Hacker News Reader

it is actually simpler. The inverter stops power flow if it does not detect a grid voltage.

The actual power coming from a balcony setup is tiny, a thousand watts ballpark. The typical house will consume the vast majority of that capacity.

Even if some flows back to the grid, it will likely be consumed by losses in the transformer and wires.

View on HN

You’d be surprised how few watts a fridge and a TV draw, 500 watts combined, and that’s only while the compressor in the fridge is running. Don’t open the fridge very often, or keep a lot of thermal mass in the form of filled water bottles in there, and the compressor in a fridge will spend most its time not running.

Now I'm curious... Is your last suggestion correct? Wouldn't the time to cool down between pause intervals be proportionally longer due to the higher thermal mass and cancel out any savings gained by the long pause? Maybe the overall energy draw is even higher because the heat losses are higher when you spend a longer time with a high dT.

The water bottles don't warm up as quick as the air they replace that flows out of the fridge when you open it; so they have two effects first they take up space that new hot indoor air can't move into and second they then help chill that air slightly through their own thermal mass.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com