Our connection to the electrical grid was restored in the early hours of this morning. We got a text message from Austin Energy at 4:00AM saying a crew had been assigned to our outage and the generator switched from “running” to “ready to run” at 4:35AM. On one hand, it’s a bit frustrating that we were off-line and running the generator for almost 110 hours for something that could have been fixed in a half hour. On the other hand, obviously when you have hundreds of thousands without power and they’re organized into a couple of thousand discrete outages, you can’t just know off-hand which will be quick to fix and which will be miserable slogs.
So, whatever, we rode it out, deafened a few squirrels and neighbors and we didn’t lose 10 months of pumped milk. It all seems to have worked out, at least until the gas bill comes.
The monitoring for the generator is pretty light on details. I wish it would report a little more to the app. I also wish it had an API that could integrate with Home Assistant but them’s the breaks. There are, of course, DIY projects for such but I’m about out of spoons for IT support on this stuff. I already run around the house changing batteries in sensors more than I’d like.
Like I say, the thing is very loud. I would like to construct some kind of sound abatement hut over it. I could make it look like a miniature version of the workshop. I need to look into where air needs to come in and exhaust out and all that but it seems doable. Of course, there are already a billion things that need doing around the house all the time so I doubt this bubbles up to the top of the list any time soon.
I’ve been idly looking at more substantial home power solutions. The thing that seems to be the sweet spot for me is the Enphase system. A complete system with solar, micro-inverters, combiner, batteries and controller would have some nice advantages.
- Instant switch from utility power to local “micro-grid” power. Basically a whole home UPS.
- Can use power from solar, battery and generator at the same time.
- When the utility is off-line, the system is smart enough to only start the generator when the battery drops below a threshold (e.g. 20%). And will run the generator until the battery is above a threshold (e.g. 60%). It can also be told not to run the generator during “quiet time” unless the battery drops below a threshold.
There seem to be some limitations regarding power handling.
For system using an IQ System controller 2, the maximum generator current is limited to 64A continuous (80A overcurrent protection) to protect the associated power relays in the IQ System Controller 2 for the generator position.
Generator sizes beyond the values mentioned above will not result in any improvement in terms of current or battery charging speed.
The generator can make 81A continuous on natural gas but presumably the System Controller won’t allow that full amount?
Also this stuff is all quite expensive. I put together a system with their system builder and then dialed it back to a slightly less insane configuration. It wants 36 solar panels which I will estimate at $20,000. 36 micro-inverters at $6000, 3x 10kWh battery banks which don’t have a price but I’m finding other brands around $4000 per for that size so let’s say $15,000? Plus a controller (no price), a combiner (no price), and a bunch of ancillary stuff like breakers and mounting kits, etc. Let’s call that another $5000? So we’re at $46,000 in parts and we haven’t talked about installation. There is the matter of putting all that on the house, running all the conduit and cabling, doing all of the panel work, etc. I’m guessing that’s another $15,000-$20,000. So let’s call this a $65,000 project. And for what? To be quieter? To achieve energy independence? Meh. To reduce our fossil fuel energy usage? To reduce strain on the grid? Slightly more compelling but that’s a pretty big spend.
It just doesn’t pass the sniff test right now. I believe there are tax incentives and such for systems like this but it’s at the point where I’d need some professional advice and I’m not close enough to ready to do this that I’m going to talk to a business about it.
So that’s it. We managed to survive another winter storm. It got named “Mara”, so that’s nice. It’s supposed to rain for a couple of days. If someone starts loading animals in a boat I suppose we’re boned because I didn’t put “Ark” on my apocalypse survival punch-card.