I'm really puzzled by this whole discussion. The disconnection should happen not between the PV panels/windmill and the house, but the house and the grid, just like you throw the main breaker before you plug in your gas generator when you lose power from the grid.
This is a good recommendation. You can put in batteries and a panel or two, a windmill, etc, and hook them to a standard inverter, and use them to (say) take your laptops off the grid, or run the CFL lights in your office. No matter what you drive with it, that's electricity you won't use from the grid. In the end, unless you produce more than you use each month, either way is a wash.
However, I've seen systems that used DC battery storage with a grid-tie inverter that connected to the house wiring with a standard plug.
One possible means of detecting 'grid down' status would be to watch a different phase than you're feeding (presuming you're not matching all three phases, right?). Just a thought.
The description of the behavior of glossy screens wasn't quite accurate. Dark colors look darker on glossy screens because matte screens diffuse light across their surface - including the dark areas, causing them to appear lighter. This is true of photographs as well - back in the day, if you wanted a real black in your photos, you had to use glossy paper. This doesn't at all reduce the brightness of the light colors - it increase contrast ratio available to display images.
The ratio of brightness of your screen to ambient lighting controls how disturbed you will be by glare. If the antireflective coating sufficiently attenuates the glare to below the level of the average screen brightness, it probably won't bother you. As laptop screens have become brighter (my Macbook Air's LED backlight will BLIND you in the dark) the glare has become less important. If you habitually turn the brightness down on your lappy, though, yer gonna hate glosse screens.
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I'm really puzzled by this whole discussion. The disconnection should happen not between the PV panels/windmill and the house, but the house and the grid, just like you throw the main breaker before you plug in your gas generator when you lose power from the grid.
This is a good recommendation. You can put in batteries and a panel or two, a windmill, etc, and hook them to a standard inverter, and use them to (say) take your laptops off the grid, or run the CFL lights in your office. No matter what you drive with it, that's electricity you won't use from the grid. In the end, unless you produce more than you use each month, either way is a wash.
However, I've seen systems that used DC battery storage with a grid-tie inverter that connected to the house wiring with a standard plug.
One possible means of detecting 'grid down' status would be to watch a different phase than you're feeding (presuming you're not matching all three phases, right?). Just a thought.
The description of the behavior of glossy screens wasn't quite accurate. Dark colors look darker on glossy screens because matte screens diffuse light across their surface - including the dark areas, causing them to appear lighter. This is true of photographs as well - back in the day, if you wanted a real black in your photos, you had to use glossy paper. This doesn't at all reduce the brightness of the light colors - it increase contrast ratio available to display images.
The ratio of brightness of your screen to ambient lighting controls how disturbed you will be by glare. If the antireflective coating sufficiently attenuates the glare to below the level of the average screen brightness, it probably won't bother you. As laptop screens have become brighter (my Macbook Air's LED backlight will BLIND you in the dark) the glare has become less important. If you habitually turn the brightness down on your lappy, though, yer gonna hate glosse screens.