The one thing that everyone is afraid of is........ the blackout! Not the Zombie Apocalypse, not a "Red Dawn" invasion, not an Ebola Outbreak, or even another Democrat in the White House. It's the lack of electricity.
With today's increasing use of electricity for everything, we're all on the hook. Most states don't have their own self-sustaining grid. Amazingly, even California has to buy electricity from neighboring states and is often a a sum-deficit during the summer months. However, with the interconnected aspect of the whole system, we're all pretty much in the same boat to one extent or another.
Every day there are more and more folks installing solar panels on their homes, but do you actually know how that works? During the day, when you make more than you use, your meter runs backwards as the electricity goes into the grid and your provider pays you in credits (at about 1/3 of what they charge you). Then at night or on the weekends, you're still using electricity as normal and they charge you. The fact is, we're still connected to the grid and beholden to it. But, is there a solution to this?
We'll yeah..... you can buy Tesla's Power Wall to store up your excess electricity, then use this storage capacity when you need it. As you can imagine, it's kind of pricey right now and won't pay for itself any time soon, but it's out there.
There are of course, DIY solutions where folks are building their own, often using 18650 lithium-ion cells harvested from old laptop batteries, but that's quite a commitment requiring over 4000 cells to get started.
Ideally, a person would do a hybrid system with both wind and solar input to have more possibility of being able to store power and I'd love to head off in that direction. When we move out of our large kid-driven house, we'll seriously look into it. Until then, all I can do is to prepare for emergencies.
In that direction, most people go for something like this and I'll probably do that as well at some point. But our teenage kids budget can't stand that level of emergency power right now, so I'm starting small......
This small. I recently bought a 230 watt-hour "Portable Power Station". It's not powerful enough to run a fridge, but it has pure sine-wave output so it'll do sensitive devices such as medical devices or computers. The various ports can power pretty much most modern devices and importantly, it's small enough to take camping!
At some point before this summer, I'll also buy a portable solar panel as well. The way I look at it, a 60 watt panel should work out fine. These devices usually deliver about a quarter to a third of their rates power, so if my calculations are correct, anything around 20w per hour should be able to recharge the 230 Wah portable power station over the course of a day even if I pretty much discharge it. So, that this is, would be a small model of what I like to do one day with full-sized solar panels and a power wall at home. Until then, this rig will be an emergency stop-gap that can go camping as well!
