13/03/2023
Necessity is the mother of invention β Our journey to get our office off the Eskom Grid
Like many businesses in South Africa, we were seriously impacted by the rolling blackouts that Eskom have euphemistically called load shedding.
It is just not funny when we have to invoice hundreds of tenants by the close of business and are faced with 4 hours off, 4 hours on, and then off again, all in one day⦠They call it stage 6. I call it disaster!
In 2021 Warren and I discussed the problem and there began the jouney ....
For more than a year we have been searching for a solution, and found along the way that not many people know what they are talking about when it comes to Power, Watts, Amps, Amp-hours, UPS, Inverters, battery types, battery capacities etc. Who knows ? Shop assistants will readily talk nonsense and promise the world just to get that inverter on their floor sold.
I discovered that the starting place was to establish my actual power requirements to keep the office functioning. To do this I purchased a watt meter from Takealot for around R400, and went around measuring everything I needed and then totaled up my power requirements.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that my desktop PCβs only use about 50 W, my laptop 30 W, and WIFI 10 W. I could run my essential office equipment with a mere 200W. Running a noisy 3000W generator is clearly overkill and a huge hassle.
Anybody with university or school-going children knows that since Covid, our schools rely heavily on cloud based education. My 15 year old son would get home from sport at 5.30 pm, with 2 hours of homework lined up, only to find that we had loadshedding scheduled from 6 pm to 10. We would have to run the noisy 3Kw generator for hours in the evenings just so that he could have internet access and do his homework (He would need a mere 50 W). Every online assignment needed careful co-ordination lest the power go down halfway through his submission.
My wife, a journalist, also works from home so a home solution was urgently required. Warren likewise worked from home and was in the same boat.
Eventually, we discovered a lovely UPS/Inverter that was plug and play, solar ready, and would run off a single deep cycle lead acid battery - a combination that matches our homes and small office essential power requirements.
The UPS also had to be programmable and smart enough not to destroy the battery by overcharging or overusing it.
Battery selection was a huge consideration. Lithium Polymer (LiPo) batteries are all the rage, are very good, but they cost a fortune. A LiPo battery typically costs about 5 times the price of a deep cycle lead acid battery and has a design life cycle of about 3 times the lead acid equivalent. So lead acid it was going to be!
Not all lead acid batteries are alike. Lead acid batteries have a bad name because people donβt know how to look after them. Deep cycle batteries are needed because car batteries are not suited to UPS use. For example to get a decent 1000+ charge/discharge cycles from your battery, you will need a deep cycle lead acid battery, some knowledge and some care.
The next step was to make the system robust enough to provide power to last a few days. Our local power grids were not designed to switch on and off multiple times a day for years on end, making 1 or 2 day power outages the norm in many areas.
By adding a single solar panel to the UPS, again matched to suit small office power consumption, we have finally found the holy grail of office power π It became affectionately know as Power in a Box.
Warren has plenty of experience with online sales and deliveries, and since it has proved so successful, Warren and I started a company to supply Property in a Box to small offices and homes across the country.
If you are still reading this, I imagine you may need Power in a Box. To find out more and how to get your hands on a unit, click here https://lionbrands.co.za/power
Kind regards Neil and Warren
POWER FOR HOME, BUSINESS & STUDENTS A simple cost effective solution to eliminate the effects of loadshedding on your business, studies, TV, music No more confusion about what system to buy.