Boy-O-Boy, you guys are starting to get wound up now! And the advice is precious to me.
Per BTU, nothing beats fossil fuels. But shelf life is quite problematic. My thought is to again, use propane and a larger KW generator backup. In other words, if 10kw is needed, I'd buy a 12.5-15kw gen-set (to make-up for the BTU deficiencies), for shelf life purposes and ease of overall maintenance. Of course, there are flaws to any system and daisy-chaining many tanks has a big one, like a not so errant bullet, from say, Moreaduring thugs, to name but one. But that aside (I keep extra Barbeque Sauce around for just such a job! --BTW, you do realize I have redefined the purpose of the Hollow Point, right? It "IS" the receptacle for the BBQ Sauce, and what brand of Barbeque Sauce do I use for this Job? Well, Bulls Eye Brand of course..wink-- "
See Insert"), my thoughts are to charge a large bank of batteries, to act as a Well pressure tank. In this way, when the lights go off, the switching changes over to the Batteries and the gen system (gas -and or- solar powered), charges the batteries, just not constantly and when running off the gen, all excess power, not already charging the batteries, goes to the shops and House requirements. In other words (I say it this way because, as you guys know, my prose suffers some.), I am thinking I want to run off the batteries, in a power outage, when the batteries start to discharge enough, switching will start the gen-set. Using Solar to otherwise charge the batteries, when power is not required. I'd nice to have enough Solar to excessively charge the batteries on those Commercial Power Outage sunny days. I was just down a week and took care of dozens of families around me. I was holding my breath, because I knew I was going to find some dead. Heck, one night it got down to -6° below! But we had a couple of Sunny Days, in all of that, that would have provided allot of power..
So again, I'm thinking, Solar and a gen-set to charge batteries, any excess power not charging batteries, runs the house hold, heck the shops can just shut down for awhile or in an extended situation I could turn off the house and divert the power to the shops for a time. The Gen-Set not to kick in until the batteries and solar are overwhelmed. And for the Gen to run on Propane??
In the case of Hoots 3 year batteries, they'd be wonderful candidates to recondition. Reconditioning will bring back the five year turn around and if you've never done it You-Tube has lots of videos on the subj (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YhfeSOyPAg). BTW, if it makes any sense, tow-motor/fork lift batteries are Deep Cycle Batteries, much like very large marine Batteries. But, discarded UPS batteries shore look inviting. Any idea where I could get them locally. They are so expensive, I'd even ship some of those you guys replace, assuming I could get them, I mean, well, you're discarding them, right??
I'm still looking for constructive criticisms. Don't be afraid to insult, I need the feed back to be able to make a decision on my needs..
..t
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Hollow point Medicine!! I no-longer care about expansion, but as my Mother used to say.."Boys, if you're going to shoot it, you're going to eat it"!!