Power cuts

Since there seems to be a chance of power cuts due to restrictions to the import of fuel – due to the European War.

Are there any good battery systems good enough to keep TVs etc running during the downtime?

Sounds like you want a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). Normally they’re used with computers/servers or medical equipment to keep them running if there’s a power outage (either to allow them to ride out the outage completely, or to allow a safe shutdown), but they can just as easily be used with other equipment.

If your aerial is plugged into a booster, you’ll probably want/need that to be on a UPS as well.

I posted this some time ago

My new Active UPS: https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/12/topics/16669

It is still working well.

Depends how long you mean by downtime. If it’s around 10 minutes to a quarter hour, a normal UPS ought to suffice.

A little longer, you could roll your own like Bryan and give it a bigger battery.

If you’re taking hours, you’d probably be looking at a gennie. What sort depends a lot upon what you expect to do. Amazon, for example, sell a little two stroke 600W thing for about €100, which would run a fridge, a TV, and set top box without problem.
If I went for a generator, it would have to be 2600W minimum – needs to be able to boil the kettle to make tea. ;)

That being said, I haven’t gone for any of these, as if there is a war induced power cut ¹, one might have more important problems than what’s on TV. I have put aside extra bottled water, pasta, gas canisters for the cooker, and got the old gas lantern running. I also have a reasonable selection of pasta and ready meals that can be heated in a saucepan.
If it all goes to 💩, I’ll shut the shutters, find a good book, and wait it out.

¹ Clarification – unlike the UK, France is something like 70% glow in the dark donuts (UK more like 16%), so problems with gas supplies will have far less impact on electricity production.

due to the European War.

Due to the murderous criminal Russian b*stards. This isn’t Europe’s war, nobody here needs or wants this after two years of Covid.
And note that Johnson is being quite a loud voice in things (he desperately wants a Churchill Moment), so it’s your war too.

By the way – what happened to North Sea gas? Did the government bail on that like they did the coal miners because “it’s cheaper to import”?

Macron is doing a lot of shouting too at the moment – something to do with a French election soon. But also they are a bit embrassed about the fact it was recently revealed they sold lots of weapons etc to Russia. France seem to be rather good at that sort of thing, remember they supplied those missiles to argentina to be used against the us in the Falklands war.

As for power cuts if we get any, they will almost certainly be of the rolling type of cuts like we had back in the 3 day week dispute. No UPS will cover for that. Oh an a generator uses Diesel I think which is our main oil type imported from Russia.

Portable generators of the sort you can buy in a DIY place tend to use petrol. It’s the biggies that run on diesel.

Solar panels and a battery storage system? No oil, no gas. Putin-free.

I had a six day power outage after Arwen. Luckily the power was restored to someone I know on the hillside after two days so I borrowed their ancient petrol gennie for day/evening use (it would have run dry overnight) – just enough to keep the CH pumped and fridge going. It only seemed to crank out about 180VAC. Presumably awful shape too, as the synchronous motors in the heating valves wouldn’t respond and had to be jammed open (you can do that to drain the system; and some dodgy hot-wiring to get the boiler to fire up). Couldn’t use the ceiling lights as the flicker was just too much. I used the camping gas stove for making tea/coffee. I too have an old gas lantern! And nice open fire. The joys of rural life…

Ah, the 3 day week. Lovely memories. :-(

Solar panels and a battery storage system?

Seen the price of those things? And I don’t mean the cheap 100W Chinese panels that would take two days to charge a discharged 100Ah battery, I mean the proper panels and controllers that can charge a battery and run stuff.

For the moment, I think a decent gennie is a better bet. The price of petrol is high but it’s not vying for being printer ink…yet.

only seemed to crank out about 180VAC […] the flicker was just too much

Was there any sort of speed adjustment? It sounds like the engine wasn’t running fast enough.
Could explain the synchronous motors, too, if it was spitting out say 30Hz at the wrong voltage. ;)

I too have an old gas lantern!

Somewhere there’s a parrafin lantern as well (a wick one). Haven’t found it yet.
If I do find it, d’you run it on the same stuff as parrafin heaters?

And nice open fire.

Don’t have that, not allowed. The insurance won’t allow it as it’s a massive chimney that isn’t lined. The lining? The last quote mom got was €1,500 or so. Which is about six thousand kilowatt hours worth, so… yeah…

The joys of rural life…

Oh, indeed. I’m sitting on the doorstep listening to the birds (hey Chaffinch!) and smelling that somebody has chucked cow poop all over the field (cow poop is gross, it’s sickly sweet smelling, at least pig poop smells like poop) which means it’s going to rain soon.

Oh, almost half five. Final tea of the day (after 6pm and I won’t sleep), so… time to go put the kettle on.

time to go put the kettle on.

How to tell my nationality – it’s easy. I have a Tefal kettle that has served me for nearly three decades. Looking to the right, a Moulinex Uno emergency kettle in its box, just in case (must be prepared to avert any potential tea crisis). Looking further right, a big sack of Tetley tea bags (1100 capacity; half empty). Even further right, an unopened sack of 1100 tea bags. There are also two litre bottles of UHT semi skimmed milk. Awful stuff, UHT, but will do if fresh milk isn’t available (though, I am surrounded by cows so….).

If anything happens, anything at all, tea is required.

Ah, the 3 day week. Lovely memories. :-(

Ah yes, absolutely forced to drink in the lower ground bar as all the electrical systems for the pumping and pressuring of that nasty keg stuff didn’t work and only the lower ground did real ale.
Get in early, keep the oiks that normally drank keg away, and relax in a rather dim (candles) basement with a choice of three beers.

If anything happens, anything at all, tea is required.

Decent coffee does a job, but sometimes, when the world needs fixing, only tea does it.

Remember the essential accessory for a petrol or diesel generator is a shotgun, because believe me when you have the only light and sound for miles, you are going to attract the wrong sort of attention. I found that out in the power cuts after the floods of 2007.

The last quote mom got was €1,500 or so. Which is about six thousand kilowatt hours worth

Good grief! People are complaining about paying half that much per kWh over here!

@Colin F

It seems we are (almost) alone, with trying to discuss the technical issue of keeping our systems alive during power downtime for whatever reason.

I wish you well with your efforts and ask that if arrive at a solution at an acceptable price then you let us know.

My system works extremely well, but at significant cost.

https://sterling-power.com/collections/marine-battery-chargers/products/pro-charge-ultra
https://sterling-power.com/products/lithium-batteries?variant=37853987209405

plus a 200watt pure sine wave inverter. I would not recommend the one I purchased as it was too noisy before I replaced the fan with an expensive silent one.

Are there any good battery systems good enough to keep TVs etc running during the downtime?

Basically you need to decide whether you want to power just one or a few devices (i.e. the amount of your “etc”), or the whole house. Then you need to decide whether you think that the power outages will happen seldomly or frequently.

Depending on that outcome, you buy

• a petrol-driven power generator – cheaper for higher power requirements, but expensive in the long run
• a “house battery” (best-known: Tesla Powerwall, but by far not the best nor the cheapest) along with a reasonably large PV system (depending on whether you would like to produce enough power during dark winter days)
  • very expensive, because the battery costs you at least 500€ per kWh capacity…
• a large diesel generator – a good idea of you also happen to heat your home with oil so you always have enough fuel in store in case of an emergency
  • but keep an engineer around to be able to fix it…
• a small battery and a portable PV panel to charge it – expensive compared to the petrol-driven power generator for the same power rating, but might be cheaper in the long run, and definitely better to rely on the sun shining than to be able to buy more petrol during a large-scale crisis
• a decent-sized UPS – expensive, and only for short outages available for a sensible price

And, as Druck says, if you expect any really apocalyptic scenario, keep enough firepower around.

but expensive in the long run

A petrol generator is possibly the simplest solution for temporary power requirements of a longer nature.
That coupled with a cheap UPS to keep the tech running while you power up the generator should see you through rolling blackouts.

keep enough firepower around.

This isn’t America. It’s not so easy to get weapons in civilised countries. I’m neither a hunter nor a psychopath.

That being said, if you envisage sitting outside with a shotgun on your lap, you’ll have far bigger things to worry about than whether or not the TV works.
That’s part of the reason why I’m keeping a stock of food rather than electricity.

Worst comes to worst, I guess I can drag the old gas cooker outside and light a fire in the oven ¹ (plenty of wood around) and cook on the top. ;)

¹ Rusty and crap and the gas pipes perished a decade ago, it’s basically a table at the moment as I don’t fancy moving it.

I’m neither a hunter nor a psychopath.

Plus, there’s a big difference between having a weapon, and using it.

Plus plus, once it’s known you have a gun, people who think they have a chance of getting what you have will come gunning for you.

Yesterday, Grahame Parish opined:

Solar panels and a battery storage system?

My detailed knowledge of the ins-and-outs of PV/battery systems is only remarkable by how limited it is. However, I suggested to friends with such a system that they were lucky not to have been affected by a recent power cut. “Oh yes we were!” they replied.

Apparently, a basic system goes off-line when there is a power cut. When I investigated the problem, it seems that such systems become isolated from the incoming supply so that technicians working to restore the supply aren’t at risk of shocks.

If you want to maintain your property on the battery supply, you have to specify that requirement before installation. Naturally, the extra complexity involved incurs extra cost, though how much I don’t know.

Over to someone with more knowledge/experience than me…

Apparently, a basic system goes off-line when there is a power cut.

If the system is designed to feed surplus power back into the Grid (as the non-battery ones do) then it needs to synchronise the alternating current it produces with that in the grid. During a power cut, it could not do that, so would need a way to establish synchronisation at the end of the cut. Just shutting down during the power cut is simpler.

It would also need a way to avoid trying to power the Grid when the Grid power is off. This part agreees with what you were told.

Solving both of these needs the same thing adding to the system – an isolating contactor to separate the house power from the incoming Grid power, and controlled by the solar power system.

Over to someone with more knowledge/experience than me…

Thank you, Alan. I just knew that someone would know.

My detailed knowledge of the ins-and-outs of PV/battery systems is only remarkable by how limited it is. However, I suggested to friends with such a system that they were lucky not to have been affected by a recent power cut. “Oh yes we were!” they replied.

There are basically three ways to do PV at the small “roof-of-my-house” scale:

• plain PV – surplus energy is fed into the grid (payment in Germany for new PV in 2022: around 6.5ct/kWh)
• PV and battery, always grid-connected, battery is just good to time-shift your PV energy to the time where the sun does not shine (i.e. to avoid paying power-from-te-grid costs of around 27ct/kWh (my current costs, likely to rise to around 40ct/kWh in 2023, and “earn” the difference between 6.5ct and 27ct by using your own PV power)
  • try the calculation…efficiency of the whole system is 90% at best, an affordable battery is perhaps 10000€ for 10kWh, if you are able to use the full 10kWh per day (very unlikely when it happens to be “not summer”) that saves you 650€ per year…
• PV and battery that is off-grid capable – like a UPS, it constantly monitors the state of the grid connection and is able to properly power all three phases for your house from that battery
  • costs a lot more of course…
  • and don’t even think about a multi-day backup unless you consume very little power – we have an average consumption of around 24 kWh per day for our house, you can do the calculation for yourself…

It is all very fascinating if you start digging into all that (like e.g. the guarantees you get how much battery capacity will be left in 10 or 15 years, that you are forced to get that maintenance contract if you want that guarantee to stay valid…), and certainly a nice hobby, but if you start the calculation…even with ultra-high German electricity costs, it is very unlikely to make you a profit.

Have I even mentioned the problem of not only keeping electricity, but also heating running? Preferably in an environmental-friendly way? A nightmare. Stop thinking about adding an electric car to the picture. It gets worse.

Steffen speaks truth. I did a very similar analysis.

Saw a video providing what I think is a clear basic explanation on such installations 2 days ago.