The “special outlet” was true dorkyness right from the beginning. You need to tie into the line to get the native phase and deliver the output. And, if you’re going to do this only in rooms where you might conceivably generate electricity, then you only need it in your gym with the treadmill/ex bike. The only reason to have a diferent plug is to avoid having power on the exposed male pins of the plug you nominally plug this rig into the wall with. That’s dangerous, even at much lower than 200 watts of power.
Actually, economic considerations aside, that seems kind of interesting. $660 delivered cost ($99 frt) divided by 6 cents for 2 hrs of workout = 11000 days/365 = only 30 years to pay back. Not bad!
For this to work, it would have to supply a voltage greater than your line voltage. Very doable.
However, I DO wonder what happens should someone elsewhere in the house turn on a heavy (8-15 amp) motor while this rig is outputting. That load would appear, perhaps briefly, perhaps long enough to blow the breaker, across the output of the inverter as long as that load was anywhere on the same side of your breaker box. Presumably, it would also blow the output breaker of the inverter unless some measures were taken. Obviously, I haven’t seen one of these things in action, and I can only assume they’ve somehow taken care of the odd and non-trivial considerations of using it in a real house in the real world.
The market might be those who don’t like hearing conservatives say “Well, if you think it’s such a great idea that Obama is forcing utilities to use solar and wind power instead of much cheaper coal, why don’t you buy a solar panel and a grid tie inverter? Here’s a link. Practice what you preach.”
I don’t think many here are in favor of Obama’s “we’re in a recession, let’s make electricity more expensive” strategy.
However, there are some conservatives who like the idea of creating their own electricity, and the ones with the extra $ might simply think it’s cool to have this grid tie gadget, even if the power they create is more expensive than power from a coal plant.