5 ms·

Consider this your reminder to swing by the home improvement store and buy that backup generator you've been thinking about getting for a while. Gonna be a lot

Consider this your reminder to swing by the home improvement store and buy that backup generator you've been thinking about getting for a while. Gonna be a lot of discarded food in Chile over the next few days...

noisy_boy 2y ago
Or a lot of impromptu parties...
- ourmandave 2y ago
  By candle light.
BLubliulu 2y ago
Get an EV instead. Use it for bi-directional charging, buy PV to reduce your dependency and energy bill and a heat pump to be independent of oil/gas companies.
- officialchicken 2y ago
  That's a terrible suggestion. A car is 20x the price of a generator while and at least 10x larger. A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc. A car is a transportation device, not a stationary energy generation machine designed as a backup in case of power failure.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    > A car can't power an entire household for days on end This is underestimating the ludicrous amount of power an EV's batteries have. You can absolutely power your house for days on end using one. (Of course, that should also give us pause to think about what it means that we spend so much energy for transportation compared to household necessities.) And gasoline has plenty of problems too, like its extremely short shelf-life.
    - whartung 2y ago
      I have two Tesla Powerwalls in my garage, and they (among other things) do just this. I look at the size of those, and the size of a random Tesla, and I can easily see two of these shoved into the baseboard of a Tesla, much less the larger vehicles. I know the Ford Lightning was advertised as a potential back up power source for the home. The real trick is getting the power out of the battery and in to the home itself. It's one thing to run an extension cord to the refrigerator, quite another to get the battery plugged into your home circuitry. That requires more preparation, as well as an electrician.
      - qwerpy 2y ago
        Cheap way to power the home directly is to get a generator inlet put in ($500-1000) and connect the vehicle to that. You can then use either a vehicle or a gas generator, which is useful during extended outages when you need to top up the car. Expensive way is to get some manufacturer specific automatic transfer switch (I got Tesla's put in). The hardware is $2500 and the labor is $4K+. I did both and used both during a recent week long outage.
    - GiorgioG 2y ago
      You underestimate the ludicrous amount of power people use. In January (no A/C used) in my home we used 46kWh per day on average.
    - mbesto 2y ago
      4 bedroom house in Austin, TX. A hot summer is around 100 kWh and my Rivian battery is 135 kWh. Which means I can roughly get a one full summer day out of my car's battery (assuming I still need to drive the car and usually leave it at 70% max). So there you have it, I get about one full day. Not "days on end".
      - qwerpy 2y ago
        That's on the higher end of household usage. On the lower end, during a cold windstorm in the PNW I was able to get it down to 600W (15 kWh/day) because I have mostly natural gas appliances. My Cybertruck kept us going for nearly a week with just one top-up (because I don't like to go above 80% or below 20%). We deferred using the dryer and dishwasher, and relied on the fireplace for warmth instead of the HVAC. On a hot day yeah I'd be running the A/C but ideally you'd have solar to offset much of that.
  - fhdkweig 2y ago
    Tech Connections did a video showing exactly this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO5fJ8z66Z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO5fJ8z66Z8
  - cloverich 2y ago
    > A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc Average home uses 30kwH / day. Average EV battery size 40kwh. Correct not days on end, but at least a full day to full capacity, and perhaps a few days at reduced capacity. My Ioniq 5 has an 84kwH battery so I guess I'd get a bit further.
    - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
      kWh
- mikestew 2y ago
  Get an EV instead Be choosy about the EV, not all of them have this feature (Tesla, for instance, doesn’t last I checked). That said, after we got our Hyundai (and the vehicle-to-load adapter), I sold our generator to a neighbor. Less than a year later, we both got to test our electrical backups. Hopefully you were going to buy an EV anyway, because a nice generator is about $1000. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 is considerably more than that.
  - loeg 2y ago
    In the US, almost no vehicles support bidirectional / V2H. It's only the F150 Lightning, I think. (Hyundai/Kia and most others are V2L only.)
  - ronnier 2y ago
    Cyber truck does
  - qwerpy 2y ago
    We had a nearly week long power outage due to a windstorm. Tesla has a power gateway, only usable by Cybertruck for now. that detects grid failures and automatically fails over the entire house to vehicle power. My Cybertruck (123 kWh) kept my house powered (15 kWh/day - natural gas took care of hot water, heating, and cooking) for almost all of that, with a one-time top-up at a friend's house.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Remember that having PV isn't enough, you also need to have the circuitry to disconnect your house from the grid, because your personal panels probably don't have the capacity to power the entire grid on their own (plus it wouldn't be safe for line workers to have random pockets of energy in a grid that's supposed to be down).
- aftbit 2y ago
  Hardware store backup generator => $500 - $2000 vs EV => $8000 - $40000 Bidirectional charging infra => $2000 - $5000 PV => $5000 - $15000 Heat pump => $5000 - $10000 That's an awful lot of money that you're proposing people spend in order to cover a rare occurrence. Of course there's day-to-day value in having all of that which a backup generator cannot provide, but in a power outage, you'd probably rather just have the cheap gas generator, and maybe a $1000-ish "solar generator" (i.e. battery pack with inverter) that you can use to load-shift the generator. Run the genny during the day to charge the battery; run the fridge, lights, and phone charger from the battery overnight.
  - therealdrag0 2y ago
    There is no additional infrastructure for plugging a vehicle like Hyundai that supports V2L into a generator socket. Except a 20$ adaptor. You only get 15A from it but that’s enough to run key functions for 5 days silently and exhaust free.
    - loeg 2y ago
      V2L is very different from V2H, but sure, you could charge your laptop and phone or whatever.
      - therealdrag0 2y ago
        You can run your fridge and freezer, you can run your (gas) furnace, and your lights. That’s most people’s core requirements, and a typical car battery can do this for 5 days. I’ve also heard of people watching tv on it.
        fragmede 2y ago
        and TV these days often means laptop anyway.
        loeg 2y ago
        With a forest of extension cables? Or are you talking about powerizing the existing sockets (V2H)?
Galatians4_16 2y ago
Feed it to chickens and hogs!
AdamN 2y ago
This seems pretty wasteful. Going without electricity for a day really isn't such a burden and a freezer can last pretty long or if it doesn't there's rarely much of a problem with waste if you just eat the food in order.
- canadiantim 2y ago
  Risk management isn't a waste
  - njarboe 2y ago
    Too much is. How much to spend on it is the tricky part.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  The problem isn't going without electricity for a day, it's that you don't know if you will only have to do a day. Also keeping people out of the damn fridge. But that can be modified through other means.
- SamPatt 2y ago
  A backup generator is wasteful? Where do you live?
  - AdamN 2y ago
    Well now I live in Berlin and I'm not sure if I've experienced a power outage in 3 years. I remember a Swiss guy from Zurich that had only experience a one minute power outage in his entire life through 18 before moving out of the country. I met him in Nairobi and there electricity was out pretty much daily and a generator was de rigeur. I've lived in suburban America and never had a generator but my parents were 'pioneer stock' and we knew the methods: candles, fridge access extremely limited, warm blankets if Winter, etc...
jillesvangurp 2y ago
Getting fuel for your generator might be a challenge. Petrol stations tend to require electricity to operate their pumps. A less reactive and better long term plan would be investing in tech that simultaneously reduces your monthly electricity bills and makes you more resilient against grid failures: solar + battery. It's not a solution in the middle of a black out. But a great one for dealing with the next one. I have no idea how reliable the grid in Chile is. But even the southern tip is at -52 degrees latitude, which means their winters are about as dark as at +52 latitude, like Berlin, Germany where I live where solar power is very popular Anything in between (most of the US, except Alaska) gets enough sun hours to make solar panels a very useful fallback (with seasonal limitations obviously); and you can also keep your batteries topped up with grid power too using e.g. cheap off-peak power. A cheaper alternative could be to pick up a few portable batteries and solar panels from Amazon. You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro. Running the AC off such a setup is not going to be a thing. But you could run a small fridge for a half a day or so, keep phones laptops charged, and keep the lights on. Some people buy generators just so they can top up their batteries when solar falls short and run completely off-grid otherwise.
- asah 2y ago
  there's fuel stabilizer you can buy to store fuel for a year+, just calendar a reminder to use/replace once a year (good idea for other reasons).
- mindslight 2y ago
  Batteries are great if you can use them all of the time - eg V2G, grid load shifting, or if your utility won't buy generated solar power. Otherwise the capital cost is too high to have significant storage batteries sitting around idle waiting for an emergency. > You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro A petrol generator that will do this can be had for like $400.
  - bdcravens 2y ago
    You can of course use your batteries on a regular basis even without solar, and even offset your expenses by filling them up during lower-cost times if your utility provides that. Additionally, a good tri-fuel generator is often less than $1000 so you have power even if you can't get petrol.
asah 2y ago
meh - "By Wednesday, the government said that 90% of homes and businesses affected by the blackout had had their electricity restored, according to the Chilean National Electric Coordinator."
ASalazarMX 2y ago
The backup generator that needs periodic testing and maintenance whether you use it or not, and accommodations to store fuel safely if you want to be in full prep mode? If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  > The backup generator that needs periodic testing and maintenance whether you use it or not, and accommodations to store fuel safely if you want to be in full prep mode? Yep. > If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems. Happens several times a decade on the Atlantic coast of the US. Well, the days do, at least. Weeks, probably not.
bob1029 2y ago
A 2200W inverter generator + 2000WH battery can carry most households for a week before you need to do any serious maintenance on the unit. About 3 gallons of fuel per day and a mid-week oil change is all you need during operation. You can often run off the battery alone while everyone sleeps at night. The battery you can keep charged, and the generator you can keep new in the box until you actually think you'll be in a prolonged outage. You can run fridge, internet, lamps off the battery for a solid day. The #1 thing that screws people with the small engines is maintenance after some initial amount of usage. Gasoline turns into jello in the fuel system after a ~year in storage. Oil needs to be changed frequently. Don't run gas through that small engine unless you really think you'll need it. LP/LNG is much cleaner, but can be harder to obtain and use. I think of these small inverter generators as a one use/emergency item. Once I fire it up, it's on a 200 hour death timer. It only costs around $600 for a brand new unit. Catastrophic, multi-day outages don't happen often.
iAMkenough 2y ago
When my family had a windstorm take out our lines for an entire week and we had to toss food, we opted to go for a battery-operated cooler/freezer that charges off 100W solar. Bonus is that we can take it camping too.

noisy_boy 2y ago

Or a lot of impromptu parties...

ourmandave 2y ago
By candle light.

BLubliulu 2y ago

Get an EV instead. Use it for bi-directional charging, buy PV to reduce your dependency and energy bill and a heat pump to be independent of oil/gas companies.

officialchicken 2y ago
That's a terrible suggestion. A car is 20x the price of a generator while and at least 10x larger. A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc. A car is a transportation device, not a stationary energy generation machine designed as a backup in case of power failure.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > A car can't power an entire household for days on end This is underestimating the ludicrous amount of power an EV's batteries have. You can absolutely power your house for days on end using one. (Of course, that should also give us pause to think about what it means that we spend so much energy for transportation compared to household necessities.) And gasoline has plenty of problems too, like its extremely short shelf-life.
  - whartung 2y ago
    I have two Tesla Powerwalls in my garage, and they (among other things) do just this. I look at the size of those, and the size of a random Tesla, and I can easily see two of these shoved into the baseboard of a Tesla, much less the larger vehicles. I know the Ford Lightning was advertised as a potential back up power source for the home. The real trick is getting the power out of the battery and in to the home itself. It's one thing to run an extension cord to the refrigerator, quite another to get the battery plugged into your home circuitry. That requires more preparation, as well as an electrician.
    - qwerpy 2y ago
      Cheap way to power the home directly is to get a generator inlet put in ($500-1000) and connect the vehicle to that. You can then use either a vehicle or a gas generator, which is useful during extended outages when you need to top up the car. Expensive way is to get some manufacturer specific automatic transfer switch (I got Tesla's put in). The hardware is $2500 and the labor is $4K+. I did both and used both during a recent week long outage.
  - GiorgioG 2y ago
    You underestimate the ludicrous amount of power people use. In January (no A/C used) in my home we used 46kWh per day on average.
  - mbesto 2y ago
    4 bedroom house in Austin, TX. A hot summer is around 100 kWh and my Rivian battery is 135 kWh. Which means I can roughly get a one full summer day out of my car's battery (assuming I still need to drive the car and usually leave it at 70% max). So there you have it, I get about one full day. Not "days on end".
    - qwerpy 2y ago
      That's on the higher end of household usage. On the lower end, during a cold windstorm in the PNW I was able to get it down to 600W (15 kWh/day) because I have mostly natural gas appliances. My Cybertruck kept us going for nearly a week with just one top-up (because I don't like to go above 80% or below 20%). We deferred using the dryer and dishwasher, and relied on the fireplace for warmth instead of the HVAC. On a hot day yeah I'd be running the A/C but ideally you'd have solar to offset much of that.
- fhdkweig 2y ago
  Tech Connections did a video showing exactly this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO5fJ8z66Z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO5fJ8z66Z8
- cloverich 2y ago
  > A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc Average home uses 30kwH / day. Average EV battery size 40kwh. Correct not days on end, but at least a full day to full capacity, and perhaps a few days at reduced capacity. My Ioniq 5 has an 84kwH battery so I guess I'd get a bit further.
  - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
    kWh
mikestew 2y ago
Get an EV instead Be choosy about the EV, not all of them have this feature (Tesla, for instance, doesn’t last I checked). That said, after we got our Hyundai (and the vehicle-to-load adapter), I sold our generator to a neighbor. Less than a year later, we both got to test our electrical backups. Hopefully you were going to buy an EV anyway, because a nice generator is about $1000. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 is considerably more than that.
- loeg 2y ago
  In the US, almost no vehicles support bidirectional / V2H. It's only the F150 Lightning, I think. (Hyundai/Kia and most others are V2L only.)
- ronnier 2y ago
  Cyber truck does
- qwerpy 2y ago
  We had a nearly week long power outage due to a windstorm. Tesla has a power gateway, only usable by Cybertruck for now. that detects grid failures and automatically fails over the entire house to vehicle power. My Cybertruck (123 kWh) kept my house powered (15 kWh/day - natural gas took care of hot water, heating, and cooking) for almost all of that, with a one-time top-up at a friend's house.
kibwen 2y ago
Remember that having PV isn't enough, you also need to have the circuitry to disconnect your house from the grid, because your personal panels probably don't have the capacity to power the entire grid on their own (plus it wouldn't be safe for line workers to have random pockets of energy in a grid that's supposed to be down).
aftbit 2y ago
Hardware store backup generator => $500 - $2000 vs EV => $8000 - $40000 Bidirectional charging infra => $2000 - $5000 PV => $5000 - $15000 Heat pump => $5000 - $10000 That's an awful lot of money that you're proposing people spend in order to cover a rare occurrence. Of course there's day-to-day value in having all of that which a backup generator cannot provide, but in a power outage, you'd probably rather just have the cheap gas generator, and maybe a $1000-ish "solar generator" (i.e. battery pack with inverter) that you can use to load-shift the generator. Run the genny during the day to charge the battery; run the fridge, lights, and phone charger from the battery overnight.
- therealdrag0 2y ago
  There is no additional infrastructure for plugging a vehicle like Hyundai that supports V2L into a generator socket. Except a 20$ adaptor. You only get 15A from it but that’s enough to run key functions for 5 days silently and exhaust free.
  - loeg 2y ago
    V2L is very different from V2H, but sure, you could charge your laptop and phone or whatever.
    - therealdrag0 2y ago
      You can run your fridge and freezer, you can run your (gas) furnace, and your lights. That’s most people’s core requirements, and a typical car battery can do this for 5 days. I’ve also heard of people watching tv on it.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        and TV these days often means laptop anyway.
      - loeg 2y ago
        With a forest of extension cables? Or are you talking about powerizing the existing sockets (V2H)?

Galatians4_16 2y ago

Feed it to chickens and hogs!

AdamN 2y ago

This seems pretty wasteful. Going without electricity for a day really isn't such a burden and a freezer can last pretty long or if it doesn't there's rarely much of a problem with waste if you just eat the food in order.

canadiantim 2y ago
Risk management isn't a waste
- njarboe 2y ago
  Too much is. How much to spend on it is the tricky part.
lenerdenator 2y ago
The problem isn't going without electricity for a day, it's that you don't know if you will only have to do a day. Also keeping people out of the damn fridge. But that can be modified through other means.
SamPatt 2y ago
A backup generator is wasteful? Where do you live?
- AdamN 2y ago
  Well now I live in Berlin and I'm not sure if I've experienced a power outage in 3 years. I remember a Swiss guy from Zurich that had only experience a one minute power outage in his entire life through 18 before moving out of the country. I met him in Nairobi and there electricity was out pretty much daily and a generator was de rigeur. I've lived in suburban America and never had a generator but my parents were 'pioneer stock' and we knew the methods: candles, fridge access extremely limited, warm blankets if Winter, etc...

jillesvangurp 2y ago

Getting fuel for your generator might be a challenge. Petrol stations tend to require electricity to operate their pumps. A less reactive and better long term plan would be investing in tech that simultaneously reduces your monthly electricity bills and makes you more resilient against grid failures: solar + battery. It's not a solution in the middle of a black out. But a great one for dealing with the next one. I have no idea how reliable the grid in Chile is. But even the southern tip is at -52 degrees latitude, which means their winters are about as dark as at +52 latitude, like Berlin, Germany where I live where solar power is very popular Anything in between (most of the US, except Alaska) gets enough sun hours to make solar panels a very useful fallback (with seasonal limitations obviously); and you can also keep your batteries topped up with grid power too using e.g. cheap off-peak power. A cheaper alternative could be to pick up a few portable batteries and solar panels from Amazon. You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro. Running the AC off such a setup is not going to be a thing. But you could run a small fridge for a half a day or so, keep phones laptops charged, and keep the lights on. Some people buy generators just so they can top up their batteries when solar falls short and run completely off-grid otherwise.

asah 2y ago
there's fuel stabilizer you can buy to store fuel for a year+, just calendar a reminder to use/replace once a year (good idea for other reasons).
mindslight 2y ago
Batteries are great if you can use them all of the time - eg V2G, grid load shifting, or if your utility won't buy generated solar power. Otherwise the capital cost is too high to have significant storage batteries sitting around idle waiting for an emergency. > You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro A petrol generator that will do this can be had for like $400.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  You can of course use your batteries on a regular basis even without solar, and even offset your expenses by filling them up during lower-cost times if your utility provides that. Additionally, a good tri-fuel generator is often less than $1000 so you have power even if you can't get petrol.

asah 2y ago

meh - "By Wednesday, the government said that 90% of homes and businesses affected by the blackout had had their electricity restored, according to the Chilean National Electric Coordinator."

ASalazarMX 2y ago

The backup generator that needs periodic testing and maintenance whether you use it or not, and accommodations to store fuel safely if you want to be in full prep mode? If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems.

lenerdenator 2y ago
> The backup generator that needs periodic testing and maintenance whether you use it or not, and accommodations to store fuel safely if you want to be in full prep mode? Yep. > If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems. Happens several times a decade on the Atlantic coast of the US. Well, the days do, at least. Weeks, probably not.

bob1029 2y ago

A 2200W inverter generator + 2000WH battery can carry most households for a week before you need to do any serious maintenance on the unit. About 3 gallons of fuel per day and a mid-week oil change is all you need during operation. You can often run off the battery alone while everyone sleeps at night. The battery you can keep charged, and the generator you can keep new in the box until you actually think you'll be in a prolonged outage. You can run fridge, internet, lamps off the battery for a solid day. The #1 thing that screws people with the small engines is maintenance after some initial amount of usage. Gasoline turns into jello in the fuel system after a ~year in storage. Oil needs to be changed frequently. Don't run gas through that small engine unless you really think you'll need it. LP/LNG is much cleaner, but can be harder to obtain and use. I think of these small inverter generators as a one use/emergency item. Once I fire it up, it's on a 200 hour death timer. It only costs around $600 for a brand new unit. Catastrophic, multi-day outages don't happen often.

iAMkenough 2y ago

When my family had a windstorm take out our lines for an entire week and we had to toss food, we opted to go for a battery-operated cooler/freezer that charges off 100W solar. Bonus is that we can take it camping too.