We had our first unplanned outage since installing our system

DIY
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We had our first power outage since installing our new house battery and almost did not notice. Only noticed the grid was down when I tried to use a circuit that is not connected to the battery. Grid power was back after a few minutes but it was nice to see the system work as designed. I had done manual power cuts as part of the initial system testing but this was the first unplanned power cut.

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Hi Mike

I’ve just had batteries installed for back up because I get a lot of power cuts. As you said, it’s great that the batteries cover the power cut seamlessly, but my power cuts can last a week. I need to know I’m on batteries so I’m frugal with my use of electricity until the mains comes back on. Do you know if there is an alarm I can set up so I know the house is now running on battery power?

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I am sure that there must be but I do not know it. I turned the problem on its head. The house doorbell runs on a 24v transformer that is connected to grid power. I tapped off of that to run a couple of status LEDs in the house that are on when the grid is up. When they are off - the grid is down. This way my grid status does not use any battery power.

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The VRM app does notify for “Grid lost”. Be sure to enable Automatic alarm monitoring and app notifications on phone.

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Good news for Karen but two issues for me:

  1. No cell phone service, so no cell phone, so no apps.
  2. We get “grid lost” 5 days a week when we disconnect from the grid during peak power rates and run from battery.
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Only got my system in place about a month now and while we don’t get many outages I wanted to to be sure that I did know it was down (as it switches over without even a flicker :slight_smile: ) also I have whole home backup with my Quattro 15kVA so I wont notice nothing is working.

I decided use Home Assistant to send firstly an Alert to our phones and as this is local through HA so if the internet went down it will still work. Also since I have Fibre even if the power is down locally the fibre should sill work. I then have Home Assistant send a voice alert to all my Google Home devices stating the power is down and we have X% of battery left and X amount of hours of backup. Additionally at 50% 30% and 10% SOC it will send voice alerts saying we are these levels when the grid is down. Also have an alert when on battery power and grid is down if I am using over 4kW of power (eg the HP is on) just to be aware I don’t draw down the battery too fast.

Tested it and it works great and used AI to do all the difficult automations in HA.