Battery backup without solar?

[RedModel3]

I'm trying to find a solution for emergency backup for my 3200 sq ft house. If it were just me in the house, I wouldn't bother. I've been through many power outages. However, I have two tenants in two other apartments, so I really want to have some kind of backup. There's a supercharger about a mile away by a hospital, so I'm not worried about not being able to charge my car.

I can get a backup gas generator and update my electrical panel for about 16K. Ideally, I really don't want to be burning anything, and I would prefer battery storage. However, I have a complicated situation with my solar panels (5 years old, 9.86 kWp). When I installed the system, TVA was offering a buy back plan, and batteries weren't really a thing yet, so I went with that. If I want to remain a part of the TVA agreement, then adding more panels to charge batteries would have been prohibitively expensive.

Yet another option would be to leave the TVA program, but I would lose financial benefits. The final option, it seems, would be to simply install a battery (or two) that I would charge from the grid. Does anyone have experience doing this? It's not ideal, because you can't predict the weather, and I wouldn't be able to charge from the solar panels. My solar installer does NOT recommend a PW3 because of a limitation of how the panels feed to it.


Suggestions?

 

[jjrandorin]

I'm trying to find a solution for emergency backup for my 3200 sq ft house. If it were just me in the house, I wouldn't bother. I've been through many power outages. However, I have two tenants in two other apartments, so I really want to have some kind of backup. There's a supercharger about a mile away by a hospital, so I'm not worried about not being able to charge my car.

I can get a backup gas generator and update my electrical panel for about 16K. Ideally, I really don't want to be burning anything, and I would prefer battery storage. However, I have a complicated situation with my solar panels (5 years old, 9.86 kWp). When I installed the system, TVA was offering a buy back plan, and batteries weren't really a thing yet, so I went with that. If I want to remain a part of the TVA agreement, then adding more panels to charge batteries would have been prohibitively expensive.

Yet another option would be to leave the TVA program, but I would lose financial benefits. The final option, it seems, would be to simply install a battery (or two) that I would charge from the grid. Does anyone have experience doing this? It's not ideal, because you can't predict the weather, and I wouldn't be able to charge from the solar panels. My solar installer does NOT recommend a PW3 because of a limitation of how the panels feed to it.


Suggestions?

In plain terms, I would suggest forgetting the battery and going forward with the backup gas generator option since the goal is power for both you and your tenents in a power outage.

You can do batteries without solar, but you already have solar, so your house isnt "batteries without solar" its "batteries installed on current house specifically not connected to existing solar". I wouldnt do it that way, for sure, because its a bunch of extra complexity for a system that doesnt function the way these systems (solar + battery) normally function.

The generator accomplishes what you want.

 

[arnolddeleon]

You might want to consider the non-grid interactive solutions from the likes of Anker and Ecoflow (and other brands I'm not remembering at the moment). I have no experience with these, just seen and ads and watched a few videos about them. The key thing is they primarily intended to just provide backup power (vs selling power to the grid). They have large configurations that can do whole house backups or they can be treated just like portable generators.