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Answer by jgoulden
Technically, you will need the appropriate equipment to convert the power generated by your windmill to 240 VAC in the same phase as your line power. Practically, you need to know if your local electric utility grants “net metering” or not.

Answer by billrussell42
You can’t just hook it to the breaker. You would burn up something, and it’s illegal. IF the power company approves, you use special (and expensive) equipment approved by them, to do this. Then the power company pays you for the excess power.

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Answer by FredHH
probably will not save any energy It depends on the thermostat in the heater.

A typical bimetallic “spring” and contact (or mercury in a glass bubble) thermostat for relatively low wattage heaters will absolutely break the electrical circuit. No power will be wasted as long as the thermostat is operating properly.

If the thermostat has a relay… the relay should be absolutely de-energized when the spring (or mercury) thermostat has its portion of the circuit open.

If the Thermostat ha an LED or LCD indicator then it will be drawing a few watts of power. Nothing really significant… about the power used by a single bulb in a 100 lite string of mini Christmas lights. Turning that off might save a few cents a month.

But it will not injured anything to turn off the breakers.

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Edit:

RE Jimmy_K’s response below.

It CAN NOT harm the heater.

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RE Kerry’s response…

Only some massive HVAC systems have a heater to keep the refrigerant from dissolving in the oil. Household units… its extremely rare. You will never see it in a window unit. I have never seen it in a unit using R22, R-12 or R-134a

Answer by bebop
it would save a little.. it would just save the electirity that is usually wasted when it passes though the wires and into the heater. everything uses electricity, even though they are off. but by shutting the breakers would infact save money. my guess…maybe.. $ 3 to 10 cents range. depending of if it has a standby mode or not. if does then it will save closer to the $ 3 range

Answer by Jimmy K
might break your heater

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Wondering if it’s safe to connect the inverter to this panel/battery charger, if we can somehow install a shutoff switch on the charger or if there is some other option we are not seeing?

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Answer by Rudydoo
Hey Sister, great idea. I am not sure exactly what you are doing there. We have a home that is powered by the wind and sun, and a small camper with solar as well, but ours might be set up a tiny different.

The solar panels you are using do not need an inverter to charge the battery, they should simply hook to the battery bank directly, or by way of a charge controller. If you are also adding an inverter to use the battery power to run your AC outlets, that is a separate problem. Most boats I have come in contact with have a selector switch that selects between the battery charger or the inverter. So when you are on shore power, it stays in the charger position, which grants the battery charger to keep the battery’s at float, and does not grant the inverter to power the AC system. Away from shore power, it is selected to the inverter, which grants the batteries to power the inverter, which powers the AC system, and the battery charger is then locked out. This is why most RV and marine inverters this day have both the charger and inverter built into one unit, and it switches for you whenever you plug in the shore power cord.

If you are installing the solar panels yourself, see what the, “short circuit current,” rating is on the panels. If it’s 3 amps for example, and you are hooking two of them up in parallel, then you can have as much as 6 amps of charge current on a sunny day. Then see if you can find out what the amp hour capacity of your battery bank is. As a rule of thumb, if the maximum charge current of the solar array is less than 2% of the amp hour capacity of the battery, then you do not need a charge controller, the panels will never over charge the battery. All you need then is a diode between the panels and battery. A diode is an electrical check valve, allowing the panel to charge the battery, but not allowing the battery to feed back into the panel at night. There is a good book on charging batteries at the library, and a magazine you might think about looking into. I will list them below. Good luck, and take care…Rudydoo

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