If you have solar, you won’t ever go 3 days without some energy generation. The 3 days of battery is mainly a buffer for night time when solar is offline.
I just think, at the very least, getting people thinking about these topics and perhaps even convincing someone to make some lifestyle changes could be really helpful, and well, it just isn’t often words from internet strangers could have such a direct impact.
Ultimately, my thinking is that I can’t help the people in that article here, but I can try and contribute to the readers in my small way.
That recommendation is for people with the money to do it, which is most of us here. I was replying to someone talking about most “rural” people and extended the reply to be relevant to people here.
Given I sleep most nights in a hammock in woods backpacking and travel around nonstop, and have no trouble in sub-zero wilderness, I have definitely opted out of housing and may or may not know something about what I’m talking about.
Believe it or not, people with ethics and willpower to follow through still exist. I have opted out of housing and opted out of having children, because the housing situation is unconscionable and refuse to participate in it (nor will I enrich people participating in it by paying their outrageous rates). I would never bring a child into this world as it is and where its going, so that is an easy one.
Okay, I do agree this qualifies as opting out of the housing market.
> Believe it or not, people with ethics and willpower to follow through still exist
Sure. I'm there myself on a few topics, and have lived them for quite some time. But you need to understand that this puts you at odds with 99% of society, and as such your example isn't going to be found as actionable advice by the sheer majority of people - even people who agree with you 90% of the way.
Do you mind sharing your numbers? If I just spitball with a 10kBTU/hr design load, a heat pump COP of 3, and assume that your heating requirements are taken care of by that design load for 8 hours at night, that's still like 3 Powerwalls. I'd say there are better ways to spend those resources, especially considering that batteries wear out like everything else.
All things told I was prepared to spend around $75k on electrical to make this happen in a remote location, which seemed reasonable to me given the capabilities & stability I would get in return. It is not something most people could afford, but most people here on HN probably could which is why I mentioned it.
For emergencies, I think I would put more trust in a low-tech wood burner, moving extra wood in-house whenever there’s a serious storm forecast.
Still, in general it seems like the ultimate design constraint is always low probability events adding up - eg solar generation getting severely cut for a week, due to snow on the panels and cloudy days or hardware failure, coupled with many cold nights in a row. For which a fall back to a more traditional denser energy source (wood or gasoline) that you'd end up using every few years comes in much cheaper than trying to oversize the primary battery storage to handle every long tail event.
I don't think you've run the numbers here, at all. Battery storage that can provide off-grid heat-pump heating for a single dead-of-winter design night is bordering on impractical. Creating a buffer that could last 3 whole days (4-5x the size) would be blatantly prohibitive.
Batteries only make sense for daily cycling to deal with the dark. It's much less expensive and most likely less environmentally destructive to supply longer term backup electricity needs from a traditional generator and dino juice than to manufacture batteries just to have them sitting around basically unused.
The sensible way to spend capital investment is on more insulation to make your heating load quite low to begin with (eg Passivhaus). Perhaps this dovetails into your thinking, but if so you should lead with and focus on that, as talking about supplying heating loads with batteries is just insane.