Watts Happening
I call it like I see it.
- Joined
- May 3, 2022
- Messages
- 811
We've recently seen some big power outages in the Northern Nevada area due to some storms, fortunately we weren't affected but some friends didn't have power for 5 days right in the middle of the city. That got me to thinking about how I could quickly and easily get us some backup power in the event of an outage. Two years ago I converted our entire 1,300sq/ft house to run on Pioneer mini-splits for heating and cooling and went with 240v units for efficiency and existing wiring. This is all being done with stuff I had laying around.
I'm a low voltage contractor and tow my work trailer to job sites. It has 1,600w of solar on the roof, 5kWh SOK battery and 3,000w Growatt inverter inside. It has a 120v 9kbtu mini split and tons of gadgets inside. I got to thinking, if I had a transformer I could convert the output of that trailers inverter from 120v to 240v and power the essentials in the house silently, and certainly save a lot of gas/propane from running a generator 24/7.
The following quick video shows the test setup, I certainly wouldn't suggest anyone make up a suicide cord as you'll see to back feed a house, but for my 15 minute test I didn't want to make up a bunch of wiring without proving the theory would work as expected. I happen to be using my Champion 2,500w inverter generator running on propane in the video, but in general I would use the output of the trailer to do it silently, and hook the generator up to the trailer when I need to charge the battery.
As a whole, I figured this might be helpful to people in a similar situation that have very reliable power and want a simple workaround for the rare outage. It doesn't make sense to me to set up a full split phase setup in the house, nor do I want to run my big 7,500w generator 24/7 to have power, both from a noise and fuel perspective. That thing DRINKS propane compared to the little generator, and at night we can just run one mini split and be fine all night on just battery alone.
You'll have to turn the audio up to hear anything I say, the iPhone sure makes that little generator sound loud but in reality, it's pretty darn quiet.
I'm a low voltage contractor and tow my work trailer to job sites. It has 1,600w of solar on the roof, 5kWh SOK battery and 3,000w Growatt inverter inside. It has a 120v 9kbtu mini split and tons of gadgets inside. I got to thinking, if I had a transformer I could convert the output of that trailers inverter from 120v to 240v and power the essentials in the house silently, and certainly save a lot of gas/propane from running a generator 24/7.
The following quick video shows the test setup, I certainly wouldn't suggest anyone make up a suicide cord as you'll see to back feed a house, but for my 15 minute test I didn't want to make up a bunch of wiring without proving the theory would work as expected. I happen to be using my Champion 2,500w inverter generator running on propane in the video, but in general I would use the output of the trailer to do it silently, and hook the generator up to the trailer when I need to charge the battery.
As a whole, I figured this might be helpful to people in a similar situation that have very reliable power and want a simple workaround for the rare outage. It doesn't make sense to me to set up a full split phase setup in the house, nor do I want to run my big 7,500w generator 24/7 to have power, both from a noise and fuel perspective. That thing DRINKS propane compared to the little generator, and at night we can just run one mini split and be fine all night on just battery alone.
You'll have to turn the audio up to hear anything I say, the iPhone sure makes that little generator sound loud but in reality, it's pretty darn quiet.
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