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Originally Posted by DIYPatriot
Roger that! I will post back to this if/when I have more questions. Hopefully, others will learn through shared experiences.
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We’re on the other end of the spectrum from TR. Being off-grid solar, we never have long-term outages like people in hurricane or ice storm areas. With periods of extended cloud cover, we just need to remove the load from the system to allow the batteries to catch up with demand. This is never more than 6 to 8 hours, but is always during the day. We have several generators: a 2000kW Honda, a 3.5kW Champion, and two 5.5kW Generacs (one inop at the moment).
Our house was built to be energy efficient with extra insulation, 6” walls, all Energy Star appliances, and LED lights throughout.
Before the solar system was up and running, we ran the whole house with the Champion for roughly 16 hours a day for 4 and a half months. We could not run large appliances simultaneously. So we retired the Champion and added the first Generac. We can run most things simultaneously except the washing machine and microwave. (For some odd reason the dishwasher will not work with the Generac.) One note: our heat-pump system is a Daikin ductless mini-split system which does a very good job and only uses about 300 watts once the house is cooled. We turn it on while the indoor temperature is below our thermostat temp, that’s an advantage of living in the desert, it cools drastically at night.
Next week we are installing a Kohler 8kW automatic LP gennie that will only help charge the batteries on those pesky overcast days (which have been bad the last 8 months or so.)
Good luck!
Pat
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