NW-Bound
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- Joined
- Jul 3, 2008
- Messages
- 35,712
An outage of 7 days will be tough, particularly during a storm when your solar panel is of no help.
For shorter outages up to a couple of days, you can eliminate the solar panels and solar charge controller, and just add more batteries at $200 for a pair of 6V GC2 batteries at Costco or Sam's Club (actually lower than $100/each).
And with this set up, when you are there to run a small genset as needed to recharge the batteries, you do not have to run it 24 hrs/day.
The 2KW inverter has enough excess power to also run some lights, TV, computers, etc... No air conditioner though, other than a small 5000 BTU/hr window A/C, and even that will run down your batteries in a couple of hours. I would buy only a pure sine wave inverter, and a namebrand one.
And I forgot a 30A automatic transfer switch for your fridge when you are not there. That adds another $75.
For shorter outages up to a couple of days, you can eliminate the solar panels and solar charge controller, and just add more batteries at $200 for a pair of 6V GC2 batteries at Costco or Sam's Club (actually lower than $100/each).
And with this set up, when you are there to run a small genset as needed to recharge the batteries, you do not have to run it 24 hrs/day.
The 2KW inverter has enough excess power to also run some lights, TV, computers, etc... No air conditioner though, other than a small 5000 BTU/hr window A/C, and even that will run down your batteries in a couple of hours. I would buy only a pure sine wave inverter, and a namebrand one.
And I forgot a 30A automatic transfer switch for your fridge when you are not there. That adds another $75.
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