Passive House Solar Array and LFP Battery Tour

My name's Mark and I live on a 24 acre farm in the mountains of North Idaho. Back in 2015-2017 my wife and I had a passive house (passivhaus) designed and constructed on this land.

Due to the difference in our ages (8 years) plus the wonderful tendency of folks in her family tree to live to their late 90s while mine struggle in many cases just to get to their 80s, we figured (barring accident or misadventure, with all things coming to their natural end) she might easily outlive me by 20 years or more. And in that instance, we wanted the house to be as maintenance-free as possible, so that she would not have to (as a 90+ year old woman) be out in the forest chopping firewood or behind the house fueling up or fixing a traditional generator.

So instead of installing a combustion-driven electrical backup generator, we opted for a 7.5kW solar array plus a SonnenBatterie ECO 12 12kWh LFP battery backup.

In this video I'll give you a tour of our backup power system and you can learn what we did and why we did it. Normally in our area no one would put up a solar array because our power cost is a very low ~7c per kWh. So no one would do a payback period analysis on something like this. But as a backup generator with a requirement to be essentially maintenance free, it makes sense. It also helps that I'm an electrical engineer who enjoys this technology.

As usual, if you dig this sorta content, go ahead and hit the like button and subscribe to the channel for more of the same. Hopefully I get a little better with the video skills each time.

Thanks for watching and hope you enjoy the video.