Having a generator installed in your home is perfectly fine. However, you cannot run both solar power and generator power at the same time. The generator and the solar panels cannot operate parallel to one another. The panels and generator must be wired properly to minimize interference. In Detail In short, solar panels and generators cannot work in parallel and must be electrically isolated at all times to prevent damage. To really understand the answer to this question we’ll need to explain how electricity enters the home, where the power from generators and solar panels is delivered and how to avoid damaging either. There are many scenarios we could cover here but here is the most common. Power lines leading to your home enter a conduit (pipe) which connects to your meter on or near your main service panel. The current then passes through the meter and continues to your main breaker within your service panel. The main breaker passes current to two parallel bus bars, a metal platform the rest of the breakers connect to. These breakers pass current to individual wires running through your home which your appliances, essentially pulling from the grid. The full trip looks like this: from grid, to meter, to main breaker, to bus bars, to breakers, to wires, to outlets, and finally to your toaster. A photovoltaic (PV) system without a generator would send solar power to the main breaker powering your bus bars to power your home and backfeed the excess to the grid, meaning current is pushing against the incoming current. The excess current must pass back through the meter and into the grid so the excess energy production can be measured and compensated accordingly. The inverter(s) working between your service panel and solar panels will “sense” when the grid loses current and will cut production instantly. You read that right, when the grid goes down so will solar production; this is a safety measure for linemen because the electric current will charge the power lines coming from your house while they work to repair them. A generator adds another component; a transfer switch which chooses power going to the service panel from either the grid or the generator. If the grid is producing current the transfer switch will “sense” this and will flip towards grid/meter fed power, disconnecting from generator fed power. If the grid is down the transfer switch will switch to generator fed power and disconnect from the grid. Here’s the problem, if a PV system is connected to the main breaker and the grid goes down, the transfer switch will disconnect from the grid and flip to the generator. Yes, the PV system will shut down when it detects the grid is down, until the PV inverter senses the incoming power to the service panel from the generator and may interpret this as a grid energy and attempt to backfeed the generator potentially damaging both. Connecting the PV system to the main breaker isn’t an option here. Since the transfer switch is choosing between grid fed and generator fed power, the connection should be put between the grid and transfer switch to bypass the generator. Now that the PV is not connected to the service panel, when the generator kicks on, both the PV system and grid are disconnected.