We are participants in this program. It's awesome.
For context, we are 3/4 miles from a paved road, and on our dirt road there are 6 homes. Like many houses in Vermont, we have a well instead of municipal water no power -> no water. Our house also came with a pellet stove that requires power in order to operate[0]. No power -> no heat. Ditto the propane boiler that runs domestic hot water and the baseboard radiators. Cell service is pretty sparse, and depending on your carrier you are wholly or mostly dependent on WiFi calling to report outages. Bit of a circular dependency there. There are lots of homes in VT like this.
The batteries are totally seamless. The only real indication that we're on battery is that anything without a crystal oscillator in it runs fast until the batteries are depleted enough that they could accept a charge from the solar panels we don't (yet) have[1]. The controller raises the line frequency to 66Hz when disconnected from the grid to let the inverters for the solar panels know that it can't/won't accept charge.
In practice this all plays out really well. We haven't yet had a winter outage that went on for more than a day since we moved. Last summer, however, we stained our home. The power comes in on the gable end, and we had Green Mountain Power disconnect it so we could sand and spray that part of the house without having live 240v power to work around on scaffolding 25' in the air. Running minimal lights, the fridge, the internet, the well pump, and either a couple of 5" sanders or a 60 gallon 240v compressor (for the spray gun), we got 4 days worth of uptime from the two battery packs. It was incredible.
The only downside to all of this is that the installation allowance wasn't enough to split my shop off from the backed-up panel[2]. I heat it with a heat pump (because insurance insurance companies get understandably twitchy about fuel-burning appliances in a wood shop). It draws a substantial amount of power when it's cold out, and if we lose power overnight and don't get awakened by the app notification, it's going to suck down a fair bit of power before the morning. The obvious workaround is to shut down the heat pump if there's bad weather in the forecast.
This probably isn't as much of a fringe case as it sounds. Anyone who heats with a heat pump is going to have to choose between not having heat or forgoing a lot of uptime.
[0] We will eventually replace it with a plain wood stove for resilience in the face of power outages.
[1] The ridge line of both the house and the shop runs north/south, so not ideal. The house has a dormer that precludes putting panels on half the roof, and skylights that preclude putting panels on another quarter of it. The shop needs to be re-roofed with metal and we need to have a couple of trees taken down before we can entertain putting panels on that roof. There have been higher priority projects over the last couple of years.
mauvehaus · · focus · HN ↗
For context, we are 3/4 miles from a paved road, and on our dirt road there are 6 homes. Like many houses in Vermont, we have a well instead of municipal water no power -> no water. Our house also came with a pellet stove that requires power in order to operate[0]. No power -> no heat. Ditto the propane boiler that runs domestic hot water and the baseboard radiators. Cell service is pretty sparse, and depending on your carrier you are wholly or mostly dependent on WiFi calling to report outages. Bit of a circular dependency there. There are lots of homes in VT like this.
The batteries are totally seamless. The only real indication that we're on battery is that anything without a crystal oscillator in it runs fast until the batteries are depleted enough that they could accept a charge from the solar panels we don't (yet) have[1]. The controller raises the line frequency to 66Hz when disconnected from the grid to let the inverters for the solar panels know that it can't/won't accept charge.
In practice this all plays out really well. We haven't yet had a winter outage that went on for more than a day since we moved. Last summer, however, we stained our home. The power comes in on the gable end, and we had Green Mountain Power disconnect it so we could sand and spray that part of the house without having live 240v power to work around on scaffolding 25' in the air. Running minimal lights, the fridge, the internet, the well pump, and either a couple of 5" sanders or a 60 gallon 240v compressor (for the spray gun), we got 4 days worth of uptime from the two battery packs. It was incredible.
The only downside to all of this is that the installation allowance wasn't enough to split my shop off from the backed-up panel[2]. I heat it with a heat pump (because insurance insurance companies get understandably twitchy about fuel-burning appliances in a wood shop). It draws a substantial amount of power when it's cold out, and if we lose power overnight and don't get awakened by the app notification, it's going to suck down a fair bit of power before the morning. The obvious workaround is to shut down the heat pump if there's bad weather in the forecast.
This probably isn't as much of a fringe case as it sounds. Anyone who heats with a heat pump is going to have to choose between not having heat or forgoing a lot of uptime.
[0] We will eventually replace it with a plain wood stove for resilience in the face of power outages.
[1] The ridge line of both the house and the shop runs north/south, so not ideal. The house has a dormer that precludes putting panels on half the roof, and skylights that preclude putting panels on another quarter of it. The shop needs to be re-roofed with metal and we need to have a couple of trees taken down before we can entertain putting panels on that roof. There have been higher priority projects over the last couple of years.