Man, thanks for taking the time to make videos during all this. I hope and pray everyone is paying attention to all the lessons learned from all the folks affected by this storm.
Really enjoy your videos. Watching and praying for all my internet friends in North Carolina in this trying time. Stay safe out there! Greetings from Nova Scotia.
About 8 years ago my mother’s neighborhood experienced a fairly serious snow storm. My mother did not live in a remote, rural area. Her house was in a Maryland suburb, about 25 miles out of Washington DC. It took Baltimore Gas and Electric 3 weeks to get power restored to her neighborhood. She had no heat, no water, no lights, no refrigeration. Having an alternative source of energy is essential! Thanks for sharing your experiences.
I have 7 Ecoflows, one Jackery and a Westinghouse. The ecoflow has pass thru charging. Also they charge really fast. Makes a big difference if you plan on topping the batteries off with a gas generator.
Eric, Thank you for making the video. I am close enough to be able to deliver some supplies and help some friends clean up . The damage there is incredible to observe. Not sure exactly what to do to make sure we are cleaning and restoring floors effectively. Mold might try to creep in . So much work to be done! Best wishes for you and the farm. Planning to return in a few days to help some more and deliver more supplies. The sad thing is most of the properties there are not insured....so folks need help from what I see. Lots of compassionate folks delivering food for pets and us workers and it is appreciated. God bless WNC and all the hurricane survivors trying to rebuild their lives.
Thank you- there are some in our county that it will be weeks more due to all the damage. There is one area where the road is gone and 200+ trees down. Total mess
Great update ! So happy the farm is doing well . Them power stations are great but there's features that can be very handy . Like that solar input charging wile you use power . Every watt of solar counts ! I run my radio stuff directly on battery .If I have solar or mains power then that goes into battery . The next hurricane is now a cat 5 going to Florida. Have many friends their. CB is getting threw from NY to FL . In times of real need CB still coming threw . Ham radio and GMRS/FRS/MURS radios helping as well. Cellphone's / internet go down and power grid. Radio still works ! The most reliable way to get info and send info is RADIO ! The best tool we have ! take care . Great video !
Wow, great insights into potential quirks with backup power systems. Thank you for sharing and I hope that you can get back to fairly normal soon. Good work on keeping things going around the house. That took a lot of work to get to where you are today. It seems to have paid off.
Thanks Erik for all the good info. If your viewers can learn anything from your recent experience it is that they should prepare for some level of disaster preparedness. While we do not live our everyday lives off-grid we could all find ourselves w/o water, power, and the ability to maintain our daily lives during any disastrous weather event. Also, folks need to have the ability to protect themselves and their families during these events. Prayers for you and your family during these hard times.
Very interesting to get your 'real world' view! Thank you. I'll keep pass-thru charging and amount of time to charge front and center as I look at portables!
Sorry to hear about all your problems Eric. I hope you can get things back up and running real soon for you and your wife's peace of mind. Having to live off grid is okay sometimes but then there's times it's not a whole lot of fun I know I've been there I was there last winter. Living completely off grid at a place called Inskip california. Living in some people I n e w s old hotel built in the mid-1800s because at the time I had nowhere else to go.. I'm doing better now though. I had a diesel generator up there at the old hotel but it quit working by midwinter and then I had no power. I did have propane though and was able to heat some water on the stove so I could at least get a shower. And I had a wood heater so I could stay warm in the hotel I was at 5,000 FT elevation and it was a pretty rough winter had a hard time getting out. Had to depend on friends that had four-wheel drive vehicles that could drive me down off the mountain into town to buy groceries and make my doctor's appointments. Turned out to be the worst winter of my life. I'm almost 69 years old and it was rough being up there all alone throughout the entire winter and all that cold and snow. And being that much off grid had no cable and no cell service. Although I did have a landline so I could contact people . Anyway that's enough about me. Hope everything is better for you and yours very soon.
Thanks, glad your back up to back up were there. Stay safe - I know they are working none stop for folks with the power. They are actually getting the young once hiking a country mile just to get to downed utility poles
Get a chest freezer when you replace the upright as they are more efficient. Keep an eye out for a military surplus diesel generator. Diesel has a longer shelf life than gas.
It appears you’re way ahead of the game so to speak during this ordeal. Always good to have a plan. Hopefully the utility company makes its way out of town towards you. 73s
Great lessons learned video. I have a similar setup to you. The flow through issue (charge while discharging) is a big deal. I have an investment in Oupes so I'll have to review their capability. Longest we have went so far is about 18 hours so I haven't had to top off with the generator yet. If you can get that power box working. I'd be interested to learn what you found. Keep charging. Later
Get a chest freezer and put a couple of gallon water jugs in to help stabilize the temperature. I have a 2000 watt inverter that I can connect to the Lithium batteries in my golf cart. Only buy a power unit that can charge and discharge at the same time. I have a boost converter to be able to charge my 36 volt golf cart bank from my solar panels. Thanks for the video .
I hope everything goes well where you are and power and other service are back up soon. I can charge my PowerOak (BLUETTI) EB240 (holds 2400 watt hour) while power is being taken. However it only charges at just over 210 watts while outputting 1000 watt. Thankfully I have two of the EB240's and a petrol generator. The generator produces 1000 watts, so two EB240 charge at a little over 400watt leaving 500 - 600 watts for other periferals.
Much better to put together a proper battery bank so you have cpacity. Those portable units are great but not really for day after day usage. That 1200 watt setup should put out plenty of amperage to keep a bank of deep cycle batteries fully charged. Run through a 2kw or 4kw invertor with a charge controller.
Great Video! I've been pushing using power stations precisely for that reason... you only need to run the generator maybe 2 hours a day (depending on the size of the power station) to charge up the station and save boat loads of gasoline. Throw in a few solar panels, and gasoline use drops even further! In emergencies, it is all about having flexibility, and options, and conservation, and you get all of that in spades with a few power stations and solar panels. Not bad considering the ad-hoc nature of all the systems you put together. I'm not a fan of VToMan's, personally... all my power stations can charge and discharge simultaneously and some of them are hitting 5 years old now with basically zero loss of capacity. -Matt
We dodged the bullet on Helene. We are about 60 miles west of where the storm went through GA and got virtually zero damage. Our power never even blinked. You're learning a couple of things through necessity. These "solar generators" are advancing rapidly, but there's a lot we need to understand about their limitations. Units that were purchased 2-3 years ago are woefully inadequate for power outages. I have 3. The first one i bought was the AC200MAX from Bluetti. It's great for running appliances and power tools, but the AC charge rate requires 4-5 hours, and that's way too much time if you need to recharge with a generator. The 2nd one was a Bluetti EB3a, a small station for running my router. It wrapped out after about 9 months. Bluetti replaced it, but it took a couple of weeks to get through that process. Things we all need to understand about these power stations. 2k watts sounds like a HUGE amount of power. It's not. A fridge or freezer will eat that up in one day. Fast charging is critical. Newer Bluetti or Ecoflow products can be charged at 1800+ watts, and that's critical when using a genny to recharge. Stations need to have UPS so you can use them in virtually all applications. Stations need to allow over-panel use. My AC200MAX charges via solar at 900 watts, but i can easily hook up 1200 watts of panels as long as I stay within the voltage limits. It will only accept 900 or so, but having 1200 available means I get more watts during cloudy conditions. Having a dual-fuel generator is the key to being comfortable during power outages that last several days. We can run portable ACs and all our 110 devices with a 5k generator. Alternative power options like solar and generator require some degree of power management. Unless you have a massive battery bank and large solar array, or a "whole house" backup generator that runs in natural gas, you'll need to control how much power you use. We have 2 refrigerators and 4 freezers full of food because we grow most of our food. We keep 200 pounds of propane and 25 gallons of gas on hand. We are on a farm, so we have the capacity to carry around 200 gallons of gas but have never kept that much. We run the gas through the mowers or just use it in our vehicles in order to keep it fresh. We have 3 generators. We have the 3 power stations, 4,000 watts of solar panels, and about a million feet of extension cords. We are as prepared as we can be. I guess...
Thanks for the update on your solar backups, very informative and helpful in future planning. I noticed your old C Band dish, is there still activity up there on C Band? I used to enjoy listening to audio feeds on C Band sub carriers back in the early 1990's. (Used a Drake SA-24 Stereo Adapter that a radio station no longer needed to tune program feeds). At that time there was a lot of audio in the clear, and still quite a bit of video.
What's your take on a modular system? Something like a battery bank, inverter, charge controller all separate, so you only replace portions of the entire system when they fail. I have a small array of Off-The-Shelf components like that, and it does charge while on load. Do you prefer the integrated units over something like that?
It was good of you to give out those four generators and gas to neighbors and help those of your neighbors, without the natural springs in the area, fill up from your spring.
Hey hope the power comes back up soon. Glad you're okay. I wanted to ask where I could get an antenna like I had back in the 80s it was called a big stick. I was able to talk all over the place with that stick.
I had an Antron 99 (still have it, just blew down one winter). I got an Antron because the better one (from what I've heard), IMAX 2000, wouldn't ship to my address. I've heard there may be one to top both, a Sirio GainMaster from Copper Electronics. I know nothing more about it. I was able to talk sixty miles on four watts with the Antron. Looks like Walcott Radio may have something you're looking for. Right Channel Radios MAY as well. Good Luck. Hear you out there.
If you purchased the All Power unit, call them before breaking into it. They're really good at helping diagnose problems and will take back some units for repair or replacement. If it was a giveaway for review, I look forward to a video about your attempts to repair it. I hope you can. Good luck and happy you all made it through this. We barely did. WNC is still fighting it out. We're doing our best down here in Spartanburg, SC to help our family and friends in NC, and soon FLA. As we all are learning, we have only each other. Our government is out on an extended lunch.
As much of a fan as I am of solar, you just about need a concrere bunker with replacement panels to keep an array viable through storms and general disaster. Back up generators and a stationary bicycle to keep stuff running while you fix the solar system.
I totally disagree. This setup has kept me running these past 12 days. Without it, I'd have to rely heavily on my generator and that means burning a lot of fuel and being stuck with power in only one spot. Solar is the eternal power source. Not something you can power everything with, but that wasn't the point of this setup in this configuration. Wind? Not here. We live in a fish bowl and as a result, we thankfully never get wind. I think you should take a look at solar as a prep, and not as a "Green" idea. I could care less about that, but wanted a silent power source here that would run for years if needed. It worked!
In an emergency there is nothing more precious than gasoline, so being able to reduce your consumption to 1/6th of what you would use without solar and storage is life-saving. And I think Helene has made that really really really clear to everyone. There was (and is) a stark, stark difference between households that had power stations and a bit of solar to augment their generators, and households that did not. (And we won't even mention the difference that starlink has made, as well, to many people's lives). You'd be hard pressed to argue against it in any sane way given the incredible amount of evidence showing just how good it is. -Matt
amazon is having a fall sale 8-9th i seen several different brands of solar generators are on super sale. Just wanted to pass that on. altho i feel kinda of dumb to say it being the situation. Sorry bout that.
If you hook your generator/solar up with a power cord to an outlet in your house. Don't forget to turn OFF THE MAIN BREAKER TO YOUR HOUSE. If you don't power can go out of your house and to the grid. Endangering linemen working to restore your power!
@@jeremydavis2595 the problem is that an interlock of any sort is useless when using a cheater cord to back feed.... UNLESS... the back feed is at the panel and going through a breaker tied to that interlock. Most people in this situation lean away from a transfer switch due to cost.
Most modern power stations use LiFePO4 batteries. They might not be cheap, but they absolutely last a long time. The cells easily last 15 years. There is no fade, you can use the full capacity. Those batteries are awesome so I can only believe that you've never actually used one. Now, I can't vouch for all the power electronics that also go into those boxes. But the basic battery technology is incredibly good... orders of magnitude better than lead acid. It isn't even a question these days.
Man, thanks for taking the time to make videos during all this. I hope and pray everyone is paying attention to all the lessons learned from all the folks affected by this storm.
Absolutely. There's a lot to Learn and now is the Time
Really enjoy your videos. Watching and praying for all my internet friends in North Carolina in this trying time. Stay safe out there! Greetings from Nova Scotia.
About 8 years ago my mother’s neighborhood experienced a fairly serious snow storm. My mother did not live in a remote, rural area. Her house was in a Maryland suburb, about 25 miles out of Washington DC. It took Baltimore Gas and Electric 3 weeks to get power restored to her neighborhood. She had no heat, no water, no lights, no refrigeration. Having an alternative source of energy is essential! Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Incredible. Feels like reporting from the front lines of a conflict. The rubber meets the road and you learn the truth of your systems and products
I have 7 Ecoflows, one Jackery and a Westinghouse. The ecoflow has pass thru charging. Also they charge really fast. Makes a big difference if you plan on topping the batteries off with a gas generator.
Good to know. Thanks for sharing!
Eric, Thank you for making the video. I am close enough to be able to deliver some supplies and help some friends clean up . The damage there is incredible to observe. Not sure exactly what to do to make sure we are cleaning and restoring floors effectively. Mold might try to creep in . So much work to be done! Best wishes for you and the farm. Planning to return in a few days to help some more and deliver more supplies. The sad thing is most of the properties there are not insured....so folks need help from what I see. Lots of compassionate folks delivering food for pets and us workers and it is appreciated. God bless WNC and all the hurricane survivors trying to rebuild their lives.
It's nice you have what you do have!
We were glad but feel a little guilty that we had when others don't
I’m glad you covered how your solar setup has worked out. I was curious about that. Praying for y’all and everyone affected by Helene.
Eric, to you and your family, we pray everyday for strength for ya,ll. You are one cool dude.
Really glad to see you and the family are managing. Hopefully things are up from here. Much love from Ontario
Thank you- there are some in our county that it will be weeks more due to all the damage. There is one area where the road is gone and 200+ trees down. Total mess
Great update ! So happy the farm is doing well . Them power stations are great but there's features that can be very handy . Like that solar input charging wile you use power . Every watt of solar counts ! I run my radio stuff directly on battery .If I have solar or mains power then that goes into battery . The next hurricane is now a cat 5 going to Florida. Have many friends their. CB is getting threw from NY to FL . In times of real need CB still coming threw . Ham radio and GMRS/FRS/MURS radios helping as well. Cellphone's / internet go down and power grid. Radio still works ! The most reliable way to get info and send info is RADIO ! The best tool we have ! take care . Great video !
Wow, great insights into potential quirks with backup power systems. Thank you for sharing and I hope that you can get back to fairly normal soon. Good work on keeping things going around the house. That took a lot of work to get to where you are today. It seems to have paid off.
Great system Erik! Hang in there and be safe! 73 de K2CJB
Thank you
I am glad you guys are safe.
I feel that Ecoflow should be sponsoring your channel. It would be good for YOU and your channel would be the PERFECT opportunity for Ecoflow.
Hang Tough. Great review of you system and especially where you found your short comings. Make you think even harder about your systems you will need.
Well said! We have learned a bunch on what worked and did not
Thanks Erik for all the good info. If your viewers can learn anything from your recent experience it is that they should prepare for some level of disaster preparedness. While we do not live our everyday lives off-grid we could all find ourselves w/o water, power, and the ability to maintain our daily lives during any disastrous weather event. Also, folks need to have the ability to protect themselves and their families during these events. Prayers for you and your family during these hard times.
Very interesting to get your 'real world' view! Thank you. I'll keep pass-thru charging and amount of time to charge front and center as I look at portables!
Good to know. Thanks for passing it along.
Sorry to hear about all your problems Eric. I hope you can get things back up and running real soon for you and your wife's peace of mind. Having to live off grid is okay sometimes but then there's times it's not a whole lot of fun I know I've been there I was there last winter. Living completely off grid at a place called Inskip california. Living in some people I n e w s old hotel built in the mid-1800s because at the time I had nowhere else to go.. I'm doing better now though. I had a diesel generator up there at the old hotel but it quit working by midwinter and then I had no power. I did have propane though and was able to heat some water on the stove so I could at least get a shower. And I had a wood heater so I could stay warm in the hotel I was at 5,000 FT elevation and it was a pretty rough winter had a hard time getting out. Had to depend on friends that had four-wheel drive vehicles that could drive me down off the mountain into town to buy groceries and make my doctor's appointments. Turned out to be the worst winter of my life. I'm almost 69 years old and it was rough being up there all alone throughout the entire winter and all that cold and snow. And being that much off grid had no cable and no cell service. Although I did have a landline so I could contact people . Anyway that's enough about me. Hope everything is better for you and yours very soon.
Thanks, glad your back up to back up were there. Stay safe - I know they are working none stop for folks with the power. They are actually getting the young once hiking a country mile just to get to downed utility poles
There are some parts of the area that will be without power for weeks more due to all the damage
@@FarpointFarms We are doing our best!!! wish it could be sooner
Praying for you and enjoying the very informative videos. Not great at geography, I am just praying Milton doesn't add more issues!
I am afraid that it will compound the issues more. That breaks my heart
Thanks for the update Eric! Stay safe
Thanks, will do!
Dig the old c band satellite dish. I had a Drake dish with a Kenwood receiver back in the day
It is great to hear from ya,glad you folks are ok
Thanks Erik…be safe. This gives us a lot to plan for in our farm we are building. Cheers!
Good Luck.
Glad that you got some power backup with the solar. Best insurance you can buy.
You know he got that dish in the shot for you, right?
@@barneymm2204 :)
Get a chest freezer when you replace the upright as they are more efficient. Keep an eye out for a military surplus diesel generator. Diesel has a longer shelf life than gas.
Thanks for the update and advice.
It appears you’re way ahead of the game so to speak during this ordeal. Always good to have a plan. Hopefully the utility company makes its way out of town towards you. 73s
Great lessons learned video. I have a similar setup to you. The flow through issue (charge while discharging) is a big deal. I have an investment in Oupes so I'll have to review their capability. Longest we have went so far is about 18 hours so I haven't had to top off with the generator yet. If you can get that power box working. I'd be interested to learn what you found. Keep charging. Later
Get a chest freezer and put a couple of gallon water jugs in to help stabilize the temperature. I have a 2000 watt inverter that I can connect to the Lithium batteries in my golf cart. Only buy a power unit that can charge and discharge at the same time. I have a boost converter to be able to charge my 36 volt golf cart bank from my solar panels. Thanks for the video .
I hope everything goes well where you are and power and other service are back up soon.
I can charge my PowerOak (BLUETTI) EB240 (holds 2400 watt hour) while power is being taken. However it only charges at just over 210 watts while outputting 1000 watt. Thankfully I have two of the EB240's and a petrol generator. The generator produces 1000 watts, so two EB240 charge at a little over 400watt leaving 500 - 600 watts for other periferals.
Much better to put together a proper battery bank so you have cpacity. Those portable units are great but not really for day after day usage. That 1200 watt setup should put out plenty of amperage to keep a bank of deep cycle batteries fully charged. Run through a 2kw or 4kw invertor with a charge controller.
Great Video! I've been pushing using power stations precisely for that reason... you only need to run the generator maybe 2 hours a day (depending on the size of the power station) to charge up the station and save boat loads of gasoline. Throw in a few solar panels, and gasoline use drops even further! In emergencies, it is all about having flexibility, and options, and conservation, and you get all of that in spades with a few power stations and solar panels.
Not bad considering the ad-hoc nature of all the systems you put together. I'm not a fan of VToMan's, personally... all my power stations can charge and discharge simultaneously and some of them are hitting 5 years old now with basically zero loss of capacity.
-Matt
We dodged the bullet on Helene. We are about 60 miles west of where the storm went through GA and got virtually zero damage. Our power never even blinked.
You're learning a couple of things through necessity. These "solar generators" are advancing rapidly, but there's a lot we need to understand about their limitations. Units that were purchased 2-3 years ago are woefully inadequate for power outages.
I have 3. The first one i bought was the AC200MAX from Bluetti. It's great for running appliances and power tools, but the AC charge rate requires 4-5 hours, and that's way too much time if you need to recharge with a generator.
The 2nd one was a Bluetti EB3a, a small station for running my router. It wrapped out after about 9 months. Bluetti replaced it, but it took a couple of weeks to get through that process.
Things we all need to understand about these power stations.
2k watts sounds like a HUGE amount of power. It's not. A fridge or freezer will eat that up in one day.
Fast charging is critical. Newer Bluetti or Ecoflow products can be charged at 1800+ watts, and that's critical when using a genny to recharge.
Stations need to have UPS so you can use them in virtually all applications.
Stations need to allow over-panel use. My AC200MAX charges via solar at 900 watts, but i can easily hook up 1200 watts of panels as long as I stay within the voltage limits. It will only accept 900 or so, but having 1200 available means I get more watts during cloudy conditions.
Having a dual-fuel generator is the key to being comfortable during power outages that last several days. We can run portable ACs and all our 110 devices with a 5k generator.
Alternative power options like solar and generator require some degree of power management. Unless you have a massive battery bank and large solar array, or a "whole house" backup generator that runs in natural gas, you'll need to control how much power you use. We have 2 refrigerators and 4 freezers full of food because we grow most of our food. We keep 200 pounds of propane and 25 gallons of gas on hand. We are on a farm, so we have the capacity to carry around 200 gallons of gas but have never kept that much. We run the gas through the mowers or just use it in our vehicles in order to keep it fresh.
We have 3 generators.
We have the 3 power stations, 4,000 watts of solar panels, and about a million feet of extension cords.
We are as prepared as we can be. I guess...
I'd love to see a video about your comms during the aftermath of the storm and too see if cb radio was useful in 2024
Thanks
Thanks for the update on your solar backups, very informative and helpful in future planning. I noticed your old C Band dish, is there still activity up there on C Band? I used to enjoy listening to audio feeds on C Band sub carriers back in the early 1990's. (Used a Drake SA-24 Stereo Adapter that a radio station no longer needed to tune program feeds). At that time there was a lot of audio in the clear, and still quite a bit of video.
Cool stuff!!
What's your take on a modular system? Something like a battery bank, inverter, charge controller all separate, so you only replace portions of the entire system when they fail. I have a small array of Off-The-Shelf components like that, and it does charge while on load. Do you prefer the integrated units over something like that?
Allpowers website states 5 year warranty. So hopefully it will be covered.
It was good of you to give out those four generators and gas to neighbors and help those of your neighbors, without the natural springs in the area, fill up from your spring.
You have to help others, that is the basic law of humanity. When people forget that, we are all doomed. Thank you for the support of the channel.
Have people been on CB during this crisis?
Yes. Much.
Hey hope the power comes back up soon. Glad you're okay. I wanted to ask where I could get an antenna like I had back in the 80s it was called a big stick. I was able to talk all over the place with that stick.
I had an Antron 99 (still have it, just blew down one winter). I got an Antron because the better one (from what I've heard), IMAX 2000, wouldn't ship to my address. I've heard there may be one to top both, a Sirio GainMaster from Copper Electronics. I know nothing more about it. I was able to talk sixty miles on four watts with the Antron. Looks like Walcott Radio may have something you're looking for. Right Channel Radios MAY as well. Good Luck. Hear you out there.
You could get a small (I prefer Victron) charge controller and tap into that power station battery pack directly and charge it while it's in use.
How did your homemade radio tower hold up with the storm?
If you purchased the All Power unit, call them before breaking into it. They're really good at helping diagnose problems and will take back some units for repair or replacement. If it was a giveaway for review, I look forward to a video about your attempts to repair it. I hope you can. Good luck and happy you all made it through this. We barely did. WNC is still fighting it out. We're doing our best down here in Spartanburg, SC to help our family and friends in NC, and soon FLA. As we all are learning, we have only each other. Our government is out on an extended lunch.
Solor is cute when everything works... However when electric is needed a inverter generator with eco control is the way to go...
Having both is the way to go
I see where florida is going to take another hit from another hurricane thats bad luck so much stuff damaged already to add to the damage
No communication? What about all those CB, Ham transceivers and Shortwave radios?
He's been listening to the scanner, CB and GMRS. Plenty of traffic on CB and a little on GMRS.
Cell reception was non existent- CBs and other radios were the only communications that were working.
As much of a fan as I am of solar, you just about need a concrere bunker with replacement panels to keep an array viable through storms and general disaster. Back up generators and a stationary bicycle to keep stuff running while you fix the solar system.
A little wind generator added to your solar system would really help I think as well tie it all together
He lives in a bowl between mountains. I think a wind generator would just get angry at the winds fickleness and lack of oomf after a while.
Great Video, be safe, K4XKF
I have radios with solar panels.
Don't think the problem with the battery bank/inverter is a fuse. It would have died all at once.
Solar And Wind "Power" Is A Fairy Tail!!
Wind is just stupid. I use solar power but it's usefulness is very limited and good results depend on ideal circumstances.
I totally disagree. This setup has kept me running these past 12 days. Without it, I'd have to rely heavily on my generator and that means burning a lot of fuel and being stuck with power in only one spot.
Solar is the eternal power source. Not something you can power everything with, but that wasn't the point of this setup in this configuration.
Wind? Not here. We live in a fish bowl and as a result, we thankfully never get wind. I think you should take a look at solar as a prep, and not as a "Green" idea. I could care less about that, but wanted a silent power source here that would run for years if needed. It worked!
In an emergency there is nothing more precious than gasoline, so being able to reduce your consumption to 1/6th of what you would use without solar and storage is life-saving. And I think Helene has made that really really really clear to everyone. There was (and is) a stark, stark difference between households that had power stations and a bit of solar to augment their generators, and households that did not. (And we won't even mention the difference that starlink has made, as well, to many people's lives).
You'd be hard pressed to argue against it in any sane way given the incredible amount of evidence showing just how good it is.
-Matt
amazon is having a fall sale 8-9th i seen several different brands of solar generators are on super sale. Just wanted to pass that on. altho i feel kinda of dumb to say it being the situation. Sorry bout that.
I want to get a generator that will run off of propane. Maybe a dual-fuel unit.
That generator of his is dual. He did a vid on it.
We ran that generator on gas because we were not sure if we would need the propane for cooking or not
Where is your Solar box snaky friends?
LOL, you remember that too!
They have found new homes- I think in the belly of the stray cat that made a home here
@@FarpointFarms Lol. Either way, they're warm.
If you hook your generator/solar up with a power cord to an outlet in your house. Don't forget to turn OFF THE MAIN BREAKER TO YOUR HOUSE. If you don't power can go out of your house and to the grid. Endangering linemen working to restore your power!
He clearly stated that in the first part of the video.
I firmly believe all new load centers should be configured standard with a transfer switch for backup power. 0% chance of having both on at same time.
@@jeremydavis2595 the problem is that an interlock of any sort is useless when using a cheater cord to back feed.... UNLESS... the back feed is at the panel and going through a breaker tied to that interlock. Most people in this situation lean away from a transfer switch due to cost.
✌️🇺🇸🙏🏆
Those batteries are NOT cheap and do not last long--a few years then need to be replaced. Nothing "green" about solar power.
Most modern power stations use LiFePO4 batteries. They might not be cheap, but they absolutely last a long time. The cells easily last 15 years. There is no fade, you can use the full capacity. Those batteries are awesome so I can only believe that you've never actually used one.
Now, I can't vouch for all the power electronics that also go into those boxes. But the basic battery technology is incredibly good... orders of magnitude better than lead acid. It isn't even a question these days.