Whole house battery backup system?

[indiajust]

Morning and evening demand is expected. My guess is that the noon demand is for maintenance, practice, cycling other primary sources. Interesting stuff. Color me curious.

 

[Diyernh]

Soft start is electronic & IMHO worth it for single-stage compressors to cut the starting amperage draw.

A hard start kit is just an extra capacitor which I wouldn't bother with either.

And am I jealous of the OP, as I've spent thousands recently for various 'solar generators' plus portable panels.

I use Victron inverters. Victron recommends not to use Pulse Modulation Soft Starts. The issue is that the soft start is MOSFETS that pulse the starting current, prolonging the startup duration. The Inverters also have MOSFETS that are designed to handle the max load. ie your soft start could burn out the inverter. I'm sure all the other inverter designs are similar, but do what your manufacturer recommends.

 

[dfblack]

I am a late comer to this conversation, but just wanted to put in my two pennies. I love the thought of a battery backup, but would not be wild about strangers accessing my house to service the equipment. Probably just a "me" thing.

I have a 6.5kw portable gas generator that I wheel out of the garage and plug in when power goes out. So there can be a 4-5 minute delay for that to get hooked up and running. But what makes it more convenient is that the "outlet" in the garage I plug the generator into is connected to a dedicated breaker in my main box. There is a safety lock-out on that breaker so that it cannot be engaged when the breaker box's main breaker is on. So either the main breaker is on, or the generator breaker is on, but not both.

This allows my generator to power anything in the house, just not everything in the house. We have to be selective. Don't run the dryer on "hot". Don't run the microwave and the oven at the same time. That sort of thing. But it runs the well pump, LP furnace, heat-pump water heater and all lights and electronics in the house. Pretty comfy setup for me for low investment. The only pain is working around when the generator needs to be turned off to refuel. We get 8-14 hours out of an 8 gallon tank depending on load, and I have two 6 gallon cans in reserve that I rotate/refresh periodically.

Hope this helps someone by presenting (yet another) way of surviving outages!

 

[Texas Proud]

I just saw an ad where they were selling something similar... but a 12KW generator that ran on propane...

Total cost was less than $4K... I have a friend who has what you have but his is I think 5K, maybe 7.5...

The negative is when you are away on vacation... unless you have someone to come and do the work when you are not there you still lose what is in your fridge/freezer and things might not go well..

 

[REWahoo]

I am a late comer to this conversation, but just wanted to put in my two pennies. I love the thought of a battery backup, but would not be wild about strangers accessing my house to service the equipment. Probably just a "me" thing.

They don't get within 40 ft of our house. All the battery related equipment is located adjacent to the power pole on the far side of our driveway, well away from the side of our house (see photos upstream in this thread). The only time they have needed to service one of the batteries they sent me a text message telling me they were on the way to do some maintenance.