[HeidiRainCountry]

We use both public power and solar but our solar set up we put in place ourselves and is totally independent from public power. We are not grid tied at all. Patrick installed separate solar outlets in our house close to the public power outlets so we can switch over anytime we need to but simply unplugging from one and plugging into the other. This has worked great for us especially here in rain country where we have near constant cloud cover through the winter months so we can run very little off solar during that time of year. This is also why we have so many back up options. Power outages are common here but for now we still like the luxury of having the public power when need be.