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The energy a car uses is insanely large compared to e.g. a fridge. You could probably run it at least a month with a smallish 40kwh battery.

Even running everything as normal probably uses less than a kw on average so electricity outrages would have to last multiple days to be a problem.

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> electricity outrages would have to last multiple days to be a problem

Ya, and that's pretty rare in most areas so it seems like a reasonable plan.

I wonder if it's worthwhile doing a small "emergency" scale solar installation or if you may as well just do a full scale system once you've installed the rest of the infrastructure. Looking for opinions...

Typical PV installations won't power your house in a blackout (one during the day, that is), since they feed directly into the grid, and then your house receives power from the grid. Hence the market for something like the Tesla Powerwall, which reroutes all that enough that you can power your home from its battery, and charge it from the PV if the grid goes down (for a while - each Powerwall's battery is 13kWh, about 1/6 of a Model 3...) . But to your general question, at this point the panels themselves are a fairly small part of the overall cost, so I don't think most people would want to go small, if you're installing any kind of proper inverter system, make it big enough to cover your usage.

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