Market guide
Build an outage load schedule before sizing a battery
Translate appliances, motor starts, duty cycles and hours into power and energy requirementsA battery cannot be sized from a utility bill or capacity label alone. The design begins with the loads that must survive, their starting and running power, when they overlap, how long they run and which loads can be shed.
01
Loads
Name the protected circuits and operating sequence
List each essential load, its circuit, voltage, running power, start behavior, duty cycle and acceptable interruption before selecting capacity.
- Power and energy are separate
- Kilowatts determine what can run at once. Kilowatt-hours determine how long the chosen sequence can continue.
- Motor starts need evidence
- HVAC, pumps, refrigeration and well equipment can exceed running demand during start and may need approved soft-start or deliberate load control.
02
Schedule
Build a conservative outage timeline
Model day and night operation, weather, occupant behavior, battery reserve, solar production and a no-solar case rather than one ideal average.
- Duty cycle changes with conditions
- Heating, cooling, pumping and refrigeration can run much longer during extreme conditions than an ordinary billing period suggests.
- Plan the shedding order
- Separate automatic and manual load control and preserve a household procedure for extending runtime when the outage lasts.
03
Boundary
Keep resilience claims conditional
Published runtime depends on configured capacity, reserve, load, temperature, battery state, firmware and solar or generator availability.
- Whole home is not all loads
- A whole-home transfer architecture may still shed HVAC, EV charging, ranges, pumps or other large loads under named conditions.
- Test the actual sequence
- Commission with a controlled outage and observe transfer, priority loads, starts, load shedding, alerts and safe recovery.
Evidence used
First-party sources behind this guide
- 01Battery energy-storage system electrical checklistU.S. Department of Energy · checked August 19, 2026Open source
- 02How to get a home battery in 2026EnergySage · checked August 19, 2026Open source
- 03Residential Clean Energy CreditInternal Revenue Service · checked August 19, 2026Open source