Can I Run My Whole House on Batteries? This is one of the most common questions asked about residential power management. Joe Piccirilli discusses the various considerations to figure out what problem the customer is trying to solve to answer that question.

Transcript

Joe Piccirilli:
It is interesting because the questions encompass a wide range of areas, but the first question is always, can I run my whole house on batteries? That’s the very first question. And because people don’t understand what it means to run an entire house on batteries and how many batteries that actually requires, it becomes a very difficult and, in many cases, disappointing question or answer for the clients. But that’s very, very typical. And then we have to make them step back a bit and say, “Okay, let’s talk about what problem are you trying to solve.”

And that’s where it gets very difficult. Because look, in Texas when you had that week long power outage, the only problem people are trying to solve is the grid’s down, I don’t want to be down. What’s that going to take? That’s a once every century or maybe once every 20 year event. That is not an every day event. What is more every day is how do you solve the problem when the power outage lasts for a second? How do you solve the problem when the power outages lasts for a couple of hours?

You have to give people perspective on what they’re trying to solve. There are people who come up and say, “Well, the equipment in my house constantly needs rebooting,” but what happens is they don’t relate that to power. It requires our integrators, our dealers, and incumbent on the RoseWater team to really interview customers to try and quantify what their problems are. Because as we were discussing off-air, there are many solutions. There are people who provide just battery backup and battery backup is really a generator replacement.

It does not solve power quality issues. Then there are people who just provide renewables. Well, renewables, one, only work in the daytime, and two, depending on how they’re hooked up. A lot of clients don’t know that when the grid goes down, the renewables don’t work, because renewable without battery is set up just to sell back to grid. There are all these half-truths that are out there, total misconceptions.
What it’s really taking now is for either the system integration community, our community, Ben, to take the lead and say, “Wait, energy is a hot topic. Let’s talk about what this means to you. What is going to be the solution for the problems that you are seeing?” That’s been our struggle, and I think that’s the industry’s struggle. It is being aided now because so many people because of Texas and then the heat wave over the summer, which created massive power problems everywhere, has at least now started people saying, “Wait, wait, wait, I have to find out about this topic.”

And then we have to bring them back and then say, “Okay, we’re going to educate you,” because experts in the area are few and far between. If we, not just RoseWater, but our integrators, establish the expertise, we will ride this wave and it’ll be a big one.