LakeHouse
Knowledge Collector
Looking for some feedback on a system that I've been thinking about...
A buddy of mine is a partial caretaker of sorts for his mother-in-law that lives in remote and rural part of an island. She has grid power, but it's very unreliable. It can be out for days at a time. Currently, a diesel generator is all she has for backup, and so for the most part, when the power is down she just lives off-grid. This isn't a huge problem for her now, but will be eventually. Relentless process of aging and all...
So we'd like to design and install what amounts to a battery backup system. Except, we don't want to have to deal with or worry about the power company. No transfer switches, no possibility of back-feeding onto the grid. Also, ideally no manual interventions of any kind, aside from maybe having to start the generator if the power is out for too long.
My thought, then, is to use the batteries as sort of like an 'energy cistern', with constant slow(-ish) charging from the grid. The entire house would run off of what would essentially be a battery-operated off-grid system. The current 'Main Panel' in the house would just be powered by an inverter (size TBD, but probably something like 10kW would suffice), which draws power from a 48V battery bank. When grid power is on, that battery bank is charged by the grid using an EG4 chargeverter (or similar), and this is the only thing that is ever connected to the grid. Literally one device connected to the grid, and everything else operates off-grid. I would envision a second chargeverter hooked to the generator to recharge batteries intermittently during long outages.
The batteries would cycle at least a little every day, drawing down anytime power demand was greater than what the chargeverter is set to supply, and charging back up once demand decreases. When grid power goes down, no one in the house even notices, although it would be pretty easy to set up a monitoring system to send alerts if needed.
I understand there would be some efficiency losses in this system from converting to DC and then back to AC. This is acceptable. At some point in the future, solar power could be added, but that needn't ever happen.
I'm open to whatever general feedback people might have on this. But I have a specific question that maybe people could help answer: Would we even need to tell the power company we were doing this? The house remains connected to the grid, more or less, it's just only ever going to have one device 'plugged in' (hardwired with a panel and breaker, of course, but you get the idea). Maybe there would be some municipal permits required for the other changes to the electrical system in the house, but that's got nothing to do with the power company.
A buddy of mine is a partial caretaker of sorts for his mother-in-law that lives in remote and rural part of an island. She has grid power, but it's very unreliable. It can be out for days at a time. Currently, a diesel generator is all she has for backup, and so for the most part, when the power is down she just lives off-grid. This isn't a huge problem for her now, but will be eventually. Relentless process of aging and all...
So we'd like to design and install what amounts to a battery backup system. Except, we don't want to have to deal with or worry about the power company. No transfer switches, no possibility of back-feeding onto the grid. Also, ideally no manual interventions of any kind, aside from maybe having to start the generator if the power is out for too long.
My thought, then, is to use the batteries as sort of like an 'energy cistern', with constant slow(-ish) charging from the grid. The entire house would run off of what would essentially be a battery-operated off-grid system. The current 'Main Panel' in the house would just be powered by an inverter (size TBD, but probably something like 10kW would suffice), which draws power from a 48V battery bank. When grid power is on, that battery bank is charged by the grid using an EG4 chargeverter (or similar), and this is the only thing that is ever connected to the grid. Literally one device connected to the grid, and everything else operates off-grid. I would envision a second chargeverter hooked to the generator to recharge batteries intermittently during long outages.
The batteries would cycle at least a little every day, drawing down anytime power demand was greater than what the chargeverter is set to supply, and charging back up once demand decreases. When grid power goes down, no one in the house even notices, although it would be pretty easy to set up a monitoring system to send alerts if needed.
I understand there would be some efficiency losses in this system from converting to DC and then back to AC. This is acceptable. At some point in the future, solar power could be added, but that needn't ever happen.
I'm open to whatever general feedback people might have on this. But I have a specific question that maybe people could help answer: Would we even need to tell the power company we were doing this? The house remains connected to the grid, more or less, it's just only ever going to have one device 'plugged in' (hardwired with a panel and breaker, of course, but you get the idea). Maybe there would be some municipal permits required for the other changes to the electrical system in the house, but that's got nothing to do with the power company.
