Solar Backfeed Breaker

The transfer switch or interlocked backfeed breaker acts to prevent the connection of the generator while the main breaker for the panel is closed.

Solar backfeed breaker.

As noted in sec. From there you d land your inverter s output into a 50a breaker and your done. When setting up a generator to backfeed your house power can be pushed out through the main breaker to the transformer and cause unexpected high voltage. The nec allows adding a back feed breaker so that the current supply is up to 120 of the rating of the bus bar.

However if we add our pv breakers into a sub panel that is dedicated to only the pv breakers we can land the sub panel into a 40a breaker in the main panel board 10 4a 21a 31 4a x 1 25 39. Article 690 requirements apply to solar pv systems. The main purpose of the fuses and breakers are to protect the wiring. So you always want to be sure your sizing your wire to handle the output of each circuit in the system.

The backfeed generator breaker can t be closed while there is main power on the panel and when there is a power failure it can only be closed after the main breaker is open. 690 10 e plug in type back fed circuit breakers connected to a stand alone inverter output in either stand alone or utility interactive systems shall be secured in accordance with 408 36 d. Circuit requirements are outlined in part ii of this article. Then looking at that photo again you can see i have a 30a 2 pole breaker at the other end for my solar inverter.

We sometimes see people adding a 60 or 80 a breaker instead. If a panel is rated at 125 amps and the breaker is 100 amp it seems to me that you could add 25 amps backfeed plus another 20 amps based on the 120 rule. The sum of these breakers is 45a and we already know we cannot land them in the main panelboard because it will only allow us 40a using the 120 rule. Energizing wiring systems far from your setup like this can damage your equipment and the appliances being powered as well as potential for electrocution to technicians repairing power lines.

If a 200 a busbar has a 200 a main breaker the code allows adding a up to a 40 a backfeed breaker. This would make 45 amps solar into a 100 amp 125 amp rated panel.