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Might be a good time to look into home battery systems. Regular 3 hour blackouts are exactly the sort of situation where they shine. It's even possible to bui

Might be a good time to look into home battery systems. Regular 3 hour blackouts are exactly the sort of situation where they shine. It's even possible to build DIY systems out of rack batteries and generic charge controllers, although you will need permits and probably professional install to hook it to your home electrical panel.

tnjm 4y ago
I installed a backup system (in the greenhouse rather than the house... priorities) to cope with these kinds of problems. Using a Victron Multiplus 1.6kVA system with 2x 110Ah 12V Gel batteries was remarkably cheap and simple. The whole lot came to just over €1k and took ~1h to set up, mostly setting jumper switches. It keeps the pellet boiler, circulation pumps, backup gas heaters and control gear going all night when necessary. The automatic switchover from mains (<20ms) is so fast that none of the PLCs, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis or heating equipment notices. Upgrading its capacity simply involves plugging in another 2x batteries (it's a 24v unit) in parallel. The only thing I wasn't thrilled about was that it doesn't protect against power surges, and a storm fried the boiler logic board AND the gas valve in the backup heater simultaneously in midwinter. (Victron unit was fine though!) Lesson learned. A similar installation in the house could easily power our (non-electric) central heating system, LED lighting and wifi for plenty long enough to stay civilized, and we're being prepared for 2 hour rolling blackouts here this winter.
sebazzz 4y ago
Word of warning: Just like solar inverters, not every home battery system is made to be grid independent. For instance, the Tesla Powerwall does, but the Sessy home battery does not and needs an active AC sinus on the grid. Even if you do have a home battery system that can generate its own sinusoidal AC wave, you still need an (automatic) transfer switch to disconnect your home from the failed grid, otherwise your home battery might be attempting to power the entire (local) grid which of course doesn't work.
- chasd00 4y ago
  > otherwise your home battery might be attempting to power the entire (local) grid which of course doesn't work. and some random line worker may think there's no electricity flowing when there is.
  - bityard 4y ago
    Line workers are trained to never assume a line is de-energized, those that forget don't live very long. (But yes, backfeeding the grid during an outage is dangerous and highly against code.)
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    > and some random line worker may think there's no electricity flowing when there is. If you have lines in an unknown state, step 1 is to put them in a known state. For power line work, this involves grounding all the phases and neutral together at both ends of the section you intend to work on. Good luck ringing a dead short with your home inverter/generator/etc.
    - benj111 4y ago
      Off topic but I've always thought of grounding as conceptually making the entire earth a part of the circuit and so dispersing the energy over a very large area. Is that conceptualisation correct? What happens is you have say a conductive (iron rich) top layer. Is there still the potential to dangerously energise the ground? I assume so because that's basically what water and electricity does?
      - everforward 4y ago
        Not an electrician, so someone else may have better info. Grounding provides an alternate path for the flow of electricity, so if a wire comes loose and ends up touching a copper pipe or something the current gets routed into the ground rather than into pipes or flammable wood or something. Dispersal over an area isn't directly the goal, but it helps. By dispersing the current into an extremely large object, you don't really have to worry about the object building up a charge to the point where you can't flow current into it anymore. Yes, you can dangerously energize the ground. You can dangerously energize almost anything with enough voltage. E.g. a Tesla coil has enough voltage to conduct through air. Don't try to test it (obviously), but I don't think a standard 110V house grounding has enough voltage to dangerously energize ground over any significant distance.
Chris_Newton 4y ago
My family live in a rural area. For a while, we had an unusually high frequency of power cuts around here. If I understood correctly, it was something to do with recurring problems with the overhead lines supplying local substation(s). Mostly it was just a few seconds or maybe a few minutes, enough to reset equipment and cause some irritating disruption but not catastrophic. Occasionally, though, the supply did cut out for a much longer time and you had to start thinking about whether you really needed to open the fridge/freezer right now. Between that experience and the environmental benefits, we were already discussing installing a big solar panel and battery system at our home with local suppliers, even before the recent dramatic price rises and the bizarre news that in the 21st century there’s a credible threat of rolling blackouts here. I can tell you from first-hand experience that getting such a system professionally installed and commissioned is likely to be a long wait and then cost a small fortune. Systems that can keep the household power on when the mains supply cuts out can require jumping through extra regulatory and consent hoops before anyone installs the new gear alongside a mains supply. You’ll also have fewer and often much more expensive options for the hardware than systems designed for efficiency/environmental benefits but not resilience to outages. Of course it might still be a very good idea to do this, if you’re lucky enough to meet the practical requirements and have the money to do it. But it’s definitely not going to be some DIY system you can build for £1,000. More like £10,000–20,000 and several months of waiting for an installation date, at least in this area.
- tnjm 4y ago
  Very true. An alternative is to install a lower-spec off-the-shelf charger/inverter for closer to £1k though, and instead have a handful of sockets with backup power. Being able to charge your phone and laptop, keep the fridge/freezer running and have at least some light is still magical.
  - Chris_Newton 4y ago
    Anything like that is better than nothing, for sure. Personally, we already have various critical equipment on UPS. Having to work out what is protected and for how long gets old pretty quickly, though. So do alarms going off in one room or another if the mains supply cuts out in the middle of the night, when everyone is (was) probably sleeping anyway. Or occasionally annoyances like waking up to find a big job scheduled to run overnight hasn’t actually run because the system that should have run it executed a controlled power-down after an earlier power outage instead. In contrast, a relatively large but domestic-scale battery system can easily store 10kWh or more of usable energy these days and provide it to anywhere in the building. That’s enough to run most of our house for 24h, as long as we avoid using very high consumption devices for extended periods or running too many of them at once with peak consumption levels higher than the equipment supports — a huge upgrade compared to the small-scale alternatives.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
Imagine the size of the opportunity here for green energy companies. Everybody whose ever wanted to pitch high efficiency building supplies or solar panels is finally going to get peoples attention. This could be huge over the next 10 years
- yourusername 4y ago
  Solar panels already had a waiting list. Waiting list is a lot longer and installation is more expensive now.
lavezzi 4y ago
c3534l 4y ago
Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of the blackout? The point is to force people to use less electricity. All you're doing is cheating the system by stockpiling it before the cutoff.
fy20 4y ago
Bear in mind that if you plan to recharge from the grid when the power is on, that's just going to exacerbate the problem of gas shortages. In California or Texas you could recharge with solar, but in Europe, solar during winter is basically useless. I'm at 54N and in June my system generates 1400kWh, in December if I get 90kWh I'll be lucky.

tnjm 4y ago

I installed a backup system (in the greenhouse rather than the house... priorities) to cope with these kinds of problems. Using a Victron Multiplus 1.6kVA system with 2x 110Ah 12V Gel batteries was remarkably cheap and simple. The whole lot came to just over €1k and took ~1h to set up, mostly setting jumper switches. It keeps the pellet boiler, circulation pumps, backup gas heaters and control gear going all night when necessary. The automatic switchover from mains (<20ms) is so fast that none of the PLCs, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis or heating equipment notices. Upgrading its capacity simply involves plugging in another 2x batteries (it's a 24v unit) in parallel. The only thing I wasn't thrilled about was that it doesn't protect against power surges, and a storm fried the boiler logic board AND the gas valve in the backup heater simultaneously in midwinter. (Victron unit was fine though!) Lesson learned. A similar installation in the house could easily power our (non-electric) central heating system, LED lighting and wifi for plenty long enough to stay civilized, and we're being prepared for 2 hour rolling blackouts here this winter.

sebazzz 4y ago

Word of warning: Just like solar inverters, not every home battery system is made to be grid independent. For instance, the Tesla Powerwall does, but the Sessy home battery does not and needs an active AC sinus on the grid. Even if you do have a home battery system that can generate its own sinusoidal AC wave, you still need an (automatic) transfer switch to disconnect your home from the failed grid, otherwise your home battery might be attempting to power the entire (local) grid which of course doesn't work.

chasd00 4y ago
> otherwise your home battery might be attempting to power the entire (local) grid which of course doesn't work. and some random line worker may think there's no electricity flowing when there is.
- bityard 4y ago
  Line workers are trained to never assume a line is de-energized, those that forget don't live very long. (But yes, backfeeding the grid during an outage is dangerous and highly against code.)
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > and some random line worker may think there's no electricity flowing when there is. If you have lines in an unknown state, step 1 is to put them in a known state. For power line work, this involves grounding all the phases and neutral together at both ends of the section you intend to work on. Good luck ringing a dead short with your home inverter/generator/etc.
  - benj111 4y ago
    Off topic but I've always thought of grounding as conceptually making the entire earth a part of the circuit and so dispersing the energy over a very large area. Is that conceptualisation correct? What happens is you have say a conductive (iron rich) top layer. Is there still the potential to dangerously energise the ground? I assume so because that's basically what water and electricity does?
    - everforward 4y ago
      Not an electrician, so someone else may have better info. Grounding provides an alternate path for the flow of electricity, so if a wire comes loose and ends up touching a copper pipe or something the current gets routed into the ground rather than into pipes or flammable wood or something. Dispersal over an area isn't directly the goal, but it helps. By dispersing the current into an extremely large object, you don't really have to worry about the object building up a charge to the point where you can't flow current into it anymore. Yes, you can dangerously energize the ground. You can dangerously energize almost anything with enough voltage. E.g. a Tesla coil has enough voltage to conduct through air. Don't try to test it (obviously), but I don't think a standard 110V house grounding has enough voltage to dangerously energize ground over any significant distance.

Chris_Newton 4y ago

My family live in a rural area. For a while, we had an unusually high frequency of power cuts around here. If I understood correctly, it was something to do with recurring problems with the overhead lines supplying local substation(s). Mostly it was just a few seconds or maybe a few minutes, enough to reset equipment and cause some irritating disruption but not catastrophic. Occasionally, though, the supply did cut out for a much longer time and you had to start thinking about whether you really needed to open the fridge/freezer right now. Between that experience and the environmental benefits, we were already discussing installing a big solar panel and battery system at our home with local suppliers, even before the recent dramatic price rises and the bizarre news that in the 21st century there’s a credible threat of rolling blackouts here. I can tell you from first-hand experience that getting such a system professionally installed and commissioned is likely to be a long wait and then cost a small fortune. Systems that can keep the household power on when the mains supply cuts out can require jumping through extra regulatory and consent hoops before anyone installs the new gear alongside a mains supply. You’ll also have fewer and often much more expensive options for the hardware than systems designed for efficiency/environmental benefits but not resilience to outages. Of course it might still be a very good idea to do this, if you’re lucky enough to meet the practical requirements and have the money to do it. But it’s definitely not going to be some DIY system you can build for £1,000. More like £10,000–20,000 and several months of waiting for an installation date, at least in this area.

tnjm 4y ago
Very true. An alternative is to install a lower-spec off-the-shelf charger/inverter for closer to £1k though, and instead have a handful of sockets with backup power. Being able to charge your phone and laptop, keep the fridge/freezer running and have at least some light is still magical.
- Chris_Newton 4y ago
  Anything like that is better than nothing, for sure. Personally, we already have various critical equipment on UPS. Having to work out what is protected and for how long gets old pretty quickly, though. So do alarms going off in one room or another if the mains supply cuts out in the middle of the night, when everyone is (was) probably sleeping anyway. Or occasionally annoyances like waking up to find a big job scheduled to run overnight hasn’t actually run because the system that should have run it executed a controlled power-down after an earlier power outage instead. In contrast, a relatively large but domestic-scale battery system can easily store 10kWh or more of usable energy these days and provide it to anywhere in the building. That’s enough to run most of our house for 24h, as long as we avoid using very high consumption devices for extended periods or running too many of them at once with peak consumption levels higher than the equipment supports — a huge upgrade compared to the small-scale alternatives.

barbariangrunge 4y ago

Imagine the size of the opportunity here for green energy companies. Everybody whose ever wanted to pitch high efficiency building supplies or solar panels is finally going to get peoples attention. This could be huge over the next 10 years

yourusername 4y ago
Solar panels already had a waiting list. Waiting list is a lot longer and installation is more expensive now.

lavezzi 4y ago

c3534l 4y ago

Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of the blackout? The point is to force people to use less electricity. All you're doing is cheating the system by stockpiling it before the cutoff.

fy20 4y ago

Bear in mind that if you plan to recharge from the grid when the power is on, that's just going to exacerbate the problem of gas shortages. In California or Texas you could recharge with solar, but in Europe, solar during winter is basically useless. I'm at 54N and in June my system generates 1400kWh, in December if I get 90kWh I'll be lucky.