Electricity needs when the grids down.

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I like the way that Pete is set-up. It covers the essentials.

We've just adding a petrol generator to our set-up as we’re vulnerable in the here and now to winter power outages, that would disable our heating furnace and central heating system.
We decided on a 3kw electric start gen-set, feeding the Furnace and CH pumps through a dedicated circuit.
I’m concerned that the Furnace / CH microprocessor controller might not appreciate the rough power coming from the gen-set, so have found an appropriate rated multi-function pure sine inverter to keep it happy.

The inverter, although un-planned, can also control a 3kW PV array, and will give us an effective UPS solution keeping the furnace operational for 8 hours or so from our back-up battery supply. (useful if outage occurs overnight)

Daily fuel consumption using the Gen set 16hrs + 8hrs running from the battery bank is going to be around 20L of petrol per day, so somewhat expensive and not viable as a long term solution.