I would love to have a home battery system, but because I live in an apartment I can’t. However, with the proper solar generator and battery, I can get very close to it.
Home Batteries tend to be from 5kw to 15kw. The portable systems that I have looked at are much lower than this of course because of the weight and space that batteries require. I don’t tend to use lots of electricity so my demands are low. I am still struggling to find a better way to heat than the built-in radiators that they use hot water with. However I don’t control the heat, and I can’t install a heating system in an apartment so I just have to accept that this is the way it is.
One of the batteries that I suggested in my earlier portable solar generators uses NMC batteries. These are very heavy batteries but they have the advantage of having a small space and high energy density. I doubt I will buy it. That is an old technology that I don’t want to use. The weight makes it not portable in my opinion, so it is an unhelpful choice for apartment renters.
I have a DC 5mm cable that I can use to daisy chain or connect different solar generators together. My goal will be to buy a solar generator or perhaps two of them that I can connect together for more storage. Then they are still portable since individually they are lighter than an entire one-piece system. I don’t know what exactly that will be yet. I am still researching but I know it is going to have LifePo4 batteries.
I don’t want to just buy LifePo4 batteries. I want the unit to be able to work by itself. Remember before I shared that 2 is 1 and 1 is none? I want to have two things that are critical like power so that if one fails then I still have a working system. This is part of the reason why Do It Yourself systems don’t appeal to me. Yes, they can be cheaper, but then you tend to only have one component of something and that doesn’t help in the case of a failure. Working in IT I have learned that things fail at any time and so I don’t trust single-component systems. You always have to have a backup.
Life doesn’t work as we hope. It works by things sometimes failing when you least expect it. Prepare for that and you will never be in the dark with your power system.