Labor costs for installing solar are already so ridiculous that you're better off doing the parting, delivery, and some installation if not all of it yourself and then having a licensed electrician just finish the connection to your main circuit breaker.
I regularly bring this up: modern fridges are generally continuous drive (which means they run off DC at some level anyway). And they run all the time(ish).
Waiting for a (mass-)manufacturer to build one with a 48VDC input that anyone can self-install a solar panel and plug-in but switches to a mains-fed 48VDC source as required.
Doesn’t need a battery (the fridge/freezer is one!), gets you some operation during outages, no license required to wire up. Takes advantage of whatever solar is available during the daytime without really wasting any.
Would also love a non-permanently installed doohickey that doesn’t require an electrician to legally install that will gladly push solar into a power strip and handle all the intertie stuff itself.
It shouldn’t be a “whole house or nothing” and a “completely islanded circuit or nothing” dilemma when wanting to partly solarize something. Which I guess Germany has allowed but regulations a big impediment in most places.
Genuinely curious - when did this become a thing? I have a couple of relatively recent fridges (less than 10 yrs old, and same model still sold today) that constantly cycle on/off, and spend more time off than they do on.
I'd imagine a variable speed system (like are available in inverter-based heat pumps today) could be designed to run nearly constantly, but the variability of things like room temp, fridge loading (empty fridges are less efficient than full ones), open/closing doors, and the addition of warm/hot things in the fridge would make it so there's always a need for cycling at some level...
From what I’ve seen, they’re usually marketed as “inverter fridges”.
And yeah, at least the fan turns off when you open the door, and I’d imagine if you put a bunch of ice into the fridge, it wouldn’t need to run at all for a while.
Meanwhile my local electric code (Ontario Canada) still requires a dedicated circuit for the fridge, which will now basically hum along at 1-2amps and never brownout/trip a circuit. What a waste.
