Speaker A
Plug in solar. Plug in solar. Plug in solar. People think of plug-in solar as a new system.
Electrician Cory Mac investigates the safety and practicality of plug-in solar systems, exploring real installations in Germany and testing the technology himself.
Key Takeaways
- Plug-in solar systems are simpler to install but face skepticism due to safety concerns.
- Germany’s extensive use of plug-in solar provides valuable insights into its real-world safety and effectiveness.
- The 800W limit per meter socket is a critical safety regulation for plug-in solar systems.
- DIY installation of plug-in solar can be safer by avoiding consumer unit interference.
- Plug-in solar can offer significant cost savings and broaden access to solar technology.
What the video covers
- Cory Mac, an experienced electrician, explores the concept and safety concerns of plug-in solar systems.
- He travels to Germany, where over half a million plug-in solar systems are installed, to see real-world applications.
- The video compares UK and German electrical standards and installation practices for plug-in solar.
- Cory interviews users and installers to address common fears about shock hazards and fire risks.
- He demonstrates how plug-in solar systems connect directly to household sockets and explains the 800W power limit.
- The video discusses the benefits of plug-in solar, including cost savings and easier DIY installation.
- Cory tests a plug-in battery system at his own home to evaluate its performance and safety.
- He highlights differences in electrical infrastructure between the UK and Germany that affect plug-in solar adoption.
- The video addresses myths and misinformation spread by industry resistance and sponsors.
- Overall, Cory aims to separate fact from fiction and provide an informed perspective on plug-in solar technology.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Plug-in Solar and Safety Concerns
- 00:46Cory’s Background and Investigation Goals
- 02:12Traveling to Germany and Meeting Local Users
- 03:02Examining Real Plug-in Solar Installations
- 03:53Industry Skepticism and Sponsor Interactions
- 04:40Comparing UK and German Electrical Systems
- 05:39Technical Details and Power Limits
- 06:31User Experiences and Safety Records
- 07:29Benefits and Cost Savings of Plug-in Solar
- 09:29Testing and Final Thoughts on Safety and Effectiveness
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
What if somebody whips the plug out and then touches the end? Are they going to get a shock?
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It's like [music] letting something go which hasn't fully been tried and tested. I just don't feel like we're made for it.
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Here's how to install a plug-in battery system. First, you get your plug. You plug it into the battery. Then [music] you plug it in.
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Done. And it really is that simple. And that's one of the reasons why these [music] things are so controversial.
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Normally, solar goes via the consumer unit and is connected by a qualified electrician. Plug-in solar goes straight into your plug socket. I asked thousands [music] of electricians what they think about this coming to the UK and heard the same common concerns and rumors
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echoed. But are they really dangerous? Let's see for ourselves. My name's Cory and I've been an electrician for over 10 years and install solar. But I want to find out for myself, [music] is plug-in solar genuinely dangerous or is the resistance
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simply coming from an electrical industry trying to protect itself? So rather than standing here in the UK arguing about what might happen, I'm going to Germany to see what's actually happening. Germany already has over half a million of these installed. I'm going
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to visit some real established installations, speak to the people using them, and put all the questions, concerns, and safety arguments to the people who have been living with this technology for years. I've also picked up a system which I'm going to be
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fitting at my house so that I can test it to its limits and separate fact from fiction. It's only now that I've arrived in Germany am I suddenly realizing I'm literally about to meet up with a man that I've met on the internet who I've
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not even seen a picture of. I know nothing about and I've not told anyone where I'm going. I wanted first of all to blend in with the Germans and secondly to have some form of self-defense. I have a friend who works
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in a prison. He said that he regularly sees toothbrushes being used as weapons. I'll be honest, I can't really see how, but I'm hoping that in the heat of the moment, if a need arises, [music] you know, adrenaline will just make it
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work. He's picking me up in a Tesla, which I feel like is a little bit less strange a danger than a white van. So, I think that's a good thing.
Speaker A
Hey. Hi. How's it going? Meet Marcus. Fortunately for all of us, he didn't have to suffer a bristly death by [music] Colgate. And now I know his name, we're technically friends. So, my new German friend is going to take me to
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three insul. Here's the first one. This is just the four panels that are installed on the roof. Yeah.
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And we have the plug-in battery from Anchor. It really is just it's just under there plugged in and it is just on your normal Yeah. normal household outlet.
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And is that outlet shared with anything else or is it just um for that case? No. This is a specific line that goes down to the meter board.
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You can also do it on a shared socket. That's not a problem. Yeah. Is that common to have shared sockets?
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Um yeah. All of the rests installed here are shared via one or two actually.
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And if you wanted to, could I put it into that one? Yeah, sure. Is it one per house or?
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Uh, one per meter. One per meter. Right. Okay. Yeah. The channel takes me to some weird places, but I've got to be honest.
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Lying on the floor of a German shed wasn't on my bingo card. It is literally sitting encased in wood and it is just plugged in to a normal socket. And then you've got the panels on the roof just coming back and plugged
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into that. And it's the same requirements as the UK, it seems, in that you've got to have 800 W per meter.
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So interesting. I'll be honest, at this point I'm pretty skeptical. And that's because I had quite a few brands reach out to me offering to sponsor plug-in solar content, but they wanted me to repeat the same key [music] bits of
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information. To all of them, I said no, because there's no way that that can be safe. [music] Surely taking solar panels and just plugging them into a socket is not safe. Until Anchor reached out and [music] said, "Okay, well, if you're
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worried, why don't you investigate it and publish your findings?" That's [music] confidence that I like. So, it's in the contract now. We're going to be posting the good, the bad, and the ugly on what we [music] think of these
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systems. Is it possible to get a uh cafe? Yeah, sure. I think that would cool me down nicely.
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Apparently, hot drinks do actually cool you down. Is there another good German word I should learn? Sam beer.
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Beer. Oh, wait. I know that one. Beer. Oh, it's the same word. That's okay then.
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What's Please? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's it. I don't want Not now. I'm just [laughter] practicing.
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I'm just practicing. Wow. Oh. To have a proper nice working height consuming it like this. This just does not happen in the UK.
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And we have done second floor as well with sink. Oh, wow. You have so many circuits. Oh my gosh. I'm not kidding. A house this size in England could quite easily just be that.
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You do you still do loops, right? I don't do them. I'm not doing rings, but people are.
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So, one thing that people are very worried about is that in the UK, we don't have this. We don't have tons and tons of circuits. We generally have rings.
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We normally also don't have that. That's a newer installation. We just have done eight or 10 years ago. So, that's an upgraded version. You still are allowed to put it on old installations with old cables and old securities where you just
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have one circuit breaker for say the half house. Is it common that plug-in solar would go on its own breaker?
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No. No. So that doesn't you can do with the 800 watt limit. You are allowed to connect it everywhere.
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So we actually have the same thing here in the UK as what they have in Germany.
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So our plug-in systems are going to be limited to 800 W. But what does that actually look like once it's running?
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About 200 watts. About 2 kilowatt. About 800 watts. About 3 kW. So if you have an appliance or your house in general pull more than 800 W. It doesn't mean that your system will stop working. It just means that
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that first 800 W will be covered by the system and then the rest of it will have to come in from the grid. I've had a few people say, "Yeah, but in Germany you would have one breaker for one socket."
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No, normally not. Not at all. That's cool. The solar just connected to the Shelly P and that just links to the Anchor through the app.
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Yeah. Right. Okay. Cool. You can use the Anchor smart meter as well, but here the Shelly was installed so we can just connect connect it to that. Great.
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Seeing that they still have got these legacy systems installed and has it been an issue yet like nuisance dripping or anything? No. Have you heard of any issues? Heard of any fires? Anything like that?
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No, nothing. So, there's a fear that people are going to be lashing these systems [music] in, throwing them onto roofs and balconies and doing a really bad job. This one is [music] actually a DIY install. And I have to say, it's to
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a better standard than some of the professional installs I've come across. And thinking about it, it's not like DIYers have ever been afraid of having a go at normal solar anyways. So, I don't really see how this is going to be much
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different. If anything, [music] this system is going to prevent DIYers from having to go into the consumer unit, which is surely going to be safer. So, how do these systems actually save you money? What are the benefits of them?
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I'll explain. If you have your consumption over time, consumption is what you're actually using within your property. It usually looks something like this. You have your base loads at nighttime. Base loads being basically like your fridge, your internet router,
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maybe bathroom fans, the things that kind of on all the time. Most houses is about between 2 and 400 watts thereabouts.
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generation. It then drops back down again in the daytime just in time for you to get home from work, put the kettle on, cook your dinner, you have another little spike, and then it drops back down again to your base loads for
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the night time. So you have these sort of two bumps in the morning and in the evening. Now the trouble is everyone is using electricity in that window, which means it's more expensive. So on average between the windows here and here you
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can get electricity for about 1/3 of what it costs in that daytime period. So if you're able to get access to one of those tariffs, what you can do is you can set a battery to charge from the
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grid on that cheaper tariff. So you can charge it at nighttime and then that will come down, stop charging, and then again in the evening window start charging again. And what that does is it negates the need for you to take power
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from the grid on these spikes here so that you are effectively never using the peak rate electricity. So what that would look like in the real world is if you're using let's say 10 kwatt hours per day over a month 300 kwatt hours.
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Let's say your electricity bill is 30 p per kilowatt hour. That is about 90 per month. If you were able to use your nighttime tariff, that would reduce your bill to30 per month, saving£60 a month with just a battery. So, that's a really
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cool way that you can save electricity. If you've got a smart battery like the Ankos Solar Bank 4, you'll be able to do things like smart charging on an agile tariff. So, sometimes you're even paid to charge that electricity and that'll
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all be managed for you within the app. We've literally just stepped outside of the house and already I'm being very careful cuz I [music] think the privacy laws here with filming are pretty serious. But you got plug-in solar on
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the balcony behind me. You got plug-in solar on that house. As I'm walking past this garage here, I see on the roof what looks like plug-in. I'm just going to go and knock and ask if we can film inside.
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Let's have another look at another system. How does that work though? Is their garage go back to their electrical meter?
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Yeah. Okay. So, it is wired back. And both of those Yeah, I guess they're both plug-in solar. [music] Yeah, they are.
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Wow. It is everywhere. Yeah. So, you've got them on this balcony here, [music] which I'm not going to unblur. And then a lot of these balconies here, instead of fly screens, [music] it looks like they've got a flexible solar panel, which I guess is
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going to be plugged into plug-in solar. [music] Hello. So, you got a similar setup here. Panels just sort of placed onto the roof and then plugged into the battery somewhere.
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Yeah. Where abouts is the battery? There are batteries just on the right corner here.
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So, here we have it. Another one in the wild. So, this is a solar bank 3 pro.
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And then you got your strings coming back. And then it is just plugged into this socket here.
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Plugged into here. Had any issues with it? Nope. Nothing. So we would Would you say it's pretty much [music] fit and forget?
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Yeah, for sure. But what about temperature? Well, it's 37° in Frankfurt right now and no overheating, no issues, and the battery is protected. If it's any time near the limited temperature of of the manufacturer, it just goes out.
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So yeah, cool. So there's still the normal solar system available with 7.37 kW up on that on on the main house.
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And is that any issues? Do they fight each other or conflict? No, no, nothing.
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So you have that in addition to this? Yeah, the the balcony comes afterwards. So this was installed first and then this comes as an addition because we saw it brings a major benefit to have four more panels available that are facing
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the sun the whole day. Is that a third party inverter or is that inverter anchor?
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Uh that's an SMA inverter. So there's no issues there. It's no nothing. They are also not not communicating with each other. That all rely on hot meters.
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Yeah. The size and scale of the electrical cabinets that they have here versus the consume units that we cram into cupboards inside of the UK doesn't even compare. It's not even in the same ballpark. Circuit by circuit level
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protection on a lot of houses here. It's crazy. Whilst the German electrical installs are [music] pretty mental and are absolutely massive, from what I've seen so far, [music] the safety devices, the earthing systems, and the methods of protection, a lot of it is all under the
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same European norm regulations as we have in the UK. And even in most cases, they're using the same brands as what we use here in the UK. If you have solar, that can be balcony solar, that can be
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plug-in solar, that can be any solar, the generation generally happens something like this. you tend to generate power when the sun comes up. It kind of peaks in the daytime around midday and then it dips back off again.
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The trouble is, as we mentioned, your usage is over here. So, you're actually not able to use that power most of the time. Let's say your base loads sit around here. All of that is just being sold to the grid, but it's being sold to
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the grid at a lower rate than what you're going to be buying it for later on in the day or earlier in the morning.
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In comes your battery. You can store this power here and use it to fill these gaps here and here. Or even better, you can mix both of these systems. What I often do for my customers is I'll set
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their batteries to charge at nighttime on that cheap tariff. I will then leave just enough for them to use in the evening so that they're never consuming from the grid and then they sell their excess solar in the daytime for 12p. So
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they're buying at night for 7, they're selling in the day for 12. So you can make even more money a lot quicker when you have a battery in your system. The final German install for us to look at
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[music] is actually a balcony solar system. We have two panels of 420 W each um connected to an 800 W inverter without any battery storage, just plain to the grid.
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So, they're just sort of temporarily suspended then on these on these clips here and then that's it. So, there's you don't really have to do much in the way of install.
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No, they are just hanging with uh metal strips. You can see the stats later on.
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I can give you a picture of that. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, if we can get that later.
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Actually, now it's in the shading. Yeah, but they are still generating a small amount of power. So, at the moment, we still have 400 W.
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Oh, so you've got a micro inverter. Yeah. Oh, cool. So, you literally have the plug the panels plugged into this.
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Yes. This micro inverter and that goes straight in this socket to that plug socket there. That is genius.
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Yeah, that's the easiest way of doing it. So, I still imagined for some reason the inverter would be a bit like the box but without the battery built in, but it's it's just this small.
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Wow. That is literally it. Two panels suspended on to the railings. Going back to that, back to a plug socket which took you how long to install?
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Including hanging the panels around about 4 hours roughly. What's your annual generation from these two? Bearing in mind you got a massive tree there.
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Yeah. So within the shading and everything in general 1 megawatt hour for the complete installation since upgoing. So since uh May 202 23 it's generated already 1 mega 1 megawatt hour at your unit right that's like three or 400 that you've saved already
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from this system. Yeah. And the system cost was just €380. So already then the system is free now.
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So you're still at the start. So the thing is I own a solar installation business. So really I should be worried about this. This everyone is telling me is [music] going to be bad for business for me. But I see
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it differently. Okay. The corner of the market that live in apartment blocks were never accessible for me. Like you can't install solar [music] for these people because they've got a tiny little roof and how are you going to divide
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that power across a whole apartment block? Whereas what this does do is it enables people that weren't previously [music] able to have access to renewable energy, access to cheaper bills and renewable energy. So I think that's awesome. Everyone's winning. It's not
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just about making money. If you're passionate about solar install and [music] what you do, then it's not just about making money anyway. But that being said, I think this could honestly open up a whole corner of the market for
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electrical [music] installers because although they might be much much easier than a traditional solar panel to fit, there are still going to be I think a lot of people out there [music] that aren't confident doing it. The actual
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act of mounting them on the balconies as well as checking the electrical installation that is plugging into it to [music] make sure it's safe. I guess time will tell really though, won't it?
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Oh, cool. You got the old screw fuses. Yeah, that's for the um water heater. So do you have threephase pretty much every property in Germany?
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Yes. So we do have three phases. This one is split with phase one, phase two, phase three.
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So you see a bit of a load sharing. So again here you've got your type A RC RCCB or RCD I can't quite see. 40 amp and 30 milliamp there protecting that bank and that is doing that whole bank. Have
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you had any nuisance dripping or any issues with it? Nothing. No. And this is my place.
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So, where's your smart meter? That is just this. [laughter] That's your smart meter. That's an infrared receiver and sender and it communicates with the infrared connection of the device.
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That's crazy. I've never seen that before. No. And this does your uh 15inute metering.
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Yes. So, this has got an infrared reader on it. It's reading the beeping off of your meter there.
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Yeah, that's so cool. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. I appreciate it. You're welcome.
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And thank you so much for not murdering me. I genuinely that that that means a lot.
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Thank you very much. Bye. I really appreciate it, man. You too. Take care. Right, let's get this thing tested. So, let's investigate some of the safety concerns that people have raised with these systems. So, concern number one that people have raised is
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the issue of RCD trip times. So in the UK and throughout a lot of the world, [music] if you were to touch an exposed live conductor, you want that power to trip in under 300 milliseconds. We achieve that with something called an
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RCD. So it will cut the power within 300 milliseconds [music] stopping fibrillation of your heart, keeping you alive and well. But the concern that people have is if you've got a system like this plugged into a socket, is [music] this going to switch
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off within 300 milliseconds? Now, the data sheet says it will, but we're not going to just trust the data sheet.
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We're actually going to test it for ourselves. So, I've got a QC [music] KT66DL.
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It is an insanely accurate multiunctional test meter. I use that at work every single day and it's calibrated. [music] We're going to plug into the socket next to it and we're going to conduct a trip test to see how quickly the power cuts
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[music] and see if this affects it. So, we'll set it to the type of RCD that we have installed, which is a type A 30 milliamp. We've got it plugged in here in the socket next to the actual solex
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itself. So, you can't get much closer. And then, let's do it. Let's trip and see how quickly we can trip the power.
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Well, 23.5 milliseconds is way, way below the minimum. Other concern people have is that this pin here on the plug will be live when you first unplug it.
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I'm going to show you why that's not a problem. So, you'll notice that this is ever so slightly longer, meaning that the earth conductor is the first to be connected and the first to be disconnected. And also the earth
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conductor needs to be connected to open the shutter to actually receive power. So when you plug it in, you can't actually get to any exposed live parts because on the side of the plug here, you have that insulation. So
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if this is going to disconnect in 23 milliseconds, you would have to have it plugged in, have it generating, and in another [music] 23 milliseconds, which just not going to happen. So, it's not a legitimate concern. Should you get
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plug-in solar? Well, I think it should be up to you, but I hope that this video helped you to make an informed decision.
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Personally, after investigating, I'd put no more thought to it than to plugging in any large electrical load. Make sure that the circuit's safe and that it's been tested by an electrician. And always make sure to follow the manufacturers's instructions properly.
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I've got it installed at mine. And if you want updates on it, follow me on Instagram. Plug-in solar definitely fills a gap in the market. I don't think it's fair that solar and battery should be reserved just for those with good
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access to roof space or with massive houses. And like it or not, the grid is unstable. Now, we can either adopt mega systems and mega batteries or we could aggregate that power across all of us as individuals and [music] give everyone a
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slice of the pie. What's best? Time will tell, I guess, won't it? But let me know your thoughts.
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Um, I love German, too.
Topics:plug-in solarsolar energyelectriciansolar installationbattery storagerenewable energysolar safetyGermany solarUK electrical standardsDIY solar
