Living in a rural and sometimes frigid part of Vermont, I used to worry about winter weather when I left my home empty to travel. Just before the pandemic, I went on a ski trip to the Rockies, and while I was gone, a pipe froze and burst, spewing water for days, and the end result was the total destruction of my kitchen floor down to the sub flooring, requiring more than $60,000 in repairs, not to mention very long waits for contractors and legal hassle with my sub-par insurer. Thanks to supply chain issues, it took well over a year just for my new range to arrive, cooking on an induction burner with no oven.
Winter is always challenging in Northern climates, but lately there’s reason to worry about the weather all year round and all across the country. The effects of climate change are becoming more and more pronounced every year, with record heat, record cold, record rain, flooding, drought, wildfires and seemingly one disaster after another, all over.
Having experienced this firsthand, as someone who spends about a third of the year on the road and outside my house, I started looking for solutions. Anyone who travels a lot or leaves home seasonally, as do many “snowbirds” in the Northeast and Midwest who have winter homes further south, has faced this same quandary. The traditional answer is a whole house generator that comes on automatically when power is interrupted. This is what hospitals, fire departments and police stations use, and it’s a great back-up, but has a few downsides. The biggest negative is cost—it’s easily the most expensive option, and when we looked into a whole house solution it ran well into the five figures, outside my budget for something you hopefully never need.
Secondly, they need a fuel supply, usually either installing a propane tank or filling with diesel. Diesel fuel has a shelf life of 6-12 months, so you either have to add stabilizers or run the generator long enough to burn off the fuel supply annually before it goes bad, whether you lose power or not, which is wasteful. Finally, generators have a big and not overly attractive outdoor footprint.
The cheap solution, which we used for years, was a portable generator that ran on regular gasoline, with an electrician-installed transfer plug to power vitals such as the furnace, fridge, water pump and whatever you might want on when there’s power. The big problem with this is that it’s not automatic, and only works when you are home to connect and start it, far from the peace of mind you want while traveling. It was no help when we went skiing.
But in just the past couple of years, much like the boom of the electric car industry, a new generation of battery back-ups have appeared on the scene, and after much research, I just had an EcoFlow system installed. EcoFlow makes a variety of very high-powered home and portable generator-like battery solutions, and has some really good options for those in areas with regular power outages who are likely to be home when it happens. But for my absentee and travel peace of mind I wanted the equivalent of a full-blown generator solution, something that would come on and take over my vitals automatically if the power dropped, so I went with their Smart Panel whole-house system (I also looked into a competing product from Tesla, but had a bad experience when their team came to my house and decided to go in another direction).
There are some other pros to the product besides clean, easy functionality and a small, neat footprint that need not be outside and can be concealed in your garage, laundry room or in my case, basement. First, you can qualify for rebates through the Residential Clean Energy Credit program, and in some locales you can actually lower your electric bill by putting power back into the grid at peak times, but this depends where you live. You can also add a solar charging option, and EcoFlow claims 20-39% savings on your electric bill when using solar input. The EcoFlow system is component driven and easily upgradable—once installed it is easy to add additional batteries if you want to up the amount of items you can power or the duration of an outage. Fortunately, where I live, in three decades our outages have never run more than about a day, but I know Vermonters who have lost power for a week.
The Smart Panel is basically a smaller version of your circuit breaker panel you connect to it (it requires a licensed electrician to attach, and that is separate from the purchase). You pick up to 10 breakers you want to stay on and if the power goes out, the smart panel automatically switches those breakers to battery back-up, almost instantly (20 milliseconds).
I got the combo of the Smart Panel and Delta Pro Portable Power Station ($2,899 on sale) and you can add additional batteries for $1,999. It is called Portable because you can also grab the battery unit, unplug it from the panel, and take it on the road as a giant version of a charging station or quiet, fuel-free alternate to a portable generator. These are very popular with people who do car camping or road trips with the currently hot generation of camper vans. You can essentially power your home and your home away from home with the same unit.
The reason it is now on sale and rather heavily discounted is because since I put mine in for this winter, they released a newer model specifically for whole house automatic backup, the EcoFlow DELTA Pro Ultra and Smart Panel 2 ($7,499). This came out at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month (January 2024) and was named a 2024 CES Innovation Awards Honoree for its design and technology. It combines battery, inverter and newer smart panel with 12 circuits and zero crossover time. Even though you need an electrician, for a whole home system installation is extremely simple. You can link multiple batteries and run essentials like lights and refrigerator for a full month. Each unit has a 6kWH 7200W output and can even run central air conditioning. It can even be used to charge your electric car. I don’t have central air conditioning so that wasn’t a concern for me, but would be if you lived in a hurricane/storm prone warm coastal region.
All the smart products are app controlled, and an added bonus I had not anticipated but was pleasantly surprised by is that when it runs, it is near silent, a far cry from my previous portable generator.
Travel is stressful enough without having to worry about what’s going on back home, and after having lived through what can go wrong, I find the peace of mind well worth the investment.