Obligatory New Member Post

[jdkc4d]

Hey All,

Just joined. How's it going?

This past weekend, we had some major weather, tornadoes plowing through the area and the power was out here for 5.5 hours. Lost some food, no big. The real problem I had is my neighbor has a natural gas generator and the thing is deafeningly loud. My bedroom window has to be a good 100+ feet from that thing, and it was so loud I couldn't sleep. After the power came back on, his generator continued to run. Luckily I was able to turn on some fans in the house to help drown out the noise and get a couple hours of sleep.

I've thought about in the past building some kind of home battery to power some things during power outages, but I've never really done much about actually going down that road outside of looking at things like the tesla power wall, or the offerings from ecoflow/jackery/anker/bluetti/whatever and seeing the prices and giving up. I've seen several of Will's videos over the years about backup on a cart or similar and would like to learn more.

In '23 after I got my tesla (MYLR), I looked into solar, I had one of those solar studies done. They concluded that my property isn't well suited for solar because I have 4 giant trees and my neighbors have big trees that block the majority of my roof. I would love the ability in a long-term power outage to lay out some panels in the yard to try and re-coup some energy, but this is not a requirement.

What I really want is just a way to trickle charge some batteries in the middle of the night when I get a discount that could then be used in emergencies, or to possibly offset when energy cost is super high. I took some electrical engineering classes in college, but that's been 20 years. I assume I need an inverter so that I can charge the batteries, and then de-charge the batteries when the power is out. I am not sure how to do that, I don't know how to get power to those breakers separately. I am hoping to learn more about that here. I already have server racks in the basement, so as long as I can find strong enough rails, I assume I can use the same racks for batteries.

I pulled the energy usage from my power company and averaged everything in this image. The spreadsheet goes down to 15-minute increments, which I think might be a little excessive. Clearly I use way more power in the summer when its hot. It doesn't help that I work from home so the AC is on throughout the day. If power were down I do NOT expect to be running AC, so I think I can kind of ignore about half of that energy usage. I would want to run some fans though.

My current plan of attack is to research and learn about inverters to find the right one for me (help would be wonderful). Then figure out how to install that/connect to loads in the house. Finally to start buying/building out battery storage capacity. My preference is to build something over time to help offset the cost.

 

[rodrick]

You might want to check out the solar mini splits

 

[Hedges]

5 hours without power shouldn't cause loss of any food except cake or bread in the oven.

Your daily average power is reasonable to make with PV if you've got good sun exposure.
Extended periods without sun you need to meet another way.

Most affordable approach is select just critical or important loads (e.g. communication and refrigeration) and determine what system can power that.
You can shed freezer at night, let it coast. Then battery can be even smaller, and re-enable refrigeration when the sun comes out.
But a battery to power freezer overnight isn't big.

I plan to loan a 12kW battery and 6kW inverter to my sister for an anticipated outage. I think it could last a week.

Air conditioning can be reasonable to run with PV panels in full sun, especially a smaller unit.
If you need A/C, there is plenty of sun.

 

[Lavarock7]

I agree with Hedges post. In my case my continuous draw all day is small, however I have a dryer and stove which use lots more power. They are normally only online for a short while when in use, so I decided not to try to power them with solar and left them on the utility. I use a 10 breaker transfer switch which did not require me to make a major change in the electric breaker box. While I have most of my house using solar with batteries, I still have the option of switching certain loads back to the grid available to conserve battery capacity.

I converted all lights to LEDs. My hot water is a propane on-demand unit. I also have a dual fuel (gas OR propane) generator which can suppliment power. Propane for me is cheaper than gasoline AND you can store propane for a long time and I believe safer, compared to gasoline.

Even in an extended outage you may be able to do without the stove, dryer and perhaps AC and/or Heat and hot water. Most important is perhaps a TV, maybe a hot plate, computer and modem (if the Internet was not taken out with a storm).

Before solar, I just bought UPSs from Costco which I used for things like the TV, the on-demand hot water ignighter and so on.

You do not need to power the whole house if you are worried about making it through the average (non-hurricane) storm.