Back The Hell Up

Last week two flaws in PHP went public. PHP is the programming language behind SolarQuotes and a big slice of the web, and these bugs had been sitting in its code for about 14 years. AI models found them. Within 45 minutes of the announcement, Cloudflare was seeing tens of thousands of attempts to exploit them. By that evening it was millions.

PHP doesn’t run the grid. But AI has made finding and weaponising software bugs faster and cheaper, and almost everything between the power station and your toaster now runs on software: the network operator, your retailer, the market operator, and the cloud platform your inverter uses.

Then there’s the weather. The Bureau declared an El Niño in June, and its models have it potentially the strongest on record. Heat, fire and the storms that follow are what take out power to homes for days.

Put the two together, and I reckon the chance of a serious, multi-day disruption to Australian electricity has gone from fairly unlikely to reasonably likely. And it won’t get better as AI improves and CO2 keeps climbing.

The Poms have been told to stock up

Last Thursday, the UK government published guidance asking every household to buy bottled water, non-perishable food, a torch and batteries, a radio, blankets, copies of important documents, and cash.

I think that’s smart, and you don’t need to panic buy. Every time you go shopping, drop a few extra non-perishables into the trolley, get $50 cash out and put it under the mattress.

None of that makes you a prepper.

When did backup get uncool?

Now think about your electricity supply. Somewhere in Australia’s battery boom, worrying about backup became almost uncool. The conversation moved to bill savings, VPP payments and tariff tricks, and blackout protection got treated as an optional extra for nervous types.

So plenty of people have ended up with a cheap and cheerful system that has no backup at all, or backup that was badly designed. And with the el-cheapo installers, it’s rarely tested before the van leaves the driveway.

We hear too many stories where the backup’s first test is the first real blackout, and it fails. Some owners discover their “backup” needs someone to flick a manual switch in the switchboard, in the dark. Others discover the battery won’t run the aircon after dark. Either way, they find out at the worst possible moment.

In this threat-heavy environment, I think you’re nuts to invest in solar and batteries and not have backup that’s robust, tested and well understood.

“But I never get blackouts”

I can hear the comments already. “It’s not worth the extra cash. I never get blackouts.”

Which reminds me of an idiot with a Tesla who’d never had a flat, so never bothered buying a spare tyre. You can guess what happened next. A flat in the Clare Valley, a night in a cheap motel, and a long wait for the local tyre place to open. Luckily, I had my bike in the car, so I could cycle to the nearest accomodation.

Tesla’s so-called roadside assist was useless. “It’s a Sunday!” “You’re a long way from Adelaide!” Serves me right for waiting until I needed the backup to test it, I suppose.

Years without a flat told me nothing about that particular trip. A decade of reliable grid supply tells you about the last decade’s weather and the last decade’s hackers, and this summer is shaping up with a nastier set of both.

What to do about it

Yet to buy a battery? Go with an installer who is competent enough to design and install backup properly, tests it before they leave, and can tell you what it will run and for how long.

Already have a battery but never tested the backup? Now’s the time.

Did your retailer talk you out of backup? I think that was terrible advice. They’re using a history of good luck as evidence that bad luck won’t happen. Get a quote to add backup.

Partial backup? Have a plan for the dead circuits

Partial backup is common and perfectly fine, as long as you know which circuits go dark and have a cheap alternative for each one.

• Induction cooktop not backed up? Keep a portable induction unit in the cupboard. IKEA’s TILLREDA is about $50.
• Oven not backed up? An air fryer on a backed-up power point will handle most of what the oven does.
• EV charger not on the backup circuit? Make sure you’ve got a portable trickle charger that plugs into a normal power point.

Whole-home backup? Know your kW from your kWh

Whole-home backup means everything can run. How long it can run is another matter.

Two numbers matter. kW is how hard your appliances pull at any moment, and your inverter has a ceiling. kWh is a measure of how much energy the battery holds. Big loads hit both: they can trip the inverter, and they empty the tank fast.

So when the grid drops, switch off the pool pump. Keep a close eye on big aircons. Switch the EV charger off, unless it’s set to charge on solar only.

That leaves the battery to do its real job in an outage: keeping the fridge cold, the lights on, and the internet up until the sun comes back.

One more catch for three-phase homes. Some three-phase inverters can only put a third of their output on each phase, so one big single-phase load can trip the backup even when the total looks fine. I covered that here.

Make it a conscious choice

I’m not a doomsday prepper. I’m fairly optimistic about the future.

But if you’ve invested in solar and a battery and you choose to forgo backup insurance because “long outages never happen”, that’s your call. Just make sure it’s a conscious one.

And make sure you’re happy explaining it to your family when they’re sitting in a hot, dark house for hours or days, with a big shiny battery on the wall and a load of solar panels on the roof.

Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column by SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to get it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.