“I Have Solar on my house, so I’m Protected in a Grid Outage” — 

  well….Let’s take a closer look.

Even if you have Solar on your home or intend to use a generator during a grid outage you will not have power…unless you have installed a very important component called a Transfer switch.

The primary reason is safety of lineman trying to restore power for customers.  Your solar energy system is outfitted with a block during a grid outage to eliminate the possibility of your solar energy power being upconverted into HIGH VOLTAGE while linemen are working to restore power.

When you use a Transfer Switch, it keeps the power inside your house preventing it from being returned to the grid while repairs are taking place.

There are several variations of these units and they essentially fall into two categories.

The first is called a whole-house transfer switch and the other is called a protected circuit transfer switch.

The whole-house switch is typically mated to a large battery or generator rated at 14 kWh, 22 kWh or even a 39 kWh to maintain seamless power even if the grid outage occurs at night.

A whole-house transfer switch is routinely used with large generators like GENERAC or CHAMPION or KOHLERS or a large battery wall like FRANKLIN, TESLA, Enphase IQ5, and others and might even include your own DIY battery bank using the latest LiFePO4 batteries or next generation solid state encapsulated capacitors.

A whole-house transfer switch will run about $3,000 installed (yours may be slightly higher or lower) and are usually installed with a generator or battery backup system or at least Energy Storage arrays like batteries or capacitors,  otherwise there is little value in having one. 

As EV’s become more commonplace, they actually have very large batteries – a 100kW battery is not uncommon for an EV that can run 400 plus miles without a recharge. So guess what…

 You CAN use your EV as the battery backup system for your home in an emergency if you have a Transfer Switch!

The transfer switch frankly doesn’t know the difference between an EV battery in your car (and now trucks like the new Ford F-150E) or a ESS or a generator.

Each home is different though in terms of layout and sizing.

Using a transfer switch with a battery or generator may vary from something as small as portable gas generator running 4500 watts to 8500 watts to support 30 Amps of power needs; to a larger whole-house 200 Amp transfer switch system using as I mentioned above, a large battery wall and/or a 20 kW generator, the best solution is to acquire one that can sustain at least 100 Amps of  charging  to power the whole house and recharge your ESS quickly.

We typically use these larger generator systems which are feed with natural gas or propane, in severe weather areas like the Gulf Coast, during hurricanes or the upper Mid-west with severe ice storms, where power can be down for weeks on end.