OK, obviously I am alittle biased here, but why don't more of you island dwellers have solar with battery backup? I'm sitting in my New Hampton home rightnow during an ice storm and the Co-op grid has been down for over 6 hours now ...but I am typing this while my stereo is Panorama tunes, the floor heat circulators are on and right now being fed by my electric water heater (35', too warm to fire up the woodstove), and I just finished a lunch that was microwaved. My roof array is relatively small (8.2 kW) and faces SE rather than South, but still I have enogh power to live normally and comfortably. To be sure my battery reserve was low this morning when the grid went down, but that wassolved by clearing my lowest row of modules so I could gain whatever irradiation was available on such a gloomy day. Its 1:30 as I type this and some of the other panels have cleared as the day has warmed, but my monitoring shows that half of my array is covered in snow and ice and I'm harvesting enough energy to run my home modestly and to put aslight charge back in my battery. There is no doubt that I could kill my reserve by takinga l-o-n-g hot shower or by recharging my EV, but overall life is normal and very comfortable.
But what if this outage had occurred this past February when it seemed to snow every three days or so and my solar array would have been covered? There is no doubt that at some point the battery would have been drawn down to the point where it would have shut down my electrical system ...for at leasta couple of days or maybe even a week, but as soon as the sun was strong enough to cause the roof (or better yet titlting ground mount) snow cover to slide, the inverter would again automatically "wake up" and begin to power my home and recharge my battery. Isn't this the ideal solution to make sure that circulators are working when they are needed the most?
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