Power Blackouts and Battery Backup

I am following up the posts regarding the loss of power during the storms last week and said we had been testing a backup battery that would provide emergency power for most appliances.

As most “solar” batteries are $8-10,000+ installed even after rebates, this is beyond the justification of most people who only need emergency power for that once a year (or every 2-3 years) event that takes out their power for a few hours to at most a day or so.

There’s no perfect solution unless you want to spend big bucks like $25,000 or more and then you can virtually go off grid.

However we started testing this Ecoflow battery about a month ago because we thought it ticked a lot of boxes.

Peak power at 3300 watts and 1800 watts continuous with 1260Wh capacity so will run your kettle, toaster, microwave, air fryer, heater and fridge without a problem. And before the keyboard warriors jump down my throat, no it won’t run them all at once (but see my comment below) and no it won’t last long if you run them all continuously. But that’s not what you do normally anyway and certainly in an emergency you prioritise. You boil the kettle (2-3 minutes uses 60Wh), heat up something in the microwave (60Wh), keep the fridge going but adjust the temp a bit (60-150Wh) and so on. Appliances don’t run continuously so when calculating how long a battery will last you need to look at these numbers, not just take their peak load and divide this by the battery capacity. And if your priority is a medical one (CPAP or nebuliser) or just keeping communication going by keeping the router and mobiles phones online, this will last almost indefinitely.

Anyway so far this battery has taken everything we could throw at it even running a fan heater and a small induction cooker (at the same time) until we ran it flat to see how long it took and then how long it took to recharge. The claims by the manufacturer were correct and this is one reason we were impressed.

The other reason we liked it was instead of being permanently connected to your home and needing an electrician to wire it up, if you needed something for camping, boating or to loan a friend who lost power (and you are ok), this is a portable unit that plugs into 230V to recharge and you just plug appliances into the multiple sockets available. It means you can get good value and multiple uses from it rather than a single function battery. It will recharge from a solar panel which you could buy from a camping or outdoor centre for $150 making it very versatile.

Retail price is $2400 and online they are $2200-2600. So we approached the importer and asked for a group buy price delivered to Melbourne (but we could organise other places as well). It’s not cheap, but it’s not junk either. If you are interested, the price to Melbourne is $1995 including delivery and you can pickup from me or else arrange your own freight. I can probably deliver if you are in the eastern suburbs.

Anyway, message me for more details and I will send you the product brochure so you can see what it looks like.

Hope this helps people during the next blackout.