It is certainly feasible to add backup to only your light circuits.
First let me explain how a regular grid connected solar and battery system with backup works:
When the grid is available, the whole house is connected to the batteries and solar. The appliances are powered first by solar, next by battery power and finally by the grid. This ensures that solar or stored solar powers most of my usage and keeps the bills down.
When the grid goes down the batteries switch over to the 'critical load' circuits. i.e. the batteries are only connected to some house circuits. This is done because if you tried to back up the whole house, the batteries would be overwhelmed without the grid to support high-power loads.
For example, I have grid connected batteries and they only backup my lights and kitchen circuits (excluding oven) in a grid-outage. I want my family to be able to see, eat and drink cold beer. The kids get cranky if the beer is warm.
But a decent sized solar and battery system starts at about $15,000, or to add a decent battery starts at about $10,000.
So what are cheaper options for just backing up your lights?
1) The super cheap option is to keep a rack of rechargeable lanterns plugged in in the garage. This will cost $40 per lantern:
https://www.bunnings.com.au/arlec-rechargeable-fluorescent-lantern_p4414740
2) The more sophisticated way is add a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) to your lighting circuit.
This is cheaper than a solar and battery system. The UPS unit will cost $500-$1000 plus installation.
The grid keeps the UPS batteries charged and when the grid goes down the lights are powered by the UPS's batteries.
But you still need it professionally installed to ensure that the backed up circuits are segregated and labelled and the UPS is installed to Australian Standards.
First ensure that all your lights are high quality LEDs.
Then get suitably qualified sparky to work out how big a UPS you need to keep your lights going through a typical outage.
For example - if you have 5 x 10W lights, then to keep the lights on for 10 hours you need:
10hours x 5 lights x 10W = 500 Watt hours (0.5kWh) .
First let me explain how a regular grid connected solar and battery system with backup works:
When the grid is available, the whole house is connected to the batteries and solar. The appliances are powered first by solar, next by battery power and finally by the grid. This ensures that solar or stored solar powers most of my usage and keeps the bills down.
When the grid goes down the batteries switch over to the 'critical load' circuits. i.e. the batteries are only connected to some house circuits. This is done because if you tried to back up the whole house, the batteries would be overwhelmed without the grid to support high-power loads.
For example, I have grid connected batteries and they only backup my lights and kitchen circuits (excluding oven) in a grid-outage. I want my family to be able to see, eat and drink cold beer. The kids get cranky if the beer is warm.
But a decent sized solar and battery system starts at about $15,000, or to add a decent battery starts at about $10,000.
So what are cheaper options for just backing up your lights?
1) The super cheap option is to keep a rack of rechargeable lanterns plugged in in the garage. This will cost $40 per lantern:
https://www.bunnings.com.au/arlec-rechargeable-fluorescent-lantern_p4414740
2) The more sophisticated way is add a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) to your lighting circuit.
This is cheaper than a solar and battery system. The UPS unit will cost $500-$1000 plus installation.
The grid keeps the UPS batteries charged and when the grid goes down the lights are powered by the UPS's batteries.
But you still need it professionally installed to ensure that the backed up circuits are segregated and labelled and the UPS is installed to Australian Standards.
First ensure that all your lights are high quality LEDs.
Then get suitably qualified sparky to work out how big a UPS you need to keep your lights going through a typical outage.
For example - if you have 5 x 10W lights, then to keep the lights on for 10 hours you need:
10hours x 5 lights x 10W = 500 Watt hours (0.5kWh) .
Then you need the sparky to install the UPS on your lighting circuit.
Note that a typical, modern Aussie house might have 30 downlights. Assuming you've got LEDs (tell me you've replaced those halogens please!) that's 300W of lights. To keep those going for 10 hours, you'd need 3000Wh (3kWh) of UPS which is huge. So this doesn't really work for all the lights in a modern home - just a one of two rooms.
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