More toys to play with - or hopefully not to play with, as this is an emergency back-up system.
This village was once notorious for lengthy power cuts, I'm told, but over 20 years ago the grid supply was upgraded and run underground. In all my time here I haven't had a single really worrying outage, although on my very first evening here, just getting ready for bed, surrounded by boxes, it did go out and stayed out until about three in the morning. But that's probably the worst one I remember.
However, you never know. Now I have a home battery, whenever there's a bad storm I think, this is nuts. Plenty electricity, but it won't work without mains input. This is just silly. So I've splashed out on an EPS facility to add to the system. If the power goes out, the central heating boiler will continue to operate from the home battery (and that will heat the water tank as well), and I have a double power point in the fuse box cupboard that will be live. From that I can run extension leads into the living room and kitchen to power the necessities. So now I think, how would I operate this if it ever turns out to be needed? I'm thinking maybe a four-socket extension lead from each of the live sockets.
Living room
- table lamp
- TV
- computer (has a battery so could be plugged in intermittently)
- landline phone (might need 2 sockets with the new system)
Kitchen
- table lamp
- wifi router (in hall just outside the kitchen, essential
- kettle, microwave, toaster really only need one socket as they won't all be plugged in together
- chargers for phone and so on
That would probably work OK. Then at night, in a prolonged outage, the fridge and the freezer could be plugged in overnight and the'd hold their temperature reasonably well during the day. I'd just need to watch that just about everything else was turned off if I wanted to boil the kettle, or I'd trip something. The battery won't deliver much more than 3.5 kw.
I'd also have the option of running another extension cable in from the car and using that directly - as I did this morning when the whole system was off for the installation. I was able to hand the electrician a mug of hot coffee while he was working with the electricity off.
I usually sleep upstairs, where it would be difficult to get an extension lead, but I could move into a downstairs bedroom for the duration and get power in there for a light and an electric blanket (these things always seem to happen when it's cold).
For a day or so this would be absolutely fine, but what if it was more prolonged? (A friend of mine lost power in Sussex for a fortnight after the big storm of '88.) So long as there's a working charger close enough I could go get more electricity there. There's a big motorway service station with a stack of Applegreen chargers about 22 miles away, and Edinburgh is closer than that. However, I have no way (at the moment anyway) of getting power from the car into the home battery. I have no real idea what the boiler takes in a day - it depends on how hard it's working, and of course it cycles on and off.
The solar will provide a top-up for the home battery during the day, but if the weather is bad I think it's possible it won't be enough. Of course I could run everything but the boiler directly from the car and just keep whatever is in the home battery for the heating, and probably over the days there would be enough solar.
I have to beware of hoping there will be a power cut just to try this out! It's just in case, for an emergency. But I do need to think about what I would do, to be prepared just in case.
But have fully powered my EV directly from excess solar since I got it nearly 6 months ago
