The Drillimation Solar Panel Project: Battery Backup?

Drillimation Systems began their solar journey back in the summer of 2022. Things have been going great. In fact, our electric bill for June 2024 was only zero dollars. Two years later, an upgrade is coming. We’ve already got a battery backup for the workstation and router, but another one is coming. What will this one do?

The solar panels have been vital to powering Drillimation Systems, but not during power failures. Even in days when it’s overcast, it is still capable of getting 50% of solar power. The only caveat here is they are grid tied. Solar panels are not designed to work during the event of a power failure because they can send electricity back into the grid and give crew workers a more difficult time to make repairs.

There is at least an alternative, and the only alternative is installing a battery backup to the panels. One such example of a backup is the Tesla Powerwall, which can connect to solar panels and store its energy from the grid. They are good for powering an entire building 24/7 or even during outages when no electricity is available.

The vast majority of this energy is used for heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. If a power cut happens in the middle of the summer or winter, the entire studio becomes uninhabitable. It’s been nearly three years since we had the last power catastrophe during the weekend the Touhou 3: The Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dreams NES Demake released in late September 2021. The outage as a whole led to a loss of nearly an entire day’s worth of electricity. That was what led to this entire project.

The caveat about the battery backup the studio is getting is that it must be indoors and in the basement. This backup cannot be exposed to extreme heat or cold. My hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania has a humid continental climate with hot summers and cold winters, the latter of which is longer and extends for six of those months.

How would the battery backup react to a real power failure? Well, we don’t know until they are installed. We do hope to have them fully installed by the end of this year. I can’t handle an outage that lasts hours or even up to a day. It has actually been months since I last talked about something solar panel-related. The next page of this project will be a whole another story.