Consider this your reminder to swing by the home improvement store and buy that backup generator you've been thinking about getting for a while.
Gonna be a lot of discarded food in Chile over the next few days...
Gonna be a lot of discarded food in Chile over the next few days...
A less reactive and better long term plan would be investing in tech that simultaneously reduces your monthly electricity bills and makes you more resilient against grid failures: solar + battery. It's not a solution in the middle of a black out. But a great one for dealing with the next one.
I have no idea how reliable the grid in Chile is. But even the southern tip is at -52 degrees latitude, which means their winters are about as dark as at +52 latitude, like Berlin, Germany where I live where solar power is very popular Anything in between (most of the US, except Alaska) gets enough sun hours to make solar panels a very useful fallback (with seasonal limitations obviously); and you can also keep your batteries topped up with grid power too using e.g. cheap off-peak power.
A cheaper alternative could be to pick up a few portable batteries and solar panels from Amazon. You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro. Running the AC off such a setup is not going to be a thing. But you could run a small fridge for a half a day or so, keep phones laptops charged, and keep the lights on. Some people buy generators just so they can top up their batteries when solar falls short and run completely off-grid otherwise.
> You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro
A petrol generator that will do this can be had for like $400.
Additionally, a good tri-fuel generator is often less than $1000 so you have power even if you can't get petrol.
I stayed away from discussing propane because it's adding another variable. I too thought that was the way to go, until I realized it doesn't work so well in the winter because the self-evaporation rate is too low. It my experience it takes 3x 20lb tanks teed together to run my small 2500 watt inverter generator, and the baseline load isn't even that much.
Also keeping people out of the damn fridge. But that can be modified through other means.
Where do you live?
This is underestimating the ludicrous amount of power an EV's batteries have. You can absolutely power your house for days on end using one. (Of course, that should also give us pause to think about what it means that we spend so much energy for transportation compared to household necessities.) And gasoline has plenty of problems too, like its extremely short shelf-life.
I look at the size of those, and the size of a random Tesla, and I can easily see two of these shoved into the baseboard of a Tesla, much less the larger vehicles.
I know the Ford Lightning was advertised as a potential back up power source for the home.
The real trick is getting the power out of the battery and in to the home itself. It's one thing to run an extension cord to the refrigerator, quite another to get the battery plugged into your home circuitry. That requires more preparation, as well as an electrician.
Expensive way is to get some manufacturer specific automatic transfer switch (I got Tesla's put in). The hardware is $2500 and the labor is $4K+.
I did both and used both during a recent week long outage.
So there you have it, I get about one full day. Not "days on end".
On a hot day yeah I'd be running the A/C but ideally you'd have solar to offset much of that.
Average home uses 30kwH / day. Average EV battery size 40kwh. Correct not days on end, but at least a full day to full capacity, and perhaps a few days at reduced capacity. My Ioniq 5 has an 84kwH battery so I guess I'd get a bit further.
Be choosy about the EV, not all of them have this feature (Tesla, for instance, doesn’t last I checked). That said, after we got our Hyundai (and the vehicle-to-load adapter), I sold our generator to a neighbor. Less than a year later, we both got to test our electrical backups.
Hopefully you were going to buy an EV anyway, because a nice generator is about $1000. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 is considerably more than that.
vs
EV => $8000 - $40000
Bidirectional charging infra => $2000 - $5000
PV => $5000 - $15000
Heat pump => $5000 - $10000
That's an awful lot of money that you're proposing people spend in order to cover a rare occurrence. Of course there's day-to-day value in having all of that which a backup generator cannot provide, but in a power outage, you'd probably rather just have the cheap gas generator, and maybe a $1000-ish "solar generator" (i.e. battery pack with inverter) that you can use to load-shift the generator. Run the genny during the day to charge the battery; run the fridge, lights, and phone charger from the battery overnight.
Here’s video summary https://youtu.be/ZmmhOXsIRjw?si=eZh_MCWJjhrwNpm9
The trick with Bolt EVs is that one must have the car on, because the high voltage battery will not engage when the car is off for safety reasons. Also, the car shuts off every hour of unless the seatbelt is fastened. This is not a big deal.
If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems.
Yep.
> If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems.
Happens several times a decade on the Atlantic coast of the US. Well, the days do, at least. Weeks, probably not.
The battery you can keep charged, and the generator you can keep new in the box until you actually think you'll be in a prolonged outage. You can run fridge, internet, lamps off the battery for a solid day. The #1 thing that screws people with the small engines is maintenance after some initial amount of usage. Gasoline turns into jello in the fuel system after a ~year in storage. Oil needs to be changed frequently. Don't run gas through that small engine unless you really think you'll need it. LP/LNG is much cleaner, but can be harder to obtain and use.
I think of these small inverter generators as a one use/emergency item. Once I fire it up, it's on a 200 hour death timer. It only costs around $600 for a brand new unit. Catastrophic, multi-day outages don't happen often.