home battery bank question

Steven, you do great work. I started listening to you on TSP and love the enthusiasm you bring to alternative energy.

My question is; what is a good size battery system (how many GC2s) that I could power my whole house from? I don want to run the electric oven or any HVAC. I just want to be able to flip a switch in the basement to power lights, refrigerator, etc. for a few days in the event of a power outage.

Also, I'd like to have them hooked up to a few solar panels and a charge controller to keep them topped off. Do you have a recommendation for the number of panels needed per set of GC2s?

Thanks for everything you do,

Nick

The first thing that you will need to do is audit how much energy you use. You might need to manually check the wattage of every thing you use and total the time every thing is used getting your average KW.

Alternatively you could use the billing info from your utility company but if you have electric heat, stove, and and AC it will be higher than you need if not running those from a battery bank.

I just looked at the stats from my utility company and the average for the last 13 months is 16.98kw daily. If I exclude the months that the AC is on the avg is closer to 15kw.
I have gas heat and stove but we do use electric oil filled heaters over the winter so that is giving me higher numbers than would be needed.

a grid tie system is the siren song for suckers. Can't tell you the number of people who have written me crying and crying that they spent a big portion of their life savings on a grid time system from some slick salesman and now that the numbers have been rolling in, they are not ever going to get their money back. There is a reason you don't see them on my house...they don't work financially. Nor will you see them on all of the houses in America, because they do not financially work. You are NOT going to get your money back in 8 years and you are NOT going to wipe out your carbon foot print because you NEVER considered the incredible amount of electric that it takes to grow the silicon for the solar panels.

Solar panels are for Energy Independence ONLY. If you want to pay that price to be off grid, then great. Do so, but have no illusions about the money it will cost.

Steve

And yet they are the major source of my monthly income.