How to Use Your Solar Panels in a Power Outage

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Power outages happen when you least expect them. Especially during monsoon season, violent lightning storms can knock out power in your neighborhood, leaving you without lights and air conditioning. One of the perks of having a home solar system is that you’ll be able to weather the electrical power outage with a backup solar battery.

Battery Backup System

Having a backup battery connected to your solar panel system provides power to your home when the power goes out. This should get you through short grid failures and weather-related outages. The size of your system, budget, and backup power needs will dictate how many backup batteries you’ll need to install.

The average home uses about 30 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity a day. You can check the specific amount of kWh your home uses monthly by checking your local utility energy bill. If you only want to keep enough power on hand to run equipment and appliances such as refrigerators, electronic devices, medical equipment, AC, and lighting, you’ll need one average lithium-ion battery. The single battery will keep your household running during most brief power outages. To be self-sufficient when the grid goes down for extended periods of time, you’ll need a lot of backup battery storage and a bigger budget. If you’re taking into consideration cloudy days and nighttime, you’ll most likely need eight to 12 batteries to weather a power outage.

To charge the battery with electricity ahead of time, you can either have it charged by pulling electricity directly from the power grid or charging it with your solar panels. The budget-friendly choice is to charge up the battery with your solar array system. Your local trusted solar panel installation business can help crunch the numbers to determine how many additional solar panels will be required to be able to power your home for a power outage lasting more than a day.

Cool Blew Solar

Solar energy is an eco-friendly choice safely powering your home with clean, green energy. When there’s a power outage, installing a backup solar battery system will keep the power on. Whether you’re looking to install additional solar panels at your home, or you’d like to look into battery backup options to keep the power on during grid outages, call your local professionals at Cool Blew Solar today. Call us at 623-234-2836 to schedule your appointment.