Whole home backup power
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Years ago I looked into a whole home external generator. They were pricey (~10k installed) but for us the real deal breaker was the regulations about placement in the yard. It had to be a certain distance from the border of your property, and a certain distance from any structure like the house or a shed. In my yard that meant it was going to be really inconveniently placed at a time when the boy was using the yard a lot to play.
So o ended up getting one of those switches installed that you can connect to a large portable generator and it powers selective circuits in your house, heating, AC, kitchen, a couple of bedrooms.
That setup was about half the price and served us well. I’ve not yet duplicated it in my new house. It was more important when I used oxygen concentrators to stay alive.
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We have had a manual transfer switch, same setup you described, since 2000. Works great. It is a very cost effective way to get some kind of backup in case of an extended outage. But as @bernard points out, it is kind of a pain to haul a generator around to hook it up.
Standby generators are running close to $15K these days and our town has created pretty stringent setback requirements like the ones you describe that are making it near-impossible to get one installed.
These Base Power batteries are just another way to get a bit of backup so the essentials like refrigerators and sump pumps can keep on doing their thing. And a furnace in winter and well pumps if you're not on city water. Not so good for running the high-demand stuff like A/C or electric heat.
They have their own automated transfer switch, so the backup kicks in seamlessly. If you want to extend the coverage more, you can get a portable generator to use to charge things up if an outage goes on for long enough to deplete the battery.
And with the incentives (reduced electricity rates and referral bonuses), it's stupid cheap. If you can refer one person, you've covered $250 of the $295 installation cost.
Of course it's always possible that there is something in the setup at an individual house that could require additional work by an electrician so that Base can do their install. Like any home improvement project, the homeowner has to decide whether the costs outweigh the benefits.
I don't think everyone has a need for one of these, but if you do, it's worth looking into.
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I can tell what a power outage in Florida means- not much.
I survived without power for over a year.
If the grid goes down in a storm, that means a hurricane.
And that could mean massive rainfall and flooding.
The rain and wind would be the problems. Residential power not so much.
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Here if it happens it’s usually heavy rainstorms with lots of wind and/or lightning, more likely in the spring or summer. Branches or trees fall into power lines. The problem is it happens in dozens or hundreds of spots around the area at the same time so it can take crews a while to get to them all.
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This thread is a reminder that I really need to start working on this for us…
So we have this ridiculously big back yard, the outside location shouldn’t be an issue.
But there are so many options, I feel like I’d need to take a week off from work just to figure them all out and figure out which ones would be best for us…
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Here if it happens it’s usually heavy rainstorms with lots of wind and/or lightning, more likely in the spring or summer. Branches or trees fall into power lines. The problem is it happens in dozens or hundreds of spots around the area at the same time so it can take crews a while to get to them all.
@jon-nyc Same here. Overhead lines rather than underground and lots of mature trees. Spring/summer winds definitely. Ice storms are the worst. They're usually to the south of us but weather patterns have been changing for years and I think we're going to start seeing them in our area more frequently in the future. Worst outage we had was after an ice storm many years ago.
ComEd has done a lot of work on the equipment around here (at least we see some benefit from those rate increases that @daniel pointed out) and in many cases the system can re-route power automatically around the problem. Lots of times our lights will dim or go out briefly and then go right back on. The entire system is more efficient and robust, and they can locate and dispatch the resources needed to get the power back on.
We had an outage last week. It was kind of windy one day and a limb fell across the line in someone's backyard a couple of blocks away. We heard the cutout fuse pop (it's across the street from our house) and the power went out completely. Half an hour later the crew was resetting the cutout even though the tree limb hadn't been removed yet. The only houses that didn't have power were the ones immediately around the house with the downed limb. It took about four hours for them to clean up the tree, repair the damage and get the last few houses back online.
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This thread is a reminder that I really need to start working on this for us…
So we have this ridiculously big back yard, the outside location shouldn’t be an issue.
But there are so many options, I feel like I’d need to take a week off from work just to figure them all out and figure out which ones would be best for us…
@ShiroKuro Most people live without backup power; having it is definitely a luxury. I wouldn't worry about taking the time off to look into and implement it....
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