Power Adventures

So I keep putting off getting a picture of the power setup on here, but I promise I'll do so soon. But since I've got a free moment I figured I'd describe the power setup I've currently got going.

City power to our house is sporadic, but not bad. We've not really logged it, but I'd say we have power somewhere between 75-85% of any given day, on average. I don't think there has ever been a day with 100% power, but on the flip side there hasn't been 24 hours without power either. The most common event is 1-2 hour segments where power goes off, and then when it comes on it will flicker on to being steady over 30 minutes or so. In contrast our water situation is much worse, we probably are without water ~50-60% of the time.

At any rate our solution to the water problem has been to get a 100 liter trash can and keep it filled. Water tends to pop on around 5am, so it is just a matter of getting up and blearily sticking more water in the trash can.

The power solution is a bit more complex. We’re both geeks, and we both do a bunch of computer work at home (both for fun and for our jobs). So we didn’t want any down time if we could help it. The solution is currently at 4 x 100 AH car batteries, 3 inverters (2 x 500 W / 8 A charging, 1 x 300 W), 4 voltage regulators (1 x 1000 W, 3 x 600 W), and more plug adapters, extension cords, and other such nonsense than I really want to think about. Sure, we could wire it all into the wall circuits, but really we only care about 3 things: computers, fans, and lights. So we’ve got the above components wired up into 3 separate circuits, 1 for computers and lights, 1 for fans. The computer / lights circuit takes a lot more juice, so we have 3 x 100 AH batteries in parallel on that. The fan circuit gets the left over 100 AH battery. There is a separate “UPS” circuit that also goes off the 3 x 100 AH batteries, making use of that 300 W inverter. It always draws through the batteries, so there is no downtime. In contrast, the charging inverters switch to city power direct when it becomes available, and that switch takes about 1 second to complete – really bad if you are in the middle of a read/write. The result is, hypothetically, a system that will keep all of our computer / lights running for 6-8 hours without power and the fans for up to 12 hours. So as long as we get enough power to keep the batteries charging more than we’re drawing it is fine. The batteries will likely need to be replaced in about 6 months because we abuse them, but they’re the cheapest part of the system, which all told cost ~$500, and provides power cheaper than a generator does, and without all the noise (if people are interested I can get the figures, we drew charts and stuff in excel, but I don’t have them on me right now). A number of friends here are interested enough in it that they’re looking at replicating the system for their own houses.