Among one of the first things we learned when we moved to Caliente is: Sh!t breaks. We need plans B, C, and D for anything that matters, including electricity — especially when days-long outages aren’t uncommon.

Many people come to us with the idea of using off-grid solar as backup (e.g., to augment or replace generators, which are noisy and costly to operate.)

But we have a better idea — why not use solar, aka free power, as your primary electricity source and grid power as a backup? This concept turns the table, putting you in charge of lowering power bills and increasing resiliency.

We make the idea possible and affordable with our proprietary Flip-the-Script™️ switchover technology, unique approach to dimensioning solar solutions, and modular, expandable system design.

Here’s how it works:

We discuss your baseline electricity requirements, i.e., what you run on a typical day. We pay special attention to anything that generates or removes heat, such as air conditioning, ovens, fridges, boilers, chest freezers, etc., because they use the most power. This load will inform the system capacity of the initial design.

We help you implement an off-grid solar system to power your day-to-day load. When you switch on more appliances and the load exceeds the solar capacity, our proprietary technology will seamlessly switch to grid power until the load drops below the threshold again.

For example, everything hums along nicely on a 6kWh solar system on a typical day. But for that July Thanksgiving, you have all the A/C, two ovens, and a kettle running simultaneously — bringing the load to 6.1kWh. The system will switch to grid power until the load drops below 6kWh again.

You’re paying the utility company anyway, so you might as well get it to share the load so that you don’t have to pay for solar capacity you don’t need often!

The image above shows how our solution works:

[ top left ] When there’s just enough solar for the house, the power generated from the panels will be used directly to power your appliances.
[ top right ] When there’s excess solar power, the surplus will charge the batteries.
[ bottom left ] When there isn’t sufficient solar, the system will draw power from the batteries to power the house.
[ bottom right ] When there’s no sun and the battery power is used up, the system automatically switches to grid power.

We don’t leave you guessing where you’re at. Our design includes a unique alert widget (aka THE Beep Beep) to let you know when the system is about to switch to the grid. You can keep doing what you’re doing and let grid power do the work or turn off an appliance to two to stay on solar.

After a few months, you’d have collected some data and gained insights about your usage pattern. You’ll also have some power bills to see the impact of how your solar solution has helped you reduce energy costs.

If you like, we’ll crunch the numbers and see if you should expand your system. For example, if it switches to the grid too often, you’ll likely need more capacity (e.g., more solar panels) to maximize the benefits of this “grid as backup” concept.

The data allows us to continuously refine and optimize your solution instead of selling you an over-dimensioned system with capacity that would sit idle most of the time. We aim to make your system generate power as close to 24/7 as possible to maximize your investment.

Furthermore, most of our solutions are modular and expandable. We can add more solar panels and inverter or battery capacity to meet your evolving needs.

For example, you may start with minimum battery capacity to focus on lowering your daytime power bills while keeping the cost of your solar solution down. But the outages become more frequent, and you’re tired of involuntary candlelight dinners. You say the word, and we can add battery capacity to store more energy to meet your nighttime needs, increasing your resiliency without redoing what you’ve already invested in.

Why not just go completely off-grid and unplug Edison?

A system that covers your typical usage but not the 0.1% chance when all 50 appliances are on has a much higher utilization rate. You’ll make your money back faster because we minimize idle capacity (we estimate most clients have a payback time of ~2 years.)

Since you have the grid connection anyway, you can use it to fill needs during those infrequent occasions when you go above your baseline requirements or need to run a monster appliance without investing in the solar capacity.

For example, a client has a 110V solar system for everything in the house. But they occasionally use grid power to run a 220V big bad power tool. They save thousands of dollars by not having a 220V system for the entire house.

We’ll crunch the numbers for you

The “grid as backup” concept is simple, but there’s a lot to consider when the rubber meets the road. That’s why we’re here with the technology and the number-crunching superpower to make it happen.

Get in touch to schedule an onsite visit to see how we can make Grid-as-Backup work for you.

Turn the Table: Grid-as-Backup

Lower electricity bills and boost resiliency