Back-up Power for Emergency and Essential Loads. Designed to provide power when the grid is knocked out or is unavailable.

What kind of backup power do you need?

Battery stored backup power allows you to use certain (or all) appliances when utility provided grid electricity is not available.

There are three main applications for backup power:

1. Emergency Battery Backup Power. The Emergency Backup Power packages on this page are designed to provide power for home or business when the grid is knocked out by natural disaster, or when there are rolling blackouts. These systems are also appropriate for remote cabins or homes or telecommunication systems where no grid power is available. They are essentially small offgrid power systems which can operate independent of the grid when the grid is not available if you add solar panels or another source of power.

2. Battery Backup Power can be added alongside an existing grid intertied solar power system. When the grid goes down, a gridtie solar system goes down, too, unless you have added a bank of batteries and planned for an additional source of electricity generation. The extra source of electricity may be a gas generator or additional solar panels. These simple battery backup power systems do not make use of your existing gridtied solar panel array(s). See sample packages of complete Battery Backup Power for Solar Gridtie.

3. Gridtie to Offgrid. Backup power that is AC coupled to your Gridtie Solar Power System. Also for homes and businesses, these packages recharge your battery bank with the solar panels of your gridtie system. This gives you independence from the grid during emergencies or whenever you want!

Of course, the irony of the fact that we sell battery backup systems and, in fact, have a warehouse full of the parts you need to set up these simple lifesavers hit us smack in the face. Oh well, oh well.

The first couple of days with no power were okay. We moved stuff from the ‘frig to a cooler out in the snow. Our house held its heat pretty well, and we could cook on the propane fed kitchen stove. But by the third day of no power, the bedroom temps were around 40 degrees at night. Brrrrrrrrrr! Unlike many of the homes in this area, we do not have a wood-burning stove. Our hydronic baseboard heaters rely on electricity to power a pump. Time for action!

We were lucky to have access to heavy-duty 200 amp hour 6-volt DC batteries. We picked up six UPG batteries and a Magnum sine wave inverter/charger from the warehouse and plopped them onto the bedroom floor close to our utility room.

The UPG’s are sealed batteries so we didn’t have to worry about leakage. The inverter’s job is to convert the DC electricity coming from the batteries into AC electricity, which can power our house. These Magnum inverters/chargers are really smart; they can charge batteries from grid electricity or from solar panels or from a gas or propane generator and then feed the electricity right where you need it.

Luckily, also, when we wired our house we planned to add a battery back up system later. We had separated out the essential appliances we want to be able to power in emergency: the water pump, the heater pump for our hydronic baseboard heaters, and the plugs in our office so we can run computers and phone. But you can just as easily run a cord with multiple plugs.

From past experience living entirely off the grid with solar electricity, we know that refrigerators and electrical appliances with heat elements are huge energy draws and so we did not plan to power them in an emergency.

Took Mark about an hour to wire the batteries into a 12-volt configuration, connect them to the inverter/charger and run a wire to our breaker box. Flipped the switch and, bingo, the water pump started refilling the pressure tank, the heat pump started up, and the house heated up. We were able to run the essential appliances for the next two days simply on the energy from the batteries, without recharging them. If the power had been out for much longer we would have charged them with solar panels or with a gas generator.

We really don’t like the idea of using a gas generator because they are messy, unreliable and hard to start (unless you spend really big bucks), and they depend on a non-renewable fuel that is in limited supply here during extreme weather conditions. A couple of weeks past the big storm, we’ve installed one of our Wholesale Solar battery backup systems that includes a Magnum Sinewave inverter and UPG sealed batteries in a slick attractive cabinet. We found room in a closet near the breaker box to put it all. We’ll remember this winter storm for a long time, and we’ll be better prepared next time.

This handsome Midnite Solar battery enclosure (with lock) easily holds eight 6 volt batteries, the Magnum inverter and safety disconnects.

The battery monitor is mounted on the wall in our hallway so we can keep an eye on the battery charge.  Batteries for our system are kept charged by grid power.  If power is out for too long I'll show you how we use solar panels to charge the batteries!