Not entirely off the grid, but do have back up power from a battery bank and solar panels. The equipment installed will run the entire house, minus the big ticket electrical items, central A/C, Stove, Dryer. Well it would run those, not all at once, but given the battery bank size, only 3 panels right now, problem is with those items is I think it would more rapidly discharge the battery bank, more than it may recharge from panels alone.
In essence, aside from those items, it will run a hot water boiler/furnace, 220 well pump, 2 refrigerators, 1 chest freezer, a window unit A/C, for several days, though I am a bit skeptical, not having seen that, but 5-6 hours on back up, at night, not turning any of those off, the battery bank only dropped down to 51 volts, max charge it reads 54 volts, was told I can go down to low 40's on voltage, its a 48 volt system. I am assuming that during the course of being on back up, when sunny the solar panels would bulk or trickle charge the battery bank enough to where there is no concern about breaching the threshold of being discharged too much. That is alleged to be the enemy of these batteries, discharging too much too many times, also alleged that acceptable cycling from full charge to a certain point of discharge is fine, won't hurt the longevity. In addition, the only maintenance I am aware of and its more so for those with straight up solar panels and battery banks that those batteries need to be balanced more often, not so much when used strictly as back up power, obviously as straight up solar power cycles them daily.
There is a responsibility to manage the power during an outage, to retain as much reserve as you can, so you can go to the panel and shut things down, but you have plenty and I mean plenty of time to do that, say you want to shut off the 2nd fridge, move some stuff out of it or similar, while on extended outage.
The other plus is, and I have not installed it yet, is that you can tie in another AC source, besides the grid, a generator, so that when necessary, if there is not enough sun, solar power etc., you can easily fully bulk charge or trickle charge the battery bank right back to a full charge. So say the power is off, no sun, inclement weather, its going to be off, and the read out shows the charge getting low, just kick on that genset, mine would be my miller NT 251 welder, 8500 watt peak, 8000 watt continous, say early evening likely an hour or so, your now good for a couple of days, all dependent on your power usage. Will say this, a much smaller home, cabin or similar, with minimal useage, I would have to believe a system like this would be ample power for quite awhile, top off with the solar panels or genset and I believe with a decent size battery bank, power would never be an issue, unless I am missing something here.
Cost installed was 15K, don't have a break down on equipment, material, and labor, including profit, but half of that was reimbursed, total out of pocket was around 7K, well worth it, only consideration is battery service life and when those would have to be replaced.
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Today's Featured Article - Usin Your Implements: Bucket Loader - by Curtis Von Fange. Introduction: Dad was raised during the depression years of the thirties. As a kid he worked part time on a farm in Kansas doing many of the manual chores. Some of the more successful farmers of that day had a new time saving device called a tractor. It increased the farm productivity and, in general, made life easier because more work could be done with this 'mechanical beast'. My dad dreamed that some day he would have his own tractor with every implement he could get. When he rea
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