Very much agree with Robin on this. 200A passthru to your main panel is not a good setup for real life long outages. Not only for the code requirements Robin mentions, but the hard reality of an extended grid outage brings in new problems which many who choose this route have not considered. If you are always going to be home (and awake) when the outage hits and will turn off loads so that your power use stays under your inverter's capacity, well OK. Otherwise when you get home/up you may find defrosted freezers, frozen pipes and other such problems.
Even with "smart" devices, that may not solve this problem if you are not on site. For example, our DSL goes out after ~10hours of grid outage (that's all the backup the phone co has at the local boxes). And if you have a cell modem, well most cell towers have ~20hours of batteries. If you catch and switch off things at the start of an outage, fine. Otherwise you may not get the chance.
For my money (and time) I would rather have a system with various levels of backup loads, really critical loads, somewhat critical loads, and "luxury" loads; all with the inverter in control of when these go on and off. No design is 100% bulletproof, but a system like this should handle most outages without manual intervention. At least for the first few days to weeks.
For the typical short term outages of a few hours to a day, this may not matter much. But if you ever have to deal with a long term outage of days to weeks, especially if you're not at home, it could make quite a difference.
Even with "smart" devices, that may not solve this problem if you are not on site. For example, our DSL goes out after ~10hours of grid outage (that's all the backup the phone co has at the local boxes). And if you have a cell modem, well most cell towers have ~20hours of batteries. If you catch and switch off things at the start of an outage, fine. Otherwise you may not get the chance.
For my money (and time) I would rather have a system with various levels of backup loads, really critical loads, somewhat critical loads, and "luxury" loads; all with the inverter in control of when these go on and off. No design is 100% bulletproof, but a system like this should handle most outages without manual intervention. At least for the first few days to weeks.
For the typical short term outages of a few hours to a day, this may not matter much. But if you ever have to deal with a long term outage of days to weeks, especially if you're not at home, it could make quite a difference.
