Hacker News Reader

Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

In the 90s, I had a couple of army surplus missile silo batteries. 1500lb each. and an 800lb forklift battery. With those charged up and bunch of ebay UPS systems wired to them, we had ~3kw for computers for 2 or three days.

View on HN

Generac-type natural gas electrical generating units wired into the power panel are increasingly popular in new housing developments of a certain financial range, and retrofitting of homes with those is happening too. Presumably the gas companies are expected to have functional pumps even in electrical outages. If a solar charged battery system like the Sunverge is used there is no dependence on external sources during an outage.

We got a Generac on our gas line installed and it's had about 5 uses so far... it's incredible. A battery system sounds pretty interesting too, but if you have the gas line already and are planning for normal outages (not prepper stuff) then for convenience, power and automation I doubt you can beat a good generator.

You’re probably fine without a battery as long as you don’t live in Texas. During their big winter power outage a few years back, all of the natural gas distribution was offline when the power went out.

The problem with the Generac solution as that there's still a 7-10 second gap between the grid failure and the generator coming online.

Good point, and it means the budget for a Generac-type system should include UPSes as needed to cover anything time sensitive.

What household load would be critical enough that it needs to be backed up by a generator and UPS? I can’t think of anything.

By household load I guess you aren't talking about the usual UPSes for computers & network gear, home entertainment systems, etc. where continual availability might be wanted.

We were out in the woods with no budget; donated surplus, redneck engineering, and a willingness to learn by burning was what got us through.

zap and hafta go peel a snake out of the bus bars in the battery shed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com