Practical Steps You Can Take to Find Peace During Load-Shedding

Every time Eskom announces a bout of load shedding there is a renewed vigour among businesses and households to investigate how to become less dependent on the grid – at least during electricity outages. This makes sense because, at the very least businesses and individuals can continue their vital operations and are not at the mercy of load shedding or unplanned power cuts.

This means that businesses are able to operate uninterrupted despite an unstable electricity grid and it means remote workers are able to do their jobs while families can continue with household essentials.

Decide What You Need in Terms of High priority and Low Priority Loads

Run the high priority loads such as lights and plugs on your backup solution and only allow your low priority loads to run while the Eskom connection is live.  For example, it is not practical to run geysers and stoves on a battery backup as these would typically be considered low priority. If they are high priority, then with planning they can be accounted for with back-up.

Determine The Time You Will Be Without Power During Load-Shedding

You need to decide how long you need to be able to power those different priority loads on average. Planned outages at higher stages frequently last four and a half hours. Some grids are allowing two-and-a-half hour blocks with no electricity, making 2nd LiFe batteries back up even more viable to cover an outage, as an average they can provide between four to six hours.

Find a Reputable Installer

Contact us to get in touch with a Energy Traders regsitered installer. If done incorrectly, what is meant to be the solution could become more of a headache than the problem!

Your Emergency Energy Requirements – Establish a Baseline

The simplest way to do this is to install a simple energy meter, which will log peak and average usage for a period of a week, at least. Any reputable installer will have these available to install temporarily. This will show how the system needs to be dimensioned to provide uninterrupted electricity during load shedding, and can be used to determine the system design to take the customer off grid partially or totally.