Charging off a solar panel

It would be a very easy swap when they come out to install the production meter. Assuming your area uses the same 2 meter configuration that mine uses. One is the (generic, not just PV) generator production meter, the other the regular house meter, which becomes the net meter.

Is this explicitly included in the product offering? Or being added as an optional feature?

As originally offered, my Enphase microinverters will not run in an island or off-grid mode. People wanting this feature back then had to buy special versions of string inverters, but those would not work well for my shade-impaired situation. Later, Tesla's Powerwall and various competing products could be configured to operate in island mode, "fooling" the microinverters into operating as if they were still on-grid, which charging a large storage battery.

Your newer Enphase microinverters are featured to work in this mode, but I don't remember if they require some additional equipment to do so. IIRC, my older units could be updated (re-flashed firmware?) for it, but definitely would need additional equipment and a house service topology modification.

 

I should double-check. It never occurred to me that anyone would design a solar power system that would shut down during an outage. The I mentioned this advantage with the sales rep, who I know to be honest, and he didn't disabuse me of the idea. But he's fairly new, so perhaps he was as ignorant as I am. Also, I seem to remember him telling me that either system could be run independently of the other. I assume it would require either an automatic or manual disconnect so the solar power would not feed into the power grid and kill a repairman.

 

That was my original thought too, until I saw the controls and costs involved. Then it became clear to me why most systems weren't built that way.

Back then, it seemed that the few string inverters built to run either way, had a separate output for off-grid mode, and rated for significantly less total power than the on-grid mode.

That was before the Tesla Powerwall and many competing products came out, and Enphase joined that market segment too. So I'm not up on the current market.