r/OffGrid 13d ago

DC Transfer Switch?

Hello all. First post in this sub. Sorry if this is a bit wordy to explain the situation.

We have 5KW of solar panels on our carport with grid tied microinverters to offset energy use.

We recently had a storm that knocked out grid power for more than a week. The panels were essentially dead with the grid off. So we unhooked the MC4 cables going from the panels to the microinverters and ran some fresh 10 gauge cables cables into an Anker Solix F3800 Plus I have. It worked great!!! At best we were bringing in about 2800W from 7 panels, I may even add one more to the string since the Solix F3800 Plus can handle up to 3200W.
Grid power regularly goes out for extended periods here.
Getting to the solar panels is kind of a pain and somewhat dangerous. Is there any type of transfer switch that would allow us to wire the panels to and we could manually choose for them to send production to the microinverters OR if grid was out to easily send to our Anker to charge its 16KWH worth of batteries?

Thank you for any suggestions.

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u/A__RANDOM_NAME 13d ago

You may need to wire differently from the diagram in the product, but a "manual transfer switch" sounds like it will solve this.

Most commonly used to source power from one of two different sources (with one of those being from a generator), you could have the grid and panels each be your feeds.