Well, we decided to make a couple mods to the unit I built a few years ago along with an improvement on our home UPS which I'll get to in a minute.
So here are a couple pics. I forgot to get one of the inside but suffice to say it contains an Optima Blue Top battery, various cables to connect to and be charged from a portable solar panel as well as a vehicle 12 volt power point and a 3.5 amp 12 volt NOCO charger. On the outside is a 400 watt sine wave inverter attached to the lid. There is an LED light and various power points as well as a meter for current and voltage. Good enough. Its heavy but the optima is apparently a 54 amp hour job so it did quite well as a portable power supply for our TV and charging requirements of things like phones etc. It actually started the fridge but didn't like it...which is fine as we won't use it for that.
But as I mentioned earlier, to solve the original problem, having additional backup capacity to run the fridge and TV in emergency situations we went with adding a second group 31 to our house emergency critical load backup. The only critical load is the fridge and a small TV to be able to watch the news in an extended power outage. We don't get a ton of outages here but weather or car accidents involving poles seems to have caused us more issues this year than in previous years and some have dragged on over a day...or more. So we wanted a little more capacity and a neater set up. We have used this system for a couple years but with half th capacity and not set up as neatly and out of the way. Anyway, we now call it our MYWANNABETESLAPOWERWALL :) And here it is.
A 2 KW Samlex inverter with pass through transfer switch and 100 amp DC 4 stage battery charger. We limit it to 60 amps as it is plugged in to a standard 15 amp 120 volt outlet.
2 X Group 31 105 amp hour AGM batteries.
250 amp catastrophic fuse.
Breakered input and output power bars.
We ran separate lines to the fridge and entertainment centre so we wouldn't have to screw around in a power outage, and if we are away the fridge keeps running because of the auto transfer switch in the inverter/charger.
That and some Bricks, some wood and my wifes artistic lightning bolt mnaking skills...which I'm fairly certain give it more power. They're lightning bolts right. Not to mention it has Tesla in the name soooooo..... :) (I'm a Tesla freak so...
I should note, during a power outage we do our cooking on a propane coleman stove, our lights come from a bunch of Ryobi LED lanterns and a bunch more Ryobi 18 volt 4 and 6 amp batteries and the house heat comes from a natural gas fireplace with a pilot light. Woohoo. Like camping at home. :)
Enjoy.
