Batteries are Cheap, Backup power is expensive

@erik_squires 

You're right, there are a lot of ways to utilize solar and I don't understand half of them. There are a few places around who bought into it to run their whole house. I'm not sure it's the way to go here in MO just yet. It costs a lot to set up. I'd never live long enough to get it back. My wife has a cousin in TX who says he got his money back in 5 years or so. I don't think that would happen here. I was talking with a friend who got his going and it didn't sound good to me at all. It did not provide enough to run his A/C in summer and when he produced more than he needed, the electric COOP paid him about 10 cents on the dollar for what they bought back. I don't think he saved any money at all by doing it. I think he lost money. The numbers were not good.

My wife is always saying we should go solar or even wind. Either proposition is outrageously expensive. We have a pretty good sized house, all electric. I can burn wood but I found it to be a lot more work than it was worth. I might have saved $200 a year on the electric bill. In the big picture, that is not enough to warrant all the work or the mess created by the wood. When we first moved here, I added a wood furnace, cost over 4k by the time I had it installed. It accomplished nothing, was poorly installed and could not keep up with our duct work. I would have had to have a whole separate system of duct work installed. I sold it after a couple winters and lost over 2k. Only benefit was getting in better shape at 60 years old cutting a lot of firewood and hand splitting it all with an axe. A lot of work and I did manage to tear my rotator cuff in the process. So much for getting in shape. :)

I'm afraid we'll be stuck with terrible electric bills for the duration. We considered downsizing to a smaller home but I decided that I'm too dang old to do that again. Decided to make the best of what we have here. Things could be worse I suppose. Hope you find what you need. 

@billpete  - Yeah the economics keep changing.  Costs of power generation have dropped  a great deal recently, making selling power a bad idea, but now with climate change and AI's demand for power it may make home power generation more worthwhile. 

One point that hasn’t been addressed is that makes a UPS more expensive than a stand-alone battery/inverter set up is that the UPS is able to take over within Miliseconds, allowing most electronics to continue running seamlessly. That’s actually not trivial to do. 
 

If you really just want cheap battery backup nothing beats lead acid - parallel a dozen car batteries and hook up a 2kW or 4kW 12V inverter.  I did the math recently and in terms of energy-per-dollar lead acid is still way ahead. And they can easily be maintained with a cheap trickle charger. 
 

That said, we have a system with solar (roof and ground based installation for around 20kW total) and several Tesla Powerwall batteries - with us enough to keep us going indefinitely without grid power. I also have an ancient trailer-mounted 60kW diesel generator (enough for a small city block) for long periods without sunshine. The diesel in my fuel trailer will last a good while with a good fuel stabilizer. And I use it occasionally for vehicles so I cycle through it. (The generator eats about 35-40 gal/24 hrs, so with any 400 gals on hand we’ll be ok for a while)

 Now, to tie it back to Audio, I don’t hear a difference between grid power and solar/battery power.  I do have isolation transformers for my system so that might help.  When the generator is running I don’t hear anything but generator noise though …

@erik_squires

I use battery backups on all my electronics because they have good surge protection and when the power flickers, they protect expensive equipment from damage.

I have a backup generator that kicks on automatically after 30 seconds of outage, but generally whole house generators have relatively dirty power, so the battery backups continue to provide low voltage protection as well as surge protection.  If you want to spend a bit more money, you can use true sine wave battery backups.

The only downside is the batteries do need to be replaced in all of them from time to time, but if you’re a little bit handy, 3rd party batteries can be had for a fraction of APC replacement battery costs.

Having your own power is an interesting idea and I love it except for one thing: You are now responsible for fixing it when your home power generation  fails. And while you can hire people to do that for you, in an emergency, those people may not be available for weeks.  So you need to think about the maintenance of voltage converters, batteries not first year or second year, but when it’s 10-15 years old.

Hey @phildebrandt - Make sure you compare usable power.  LiFePO4 batteries can be used for almost 100% of their amp hours (Ah) while lead acid 50%. 

If you have the room, I can see lead acid beating out LiFePO4 for $/usable watt hours.