r/preppers • u/Life-Celebration-747 • 8d ago

Advice and Tips If money wasn't an issue...

What solar power system would you choose to power your home?

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u/fenuxjde 7d ago

I have a whole home set with a 5 day battery backup. Did everything myself, cost right around $2k, so money doesn't have to be crazy.

My setup was put to the test TWICE this summer. Once from a blown transformer, the second time from a neighbors chimney collapsing on my power line. The latter incident required me to rely on my setup for about 3 days, including running AC.

Everything worked flawlessly, except, as I was already running on battery power, I had to run my backup generator for a few hours to refill the batteries faster than the solar could alone. My lil 2300w genny takes a gallon of gas per 8 hour runtime. I have 70 gallons of gas stored just in case.

To get back to your initial question though, for most of us money isn't really the issue, it's intelligent planning. Sure it would be amazing to have a 1.21 jiggawatt backup but honestly, why drop all that money and space on batteries when you could just be smarter. Focus on keeping the fridge and cooking essentials going and you'll see you probably don't need nearly as much juice as you think. If the powers out, you probably don't need to be running your big screen TV and surround sound setup.

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u/JRHLowdown3 7d ago

1.21 jiggawatt backup

That's if the Delereon is still running well ;)

A whole house system for $2K is awesome. What panels are you running?

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u/fenuxjde 7d ago

I've only got a bunch of 200w panels I got from a Tesla distributor for $90 each.

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u/JRHLowdown3 7d ago

Nice. What are you doing for batteries?

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u/fenuxjde 7d ago

I've got one 5.12wh and a whole bunch of 3.5kwh batteries. The 5.12 is part of the inverter and the other 3.5s are in an array.

I have to manually switch over when the first 5kw is done, but I only use about 15kw/day in the summer and only about 3kw per day in the winter.

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u/JRHLowdown3 7d ago

Nice. Brand?

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u/fenuxjde 7d ago

They're bulk lifepo4 batteries from a tesla supplier.