Power outages in the face of natural disasters or more mundane grid failures can range from a mild inconvenience to a matter of life or death if you depend on electrical medical equipment. [Shareable] and [People Power Battery Collective] have partnered to develop a toolkit for communities looking to share power with each other in these situations.
Battery backup power isn’t exactly a new concept, so the real meat of this guide is how to build a network in your community so these relatively simple devices can be deployed effectively in the event of an emergency. We know that you can already handle your own backup power needs, but it pays to be a good neighbor, especially when those neighbors are deciding what to do when you’re releasing the factory-sealed smoke from your latest build on the community sidewalk.
For those who aren’t as technically-inclined as you, dear reader, there is also a handy Battery Basics (PDF) guide to help in selecting a battery backup solution. It is somewhat simplified, but it covers what most people would need to know. A note on fire safety regarding Li-ion batteries would probably be warranted in the Battery Basics document to balance the information on the risks of topping up lead-acid cells, but it otherwise seems pretty solid.
If you’re not quite ready to bug your neighbors, how about you build a backup battery first? How about repurposing an e-bike battery or this backup power solution for keeping a gas water heater working during a power outage?
Why? Just fire up your gas powered generator. Done! As long as you have gas, you have power. Simple.
GD right! As long ……..as………you………..have……..GAS!
Back in 2011 a very large cyclone, Cyclone Yasi, landed here. It was a Category Five storm and the largest recorded in Queensland. Fortunately there were few injuries only one death. The latter was a young man who died from generator fumes.
Strange. Darwin isn’t in Queensland.
Goes without saying, gas generators belong outside…. At least I ‘think’ it should go without saying :) . Not basement machines. At our control center the big diesel generator sits just outside and makes a ‘lot’ of noise when tested every week.
What kind of maintenance do they need? I assume you can’t just leave them in a basement for 5 years and expect it to work when you need it, can you? Would propane be a better choice for backups?
Seems like having a generator might be a good idea but it also seems like there’s a fair amount to learn.
Of course generators would require some attention to storage, as would fuel. It’s a solved problem though. Propane would be good, but it’s easy to rotate gasoline fuel.
You sure can’t bet on a battery being fit for use after 5 years in a basement without attention.
You can rotate fuel only to find that the carb is fucked because of a little residue from the last time you ran it, even if you ran it dry and/or drained the carb. Propane is better, there, but has limits. A battery can absolutely wait quite awhile without human attention, if you leave it plugged in or you are talking about long shelf life batteries without much self drain. Everyone used to keep a pack of unopened batteries around for basic light and radio use, along with maybe some candles or lanterns of course. Or those crank radios/lights that recharge a battery from empty every time you pull them out. Mostly, the nice thing about hypothetically having a fair capacity of batteries around is to use them from time to time, such as for charging your portable devices or powering an ebike.
I’m assuming that pack of unopened batteries were alkaline or other disposable.
@Dan yes alkaline, dry cell, the lithium primary cells like L91/L92, or various button cell chemistries for certain other purposes. Though some rechargeable stuff can last well too if it’s not being drained parasitically by something.
Checkout the Mustie1 YT channel… That guy has made it a habit of picking up “dead” generators from the sides of roads, cleans the carbs and jets, purges all the ethanol-based gasoline from them, and gets them running. His hacks make it look easy to maintain a basic genset.
I personally maintain a propane-based generator — less maintenance IMHO.
Yeah until you need to find propane to refuel in a disaster. Underground gas lines break in earthquakes and sometimes in major floods (they float up in waterlogged ground). As a Hurricane Katrina responder I can assure you that cooperation in a community after a major disaster is something I would not bet on. I saw some horrible human behavior there along with acts of courage and kindness. Yeah generators require maintenance like any other mechanical device and unused engines don’t fair very well. At least a monthly exercise run and an annual full load test is the minimum I would accept. You cannot leave most rechargeable batteries very long without cycling. Self discharge is a thing and I have revived lots of lithium batteries for people after they fell below their “safe” low voltage level due to sitting too long and the smart charger refused to try to charge them. Tip for power tool lithiums. Take them outside and tie a 9v battery to the main power terminals for awhile. This usually raises the voltage enough for the normal charger to like them again. Again do this all outdoors where a fire wont take out your home until you get one full good charge and balance done.
If you think running a generator indoors is proof of Darwin’s ideas you should see the drivers around here.
I’ve driven in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and most points between, and in more than a dozen countries on four other continents. Believe me, Aussie drivers are very much on the more civil and competent end of the spectrum.
I think their all drunk as Wisconies.
On the wrong side of road!
Beware stepping off curbs.
Not sure if joking? In .au there is a very low DUI rate. Random breath testing since the 1980s has really had an effect. On holiday weekends you’ll see roadblocks where EVERY driver gets tested. None of these bogus coordination tests either, it’s proper calibrated alcohol in breath, verified against a calibrated instrument if you test positive on the roadside. Memorising the alphabet backwards won’t help you. Then if you do get caught, mandatory suspension of licence and big fines.
This probably wouldn’t fly in the USA, as an Australian cop doesn’t even need an excuse to pull you over – they don’t even have to make up a tail about a failure to signal or a dodgy tail light. 4th amendment aside, it does mean that driving under influence of alcohol is relatively rare.
Having some of the most expensive booze in the world doesn’t help either.
I have a gas powered generator for short outages.
I remember the northeast blackout of 2003. Gas became hard to come by because most gas stations didn’t have working pumps. Those that did had huge lines and frequently ran out due to the concentrated demand.
If one really wants to prepare for an extended blackout they should only plan on having as much gas as they can store themselves.
We had a several-hour power failure a while back. When my 1 kilowatt-hour of batteries started giving out, I found that my car, via a “600 watt” (peak) inverter will happily provide 300 watts AC indefinitely, at the cost of about a 0.17 gallons of gasoline per hour. The alternator easily kept the battery at 14.2 volts under that load, at engine idle.
All in all, it’s horribly inefficient (4.4%) compared to a real power plant, but that’s about what a small generator under that load will burn, and less than what a big generator will suck (with that load). A lot quieter too.
Batteries are good, but they have pretty hard limits. It’s hard to beat the energy density of a jerry can.
That notion of storing batteries for possible community use is fundamentally broken in several ways. The capital cost of even just one kWh of storage is less in the form of a generator and some fuel than in a battery, and a generator is going to depreciate less quickly. And for more than a couple of kWh, a generator (with fuel) will provide a lot more energy for a given weight to tote around.
The advantage to a battery in the right chemistry and casing though is reliability, less energy dense absolutely but a man portable battery can still provide a heap more electric than you really need while in the sort of emergency that cuts you off from the mains – at least a few days of careful heat, light and cooking. And as you can have a decent little folding solar panel array to top it up again stored right next to it you have no dependency on outside resources (till it breaks and you don’t have the right spare parts or a second battery to run your soldering iron).
The battery can just sit on its shelf kept at the right state of charge for optimal shelf-life and good energy storage, with the right chemistries probably for decades – very unlike the generator, something you probably should MOT once a year at least – and even if it is good the fuel is probably bad from long term storage. Though the generator that hasn’t been used or maintained regularly likely requires a relatively skilled rebuild (easy enough for everyone reading this probably, but next to impossible for most folks – especially if their generator is down so they can’t access the hopefully working internet to know which tools they need to borrow).
That said the concept of deliberately adding more portable batteries to your collection than you think you will ever need to use yourself is probably silly. While one portable battery probably with a beefy inverter built in can be very handy and two might make sense if you actually use the one you have enough you want another that is already charged from time to time with the EV and PHEV becoming widespread enough in the developed world you really shouldn’t need to have special extra batteries in general, and as you said your normal ICE car with an inverter works well enough in a pinch – won’t be able to source the same peak draw (or at least not sustain it for as long) as the EV will, but power is power. Plenty enough to help your neighbour as required just from having the tools you want/need anyway.
Technically, you can remove the electrolyte of a lead acid battery and it’ll last almost forever. Ld is surprisingly stable and so is sulfuric acid in the right container. But the energy density is very low for this kind of devices.
In the end a true “have electricity in 20 years without maintenance” would require a PV array, a pack of “repurposed/recycled” lead acid battery without electrolyte and some gallons of sulfuric acid.
True though I was thinking of leaving the battery in ready to use state – which lead acid isn’t a terrible choice for, but I’d suggest is not the best. Nothing wrong with Lead acid – reason why most UPC are still lead acid is they are darn durable if you treat ’em right, but I would think LiPO4 would probably make a better choice for this role in part because its got more energy density.
Nothing lasts forever, but a generator will need maintenance way more often than the battery – so a battery is perhaps the better choice for most folks.
However once you fill the lead acid with electrolyte, you probably need to charge it to get full performance. I have never seen of heard of batteries that could last for decades in a charged state without maintenance. There are some cells that stay unmixed until use that can function for a little while but not on a power your home scale. That PV array that lasts 20 years better be protected from normal degradation then taken out for use. You can use your electric car as a power source, Ford is pushing that capability. To me discharging your transportation in an emergency is not a great plan unless it is a pretty minor thing like a thunderstorm or known to be short outage. BTW, diesel is kind of the way to go, properly treated it has a better shelf life than gasoline. Energy density beats just about anything and in disasters diesel gets brought in first because emergency equipment is all diesel. If you use gasoline make sure it had no ethanol, lots of times premium octanes wont have ethanol, the ethanol does bad things in storage.
I don’t agree that small generators are going to be as bad as idling a car in general. There’s little inverter generators that say they’ll burn maybe half that amount of fuel at the same load. The inverter type will be the best point of comparison if you’re planning on very tiny loads like under 300 watts, which conventionally are better provided by batteries. Even if you recharge batteries with a generator, at least you only have to start it up every now and then. Conventional small/portable generators run at 3600rpm constantly, and aren’t good for low loads even if it’s easy to get ones that are acceptably efficient at higher loads and may produce as much as 5-10kW continuously. They can power a well pump and the heater that keeps the pipes from bursting, or some total amount of necessary stuff, but I wouldn’t run one if all I needed to power was a fan, a laptop, and a freezer and I had another option.
A potential small generator with few moving parts https://www.ecojetengineering.com.au/technology/
No updates since 2019…
10 displayed comments out of 14. The deleted ones were pretty mundane. Strange moderation policy going on here.
Yeah they will never figure out how short-sighted that kind of behavior is until it’s too late
There is no telling if a moderator is again butthurt or if the database has again blown an index.
If the comments come back, it was the database.
More borderline useless ideas from the usual useless idea crowd