Tim Holloway

The best reason to avoid Tesla right now is that it is headed by someone who has come off the rails, and not in a good way. No sense in funding such antics.

The second-best reason would be that apparently the Tesla vehicles are generally constructed with a quality level that would embarrass GM circa 1980. It probably doesn´t help that Tesla employees are not well-treated on the whole, and slaves (real or figurative) often get their revenge in the quality of their work.

That said, as far as I know, no Powerwall has burned anyone's house down.

It would depend a lot on whether your solar panels are smart or dumb, but for dumb panels I could just attach a plug to the charge controller and matching connectors to each power bank. I highly recommend a polarize connector like those 2-wire ones common in automobile wiring to avoid accidents.

By dumb, I mean that the panel is just the photovoltaics with that wire straight to the charge controller as opposed to something that comes with its own inverter or other onboard/near-board electronics.

A note on small-system batteries. I started with a deep-cycle marine-style battery and it failed less than a year in despite never having seen a load. Probably just a bad battery. I replaced it with an AGW from Renogy (a respected name in solar) and that battery is still doing fine.

I've been using lead-acid because the battery lives in an unsecured cabinet and a cheaper battery is less attractive to thieves (or at least less expensive to replace). As other battery technologies get more mature/cheaper, I´d like to move up, but what I have is sufficient.

The best people to ask about Powerwalls are those who used them during the Texas Freeze.

Like Eric, I built a mini-system from the ground up. There are limits to what amounts of electrical force I'm comfortable handling.

The other advantage for the mini-system being that in the Free State of Florida, a backup system that connects to your house wiring not only has to interface safely to the mains (please don't fry the linemen!) but is also subject to meddling by the state's electric utilities. All my stuff is totally separate from the house wiring.

You should be able to charge a PowerWall from panels, though to get the best price you may have to hurry. Once the new beautiful regulations kick in, your cheapest alternative is probably going to be a coal-fired steam generator.

I tend to grind my teeth when I hear "Solar power generator". What those things really are are battery/inverter all-in-ones and they don't "generate" squat. They have to get their batteries charged from external panels (usually sold separately) or the mains.  That said, I did just order a small one for my wife. She has been frustrated by having to unplug her piano when thunder rolls in and doesn't like it when she asks when it will stop and I answer "October".

As time progresses, I expect to see better bargains on both solar and batteries. Stuff being retired from primary duty is still good enough to run lesser loads, though at the moment, even used EV batteries aren't cheap.

I'm not prepping for the Zombie Apocalypse. But storm outages do happen here and I just wanted to be able to live normally outside of the loss of service.

While I did a lot of pickling this year and some dehydrating, frozen dinners are still a convenience on occasion. I do try to reduce the freezer inventory come storm season, but there are limits, so I just needed a way to keep the really essential items frozen until the grid comes back up or I eat them all, whichever comes first.

I also triage, I keep flour in the freezer to minimize it getting stale. That can go to room temperature. Frozen vegetables can go in the ice chest and eventually thaw if the mini-freezer is full. Refrigerator contents likewise triage. The carrots and celery really just need a little cool. Quite a few of the condiments really don´t require refrigeration at all - it's just recommended. stuff like cheese can get by on merely-cool as well.

The goal is to minimize the amount of stuff that I have to throw out if the lights are off for a week. The fridge is safe for about 3 days and I have temperature alarms on it. So I think I probably can handle it.

Also , I like to keep what I call ¨Indian MRE's¨. This is the stuff that comes in shelf-stable pouches and pretty well provide a full meal, although some rice or roti on the side makes it more balanced. I used to pick these up cheap at the local Indian grocer, but some are now in the International section of my local supermarket.

Being in a major metro area, the longest sustained storm outage I've had to deal with so far was about 5 days. I tried to bring all my frozen foods into the fridge at work, but the freezer didn't work in their unit. Grrr.

I don't feel the need to pretend that life is normal in such situations and don't have anything as ambitious as a powerwall, but after enough outages I learned what the essentials were and have built up accordingly. Cooking via camp stove or charcoal grill (or solar - my automobile dashboard clocks at over 145 degrees!), light via LED lights with solar-recharged, hot water from a camp shower. USB fans for after the post-storm coolness passes. Raspberry Pi powered off 12 UPS battery, solar recharged via a 25W panel, ditto for charging phones/tablets, etc.

The hardest part was saving the refrigerator. It would take about 3600W for a generator that would get used only once every 2-3 years so the seals rot and gasoline drips on the hot motor. And the gas stations are all going to be useless when you run out. So I got some solar panels, an inverter and an icemaker.

Back when my last-but-one refrigerator died I lived out of an ice chest for about a week and estimated that I needed about 10lbs of ice per day to keep it going. The current crop of tabletop icemakers can spit out 28 lbs of ice in 24 hours and mine pulls only 104 watts, so with a better-insulated ice chest I figured I was set. Until last September when I fired it up and the water line clogged and the ice was grossly undersized. A replacement pump and better line routing have fixed that, but when I saw ads for refrigerator/freezers that run straight off 12V for about the same price, I jumped.

It's not a large unit, but it will hold all the frozen dinners and keep them at -4 degrees F. And, unlike the icemaker, runs straight from the solar battery with no need for an inverter. And it pulls about 48 Watts.

It's not as impressive as a multi-kilowatt keep-the-AC-running system, but it's cheap and addresses the essentials. Just by way of comparison.


To run a full-sized refrigerator, the old figure I'd heard was to expect a draw of about 1KW/hr. Probably newer ones do better, but I cannot easily get to my power cord to measure what I'm currently using.  Note that KW/hr per day is only meaningful when computing your electric bill. KWH can tell you how fast you'll draw down the batteries, but the ultimate factor is the max amperage (Watts) the unit requires. My icemaker nominally draws 104 Watts, but when the compressor motor first kicks in, it spikes to about 600W. I have to get a 1KW inverter to run it because even a 500W inverter would trip on that overload, even though it probably only lasts a few milliseconds. The same restrictions apply to large refrigeration units as well. You can avoid this problem by getting a propane-powered refrigerator, but they tend to be overpriced and under-sized due to lack of popular market interest (except in camping units).

Like Rich, I'm suspecting that the intent was to use an incandescent light to both illuminate/indicate and to provide a heat source.

Incandescent lights are notoriously inefficient at both.

There are innumerable LED solutions that can run off 3-12 volts including replacements for flashlight bulbs and strip lights. All dirt cheap and very energy efficient.

If you need one to turn on or off at a given temperature and cannot find a suitable ready-made temperature-controlled switch, I can provide info on a build-your own, since that's been a major occupation for me for the last few years. I can even set up a system that sends alerts over Bluetooth, WiFi, or if longer range is needed, LoRa. Parts under $50, and sometimes maybe even under $10 (excluding labor).

If heating is required, I'd do with a 12V heater element with a battery/solar panel/charge controller. The same electronics I mentioned above can easily turn that on and off as well.