Power outages can occur both expectedly and unexpectedly which disrupt our daily lives. Having a properly sized battery backup system can provide numerous benefits, particularly in terms of security and quality of life.
In this article we review the reasons for investing in a battery backup system, considerations for sizing your system and how to calculate your ideal system size.
Reasons for investing in a battery backup system
Security
During a power outage, maintaining a certain level of security becomes crucial. Adequate lighting is essential for visibility reducing crime and preventing accidents. With a battery backup system, you can keep important areas illuminated, such as entryways, hallways, and security cameras, ensuring the safety of your family and property.
Emergency Communication
Staying connected during emergencies is vital. A battery backup system can power communication devices, such as mobile phones, and internet routers, enabling you to stay in touch with emergency services, loved ones, and receive important updates.
Preserving Food and Medications
Power outages can pose a threat to the freshness and safety of refrigerated and frozen food. A fridge powered by a battery backup system can keep your perishables at the proper temperature, preventing spoilage and potential health risks. Additionally, if you rely on refrigerated medications, a battery backup system ensures their integrity and effectiveness during power interruptions.
Comfort and Well-being
Load Shedding and outages doesn't have to mean discomfort and inconvenience. With a battery backup system, you can power essential devices like fans, heating systems, and air purifiers, maintaining a comfortable environment. This is particularly important for individuals with health conditions, such as respiratory issues or temperature sensitivities, ensuring their well-being during outages. It will also reduce potential stress in having to plan your life around load shedding.
Investing in a quality battery backup system tailored to your specific needs is key to reaping these benefits. By properly sizing your system, you can ensure that it meets the power requirements of your essential loads, providing you with reliable backup power when you need it the most.
Remember, a battery backup system is a long-term investment in your security and quality of life. Prioritize quality and reputable manufacturers to ensure the reliability, durability, and performance of the system.
The Need for Proper Sizing of Battery Backup Systems
When it comes to choosing a battery backup system for your essential loads, proper sizing is crucial to ensure reliable and effective backup power. While many people focus on the basic essentials like lights, TV, fridge, and plugs, there are other appliances that are often overlooked but can significantly impact the overall power requirements.
High-Powered Appliances
Some appliances, such as hair dryers, kettles, and heaters, have high power demands. Hair dryers, for example, can consume around 1,000 to 1,800 watts, while electric kettles can range from 1,200 to 2,700 watts. These high-powered appliances can quickly drain the battery capacity if used during a power outage or even cause an overload fault on smaller inverters. It's important to consider the power consumption of these appliances and factor them into your calculations when sizing a battery backup system.
Simultaneous Usage
Take into account the possibility of simultaneous usage of different appliances. For instance, you might have the TV running, lights turned on, and the kettle boiling water at the same time. This cumulative power consumption should be considered when determining the size of the battery backup system. Failure to account for simultaneous usage can lead to insufficient backup power, resulting in premature battery depletion and faults.
Future Needs and Lifestyle Changes
It's important to consider potential changes in your lifestyle or future appliance additions. Are you planning to purchase a larger TV or upgrade your appliances? Are there any changes in your household size that might increase the demand for power? Anticipating such changes can help you avoid outgrowing your system down the line. It's advisable to consider a system with some flexibility to accommodate future needs.
Remember, the goal is to size the battery backup system to meet your power requirements comfortably. Oversizing the system can be costly, while undersizing it may result in insufficient backup power and continuous inverter overloads. By accounting for commonly overlooked appliances like hair dryers, kettles, and other high-powered devices, you can make more accurate calculations and ensure your battery backup system can handle the load during an outage.
Calculating the size of your ideal system
When considering these factors, you can obtain a more accurate assessment of your power needs. Let's take a typical household with interior lights, exterior lights, a fridge, and a TV running, which could draw around 1000W. If you add a heater or air conditioning to that, the load could easily reach 3500W or more. Furthermore, boiling a standard 1.7-liter kettle alone can exceed 5000W. Understanding your household's peak power consumption is crucial for sizing the inverter and battery correctly, ensuring smooth operation of your backup system.
To determine the duration of backup needed, you can convert the power consumption of the appliances and electronics you want to keep powered into kilowatt-hours (kWh). Let's say your house draws a continuous 600W with lights, TV, and fridges, and you want to have backup power for 4 hours. Multiply the power consumption (600W) by the duration (4 hours), resulting in 2400Wh or 2.4kWh.
Now, let's consider that you also want to run an air conditioner simultaneously, which uses 1200W. This adds an additional load of 1200W, bringing the total load to 1800W. To power this setup for 4 hours, you would need 7.2kWh of battery storage.
When exploring different battery options, they are typically sized in kilowatt-hours (kWh), with most manufacturers offering them in 5kWh increments. It's important to note that most systems will shut down when the battery charge reaches 10% or 20%. For instance, if you have a 5kWh battery and the system shuts down at 20%, you will only have 4kWh of usable capacity.
By taking these considerations into account, you can ensure that your battery backup system is properly sized to provide reliable and adequate backup power for your essential loads, even when using appliances that are often overlooked during the sizing process.
Conclusion
The key steps to take when sizing a battery backup system is to take into account the total load that you want to backup, the duration that you want to backup for as well as what the potential peak power needed is going to be with switching on appliances such as a kettle or hair dryer.
With there being so many options out there it is important to consult with a professional not only on how to size the system to meet your needs, but also relying on their experience and expertise as to what brands work well together.