Home Backup Battery for Less! - Anker SOLIX F3800 | In Depth 

You have been able to buy a UPS system from places like Office Depot, and plug in your camera system to your UPS battery back up. Look for a fairly large one. The very low cost 300 watt model will not have a large battery. The one shown is extra large 3,800 watt battery, but also extra cost too.

@@Kangenpower7 a regular computer UPS is not enough at all for a security system, which likely has spinning hard drives too. My at home system with only 2 cameras only lasts 30 min or so without power (1500VA UPS by the way). These only have 2 small lead acid batteries. You do need a LFP kind of battery, but smaller than this would be fine. 1kWh would likely be plenty.

@@whattheschmidt What I did with one UPS system is connect it to my RV pair of golf cart batteries wired for 400 AH at 12 VDC. You can also wire in 4 golf cart batteries to your UPS. Check the battery voltage, normally 12 or 24 volts. Then wire the golf cart batteries the same voltage. 4 of them will store about 4 KW of power. The golf cart batteries need to be stored someplace like a storage shed, well ventilated and not a occupied space. Each 200 AH 6 volt golf cart battery is about 1 KW storage and 67 pounds! If your 1500 KVA UPS is only 40 pounds total then battery storage might be a pair of 12 volt 10 AH batteries. So that can be greatly expanded.

I won’t deal with companies who only offer email support.

Anker's customer support is pathetic, in my experience.

Any recommendations?

Sorry I use the terms interchangeably because I grew up with 220 :)

The installation cost and process for that could be cost prohibitive, also home standby generators require regular periodic maintenance (oil change etc).

Are Anker not there yet? I'd be surprised if there's no-one selling the same thing but different tbh.

@@jonevansauthor I've done a search on South African suppliers, no hits. I've bought the Ecoflow Delta 2 a couple of months ago, also a great product.

Anker Solix F3800 is less than half the price as the Powerwall, is 3.8kWh vs 13.5kWh and is not tied to the grid in our case.

I have heard that the Powerwall is about $10,000. And if the battery in the powerwall is 4 times larger, then it would be less per stored watt. However I am not sure what the wattage of each battery is. The Powerwall is said to be able to run a HVAC system that is small, say 2 tons of capacity. This unit only runs 120 volt loads.

I believe with the manual transfer switch in the kit we got, you'd need to manually switch back and forth but their Smart Panel kit should allow you to do programmed time of day switching.

A single 200 watt panel should make about 1,000 watts per day between May and October, when the daylight is longer each day. So it would take 800 watts to fill the 3,800 watt battery in 1 day. If oyu have a load on the battery, then more solar would power that load and also charge the battery if the solar is larger than the load using the power.

Don't see why not. It's a 30amp outlet so it could supply 60amps of 120

Yes that should work - in fact we should test it! Thanks. Also you can feed the Ford Lightning into the battery to keep it topped up.

A test would be great! I'd buy that transfer switch in a heartbeat if I knew for sure it'd work with the Lightning. I agree, it should technically work. The few reasons it might not seem unlikely. A physical test would be a nice way to get a solid answer.

Would still love to see a physical test to know 100%, but after more research it seems unlikely to work. This is due to the trucks bonded neutral. I hoped Anker was using a bonded neutral with their battery, and this transfer switch supported that. But it seems it doesn't, and this box is an off-the-shelf Reliance transfer switch which doesn't support bonded neutral generators. Plugging in ProPower will likely result in a ground fault in the truck. 🤞 I'm wrong!

I highly doubt it disconnects from the grid and notice there is no main breaker in his panel. However, most local codes require a disconnect from the grid and his probably is at meter or another location. You must disconnect from the grid.

In effect the transfer switch doesn't allow back feeding the grid because you are choosing between "Line" or "battery"

@@ZacCataldo Yes, excellent description.

Yes. The "Line off Gen" switch is a code legal way to disconnect the grid power from the generator power. It is safe, and proven great way to move power from the grid input to the generator input, in this case from a battery inverter system instead of a generator.

I know in our area National Grid can send text messages when the grid goes down/comes back online.

The things that are not run on the battery will come back to life. Such as the light on your digital thermostat run on a 240 volt A/C system. Or you do not put something like 1 light or a radio on a 120 volt circuit that stays grid tied. When it comes on, you know the grid is back. Then can switch some things back to grid power, and maybe leave the lights on the battery pack, in the likely event the grid goes back off later. Most back up generators keep the load on the generator for 15 minutes after the grid is back, then run the engine for instant back up power for another 10 - 15 minutes with no load on the generator, so that the engine can cool itself off before shutting down about 18 - 30 minutes after the grid is back. The chance of a grid going down again is much less after 15 minutes.

They don't have Ofgem or any equivalent, or a national grid of any kind. They have 3 grids on the mainland. We have interconnectors to France, Belgium, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, and we have huge amounts of wind power already, they do not. I could find a single interconnector in the US but that doesn't mean there isn't one. So yeah, their power is completely unstable and antiquated, not to mention the hilariously poor choice they made to go 120 volt and the much worse decision to stick with that. What they need is regulation, and (federal) government management to shore it all up and modernise but of course, they prefer fake freedom to real freedom, or at least, many of them do. And it's not that their politicians are even more easily influenced by money than ours. The insane thing is this sort of thing makes sense to loads of Americans because they can't even see why they'd vote differently based on their own self interest, let alone bring themselves to deny multi-billion turnover companies 'freedom' as if they're people being kept in servitude. :D Of the great things about the US that are nice to have, neither bread nor their utilities are things to be envious of.

What a strange bit of assumptions! We don't have power outages around here because of some little failing of the power companies! We have outages because the dozens of miles of powerlines are knocked out by trees falling or vehicles hitting power poles or rockslides burying a power substation. There are wind towers all over around me, zillions of solar panels, and hydroelectric plants here and there but that doesn't help anyone if the power lines are broken somehow!

lol after the storm today, i find myself here

Yes. I suspect their fridges of equivalent size are less efficient. Just like you could buy the same Ford model over there and over here, and ours would mysteriously get more miles/litre than theirs and have suspension that doesn't feel like you're on a small rowing boat going over rapids. I saw a washing machine on Two bit Da Vinci the other day, that head a heat pump... but had natural gas powering it because they are on 120 volt and can't run normal devices efficiently. I love America, but it's just as crazy as the rest of the world, and bizarrely behind on so much tech.

i mean thats what literally the title of the video says.

Conversely a backup generator has an extremely low utilisation rate and requires fuel, maintenance as you allude to. A battery on the other hand can be used every night to supply solar power that was harvested the previous day. So yes it’s more expensive, but it can give you value every single day, and it doesn’t need any particular maintenance.

@@anthonydyer3939 nailed it