Submitted by GraniteGeekNH t3_zx9ws8 in newhampshire
Any New Hampshire folks reading this who lost grid power in the storm and used home battery (Powerwall, etc.) to keep going - or, even better, V2G?
If so, I'd love to talk to you about it for a Concord Monitor story. dbrooks@cmonitor.com
How much did the powerwall cost?
I mean a portable generator is under $1k plus a couple of gallons of gasoline when this happens
Right, but I have solar panels as well, so I don't have the battery solely for backup in emergency situations.
Most days when the sun is out I only pull 4-5 kwh from the grid.
I generate power all day , what i don't use goes to the battery and then I sell back to eversource once my battery is fully charged. I use a percentage of my battery every night to offset grid usage. Once the non-emergency battery allocation is used up I go back to pulling from the grid.
I would not have bought a battery just for emergency use, it is about the same cost (~10k) as a whole home auto switch over propane generator.
The battery is great for emergencies, but my main goal when getting it was to offset my nightly grid usage.
No, it makes sense if you have solar as well. Not so much if you are just buying a huge battery for times when the power goes out.
A little off topic, how much energy does your solar generate typically in the winter months? It seems like we don't have a lot of sun and the days are short to begin with.
Ugh, December power generation is really frustrating. We got panels in August and I was generating 30+ KWh a day. Now I am barely getting to 10, on an overcast cloudy day I can sometimes get 0 or maybe 1-2 KWh.
I am not looking forward to Jan and Feb. Next winter I will have built up credits over the summer. And my bill will be better, but this year is not going to save a lot of money.
I like to think I am helping the environment too, but I know it is a drop in the bucket really.
With a well pump, did you need two power walls? I've considered getting just the powerwall without solar just for backup since we're in a tricky spot with lots of tree cover.
This is good to hear. I want to look into generators and was thinking about going this route.
Were you able to purchase the power wall without the solar shingles? Did you use some company or install it yourself? I've been interested in getting one myself.
We have 22 solar panels and one powerwall, all installed by granite state solar.
I too am interested in this. I hope someone replies. I’m very interested in the technology, but want to hear real reviews, not sales and marketing.
Shouldn't it be easy to just figure out how long a battery can keep your house going - essentials vs. entire house - and figure out if it's worth it based on average time without power in your immediate area?
I think if you have a propane tank for the kitchen or water heater it's a no-brainer to get a propane powered generator; you're already paying for its fuel.
If you live in a rural area that routinely loses power for extended periods and have a wood stove for supplimental heating, do you need a small source of energy to run the home water heater and fridge for a while?
There's tons of variables, and you can keep going with a long list of what-ifs.
It'd be smart to talk to people that live off the grid full-time. I know of one family that did it for decades with lots of solar panels, huge battery banks of old-school batteries, propane powered appliances, incinerator toilets, a wood stove, lots of insulation, and a big backup gasoline generator for when the sunlight in the winter wasn't enough to sufficiently charge the battery banks.
In the end, as they got older, it became less fun to maintain their energy needs, so they paid to have the utility company run power to the house.
We have solar and powerwalls in southern NH. We also have ground source heatpums which are efficient but use more power. Powerwalls charged itself to 100% on thursday night and went on standby. Lost power at around 6:18 am on Friday morning. Did not notice a thing until I saw a notification from tesla saying powerwall is 95% charged and providing power to your house. We turned down the heat and flipped the propane fireplace on. Switched the heating to emergency propane heat but fireplace was able to keep the house warm. Other than heat pumps we did not make any changes to the power usgae and by the time power came back at around 4 pm we still have 90% battery capcity left (total 26 kWh). Even with the rain and cloudy weather we had roughly 3 kWh solar production to offset some of the electricty usage during the day. If we would not have got the power back we would have lasted at least 24 hours with propane fireplace and propane furnace.
This was the longest we were without power and really appreciated the battery backup we had.
While I'd love the solutions you actually asked about, the budget and/or time hasn't been there yet (there are lots of good videos on DIY Powerwalls), but I was pretty proud of my plucky New Englander lower budget solution.
Normally I just ride out any outages, but we had a newborn for this one so that wasn't going to fly, especially if the hype was to be believed. I already had a handful of batteries from the Ego Power tools (could not more strongly recommend), so I ran out and grabbed what was apparently the last Ego Power Station on the Seacoast.
This would have been enough for a radiant space heater or running the toaster oven or even the tankless for some showers. I also justified it with the thought of future camping trips or remotely running my few remaining corded tools.
While there I also picked up a couple of DC>AC inverters so if the existing stored energy did not suffice I could use the rolling generators sitting in the driveway to convert the gas in the tanks.
Failing any of that there is always the wood stove, but I would have had to have moved the Christmas tree and no one wanted that to happen. I also grew up using exclusively wood heat and vowed to not be hauling wood when I was an adult, so avoid it at all costs.
Ultimately we were only without power for a few hours, so didn't really get to exercise the plan, but at least we'll be more prepared for the next time.
Great discussion! Thanks to OP for posting and starting this discussion.
I've lived in S NH since the mid 80s and have noticed power failures getting more common. (I recall getting out my portable Honda generator for a failure and noticing that I had last serviced it and put it away ten year previous! Now it seems to be a yearly occurrence.)
I'm thinking hard about solar but live in a neighborhood with a HOA that may prevent solar from showing from the street. My house faces south, so need to do more research into les visible.
If using V2G how do you make the decision to stop and keep some range for the vehicle?
I also live in S NH, for 30 years, and have noticed far fewer power failures in the past five years, so there's that.
I credit the person down the street on the same distribution line as me; they spent big bucks on a whole-house generation system. Power hasn't gone out since.
Ha! Isn't that how it works?! ;-) I do think that the big ice storm took out lots of trees, so the benefit is that we get a few years of less outages from trees. ... Until the trees grow back and another big ice storm, at least.
I don't know if this quite meets your specs, but we have battery backups on a lot of our electrical equipment that can let it run for several hours during an outage. These are significantly cheaper than a powerwall ($150-$500ish)
This means that we can still have wifi/internet (fiber often stays up during an outage) even if we don't have power.
We were out for several hours, but for us the only difference was the lights. (woodstove heat)
Sounds to me like you’ve got an agenda in your head and are looking for sources to corroborate the story you’ve already written.
Thanks for the input. I will give it all the consideration that it deserves.
opiegagnon t1_j1zf0wd wrote
We were without power for about 23 hours, losing power around 6:30 pm. Our powerwall held strong and when the power came back on I had 21% left on my battery. Wednesday before the storm I got a severe weather notification from the app, the powerwall charged itself to 100%, my solar did not generate enough power to refill all of the battery. So the battery pulled what it needed from the grid to get to 100%. All in all the experience was pretty good on my end, we ran the house on a light load and used wood heat not my pellet stove. For reference we ran 2 fridges, a chest freezer, 2 turtle tanks, well/radon pump, lights where needed, and the furnace during the outage. The pellet stove is a low load but, with this being our first outage I played it safe.