Yes but those breakers provide only over current protection which is great for a radial system but breaks down once you add generation on various feeders.