Community Q&A

Only indirectly, through your home's circuits. It is also important to note that Level 2 EV charging draws between 7 and 10 kW. You would need twenty balcony systems to charge a car from panels alone, way beyond the 1,200 W that most states' plug-in solar laws allow. What it does is reduce the cost of charging. If you charge during daylight hours, your kit's output offsets part of what the charger pulls from the grid. Daytime EV charging is a great reason to make a second pan

In most states, yes. Plug-in solar is not banned anywhere in the United States. A handful of states have passed laws that explicitly permit it and set out how it works. In most of the rest there is simply no framework either way, which is a gray area rather than a prohibition. We ship to 47 states, and members buy and install in states with no law on the books. The three exceptions are New York, Maine and Vermont, where the requirement is whole-system certification rather tha

Because we sell the hardware at cost, and selling at cost means we cannot afford to sit on a warehouse full of it. We make no margin on kits. Every panel we hold is money not doing anything, and unlike a retailer we have no markup to fund a deep cushion. So we order in bulk against what we expect demand to be, and when demand runs ahead of that estimate, we run out before the next shipment lands. The timing is the hard part. Lead times from order to warehouse run up to four m

No. A plug-in solar system will not power your home during a grid outage. Plug-in solar is a small solar system, usually one or two panels and a microinverter, that plugs into a standard outlet rather than being wired into your electrical panel. The microinverter shuts down the moment it does not sense grid power, and it will not energize your circuits until the grid returns. This is deliberate. It protects you when you touch the prongs after unplugging the inverter cord and

It depends on whether your utility charges different rates at different times of day. Plug-in solar without a battery offsets whatever your home is drawing while the sun is up, and anything beyond that goes to the grid uncompensated. A battery stores the surplus so you can use it in the evening, which is worth more if evening electricity costs more than daytime electricity where you live. On a flat rate, the battery allows you to install more plug-in solar because you can sav

Write to your state legislator, then do the three things that matter more. Whether you may plug a solar panel into your own outlet is decided state by state, and bills succeed when a legislator can see that people at home care and that the technical objections have answers. A single letter rarely does that. What does: find out whether a bill already exists in your state and who sponsored it, so your message lands on someone already invested. Bring other people, because ten co

Buy the second panel only if you have significant continuous daytime electrical loads. Plug-in solar reduces your bill by offsetting electricity you are using at the moment the sun is shining. Unless it includes a battery, it does not bank the surplus. A single 180W panel produces roughly what a fridge, a router, a computer and standby loads draw during the day, so most households absorb all of it. A second panel takes you to 360W, and that extra output only saves you money i

You need a dedicated circuit once your plug-in solar goes beyond roughly 400W. For why a single kit tops out at 360W in the first place, see our guide: Why our plug-in solar kits max out at 360W. Why doesn't the breaker just protect me? Because it may not "see" the current. A breaker trips on current flowing through it from the panel. Solar feeding in downstream adds current to the circuit's wiring without passing through the breaker, so as systems get larger the breaker sto

The angle at which your panel faces the sun matters a lot, and so does whether anything shades it. Which way up you hang the panel makes no difference: portrait or landscape, the cells receive the same light, and the choice is usually decided by your space constraints or the length of your mounting brackets rather than by performance. One thing to watch if you have two panels: they share a single microinverter input in parallel, so mounting them at noticeably different angles

Only if the voltage and wattage match. The small microinverter in our balcony kits has a single input port, so a second panel connects in parallel through a Y cable. Parallel connection requires the two panels to run at substantially the same voltage and be of roughly the same size. Our 180W panels have a maximum power voltage of about 41.8V. Camping and portable panels are typically 18 to 20V, often described as 12V panels because they are meant to charge a 12V battery. Wiri

You can, and some members do, but the panels are not specifically designed for it. Plug-in solar panels have a light aluminum frame intended for railings, walls and ground mounts, not the heavier frame that roof-rated panels carry to handle wind and snow loading. That makes a shed, garage or other low outbuilding a reasonable place to try it and a house roof a poor one. Height changes both the wind load and the consequences of getting it wrong, and anything on a dwelling roof

Because those three states require whole-system certification, and our kits do not carry it yet. A plug-in solar kit is assembled from separately certified parts: panels and a microinverter that plug into a standard outlet. Our components are individually certified, but what New York, Maine and Vermont ask for is different: certification of the assembled system as a single unit, under UL 3700 or a comparable standard. Until our kit holds that, we will not ship there. We ship

Yes, a GFCI is required for any outdoor installation. Plug-in solar is almost always installed outdoors on a balcony, patio, fence or roof, and outdoor receptacles have required ground-fault circuit interrupter protection under the National Electrical Code for decades. This is not specific to solar. Any outdoor outlet should have it. If the outlet you plan to use is not GFCI-protected, you have two options: replace the receptacle with a GFCI receptacle, or fit a GFCI breaker

Lead with what you are not doing. Plug-in solar is one or two panels and a microinverter that plug into an existing outlet, so nothing is drilled, nothing is wired into the building, and nothing is permanent. Most landlord objections assume a rooftop installation and evaporate once that picture is corrected. The three questions you will actually get are whether anything is being attached to the structure, who is liable if something goes wrong, and whether it can be removed at

Yes. Our panels use standard MC4 connectors, the same fitting the rest of the solar industry uses, so they will connect to most portable power stations either directly or through an adapter cable. In that arrangement, you do not use the microinverter that came with the kit. The microinverter exists to feed household AC into an outlet; a power station wants raw DC from the panels. Check your power station's solar input range before buying. The panel's figures (around 40 V for

It flows back to the grid. If your plug-in solar system generates more than your home is consuming at that moment, the surplus leaves your property. In most cases that energy is used by nearby homes and displaces generation from another source, so it is not wasted in a physical sense. Financially, it usually is. Compensation for exported electricity requires a net metering or interconnection agreement with your utility, and most plug-in solar owners do not have one. The pract

Yes. The microinverter connects to your Wi-Fi and reports to a phone app, showing live output in watts and a production curve you can look back over by day, month and year. Most members check it obsessively for the first fortnight and then settle down. Understand what it is measuring: the app sits on the inverter, so it knows exactly what the panels produced and nothing else. It has no visibility into what your house was drawing at the same moment. That means it cannot tell y

Mostly because of what happens to the hardware before it reaches you, not because of anything a US state has done. In Germany, a kit of panels and a microinverter that plugs into an ordinary socket is a mature consumer product, sold in ordinary shops at ordinary retail prices. A German household pays as little as $0.45 per watt. In the United States the figure is several times that. Almost none of that gap is manufacturing. The panel is broadly the same panel. What differs is

We believe zero export only makes sense in combination with a battery, to optimize for self-consumption. A zero-export device stops your plug-in solar system from sending surplus electricity to the grid. That surplus arises whenever the panels out-produce whatever the house is drawing at that moment. Without a battery, the only way to stop that surplus leaving is to stop generating it, so the device throttles the panels back. You do not save more; you simply produce less. Wit