Most batteries have a continuous power rating of between 5 and 8 kilowatts, meaning they could power several circuits or a handful of appliances concurrently. This is the metric to look at to determine how many different appliances and circuits you can power at once for hours at a time. If you have an appliance that has a surge requirement for power when you first turn it on, be sure to look carefully at this spec.Ĭontinuous power represents the amount of power (in kilowatts) that your battery can provide steadily. For instance, a well pump or sump pump might require a lot of power when you first turn it on, but then it’s power requirements will drop for the rest of the time you’re running it. Instantaneous power determines if you can provide an extra surge of power to appliances that need it. There are two key power metrics to look at: instantaneous power and continuous power. Once you know how much power you need to back up part or all of your home, you can begin to size an energy storage system appropriately. Power rating of your battery (instantaneous and continuous) By finding the wattage of each individual appliance, you can calculate the power requirements for backing up your home: 200 watts for a refrigerator, 20 watts per light bulb, 25 watts for a phone charger, 300 watts for a TV, and so on. Less excitingly, that means you (or your installer) will need to calculate the power usage of different appliances in your home, or of different circuits on your electrical panel (most circuits can hold a max of 15 to 20 amps).īatteries provide power ratings in kW and current ratings in amps, so if you know the power draw or current requirements of different appliances, you’re in luck! If you don’t happen to know those values off hand, here are two resources to start with: first, our explainer on what even is electrical load, and, second, the US Department of Energy’s appliance load calculator. Thankfully, it’s unlikely that you’ll be running every single appliance in your home on any given day, and you’re even less likely to be running all of them at once. As you’ll see in the next section, though, batteries typically provide far less power than that. If you wanted to backup the whole electrical panel, providing power to every circuit at the same time, you would need a lot of power. Many homes in the US have a 200 amp electrical panel.
To determine how much power you need, you need to know which appliances (or circuits) you plan to back up. Homes in the US either have a 120 volt or 240 volt electrical panel, so to convert amps to watts, you just multiply the amps by the voltage (and then divide by 1,000 to get kilowatts): at 120 Volts, 20 amps of current would be 2,400 Watts or 2.4 kW of power. To get from current to power, you need to multiply by voltage. kilowatts: what’s the difference?ĭon’t worry, we won’t bore you with technical details, we just want to make sure that if you are more familiar with amps or kilowatts, you can understand the other! Amps are a measure of current. When talking about how much of your home you can power with a battery, the two main factors to consider are: how much power do you need, and how much power does your battery supply, with power measured in kilowatts (kW) or amps (A).Īmps vs.
Battery backup for computer that lasts for days how to#
How to calculate how much of your home you can run on a battery and for how longįactors that influence how much of your house a battery can power.How load management devices can prolong your stored energy capacity.Factors that influence how long you can power your home with a battery.Factors that influence how much of your house a battery can power.Solar-plus-storage shoppers should use the EnergySage Marketplace to compare quotes from pre-vetted installers.Load management devices can prolong your battery’s stored energy capacity.Factors that impact how long you can power your home with your battery include: usable storage capacity of your battery, which appliances you’re using and for how long, and whether your battery is paired with solar.The amount of your house you can backup with a battery will depend on the appliances and circuits you want to backup and the power rating of your battery (instantaneous and continuous).
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