Small Solar — a low-cost ladder from one panel to a block
Four rungs, storage sized to the night, five ways to move the power, a local mesh that is not the internet, and the shelves that say where to buy it and what the rules said on the day we looked.
A field guide for putting solar on a desk, a shed, a house or a block in El Segundo without custom parts or a loan. The ladder has four rungs. Rung zero is one panel and a small lithium box for $150 to $300. Rung one is four used commercial panels and a battery that runs a fridge, under $1,500 and no permit while it stays a plug-in cord. Rung two puts the loads you would miss in an outage on their own subpanel, $3,000 to $6,000, and that is where the permit and the electrician come in. Rung three is a block: several roofs, one shared battery, a hub that stays on. The rule for climbing is to buy 48-volt gear at rung one so nothing gets replaced later. Storage is the expensive part, so the page sizes it to the night rather than the roof. Tick the loads that have to stay on, set how much runs after dark, and it gives you panel watts, battery kilowatt-hours, and which rung you land on, using PVWatts sun numbers for the LAX station rather than a brochure. Then the storage that costs nothing: timers, a chest freezer full of water jugs, and a water heater that eats the surplus. Moving the power gets its own ladder, from no wires at all to a 48-volt DC bus with power over ethernet, a battery sneakernet where portable stations walk to where they are needed, an AC island behind a transfer switch, and finally the grid, where NEM 3.0 pays little for exports. The network gets the same treatment. The internet is a wire someone else owns, so the page adds a local layer that runs on the same small solar: phone-to-phone apps over Bluetooth with nothing to buy, LoRa mesh nodes on the license-free 915 MHz band that carry text between phones over miles for the price of a dinner each and a fraction of a watt, and a Wi-Fi commons, a router with no wire in the back and a small computer that serves a local page, offline Wikipedia, a shared drive and a chat room. Each layer says what an iPhone, an Android and a Linux box can do on it, and what it costs the battery. The shelves are the part that took the research. Used-panel yards, wholesale desks, lithium batteries with their UL listings, inverters and controllers, portable stations, the wiring and fuses that keep it from burning, and the rules: El Segundo permits, Southern California Edison interconnection, the state of plug-in solar in California, and what happened to the federal credit. Every link is the seller or the agency, every price carries the day we saw it, and nothing is an affiliate. We point, the vendor sells. The whole guide is one CC0 JSON file at /solar.json.
