ahaaa, had not seen that link. Well, for all intents and purposes, how many Kwh you need is entirely up to you once you scale the inverter charger to handle max available load without tripping. The rest becomes a time based variable (i.e, the more the batteries, the longer youll stay without power) and since were all in a generous forum, if you share the specs of all the equipment thatll be running on that, we can always give a very close to real estimate of possible (and max) power consumption. 

In most cases the rating of equipment is written in the power connectors (laptop chargers => usually something like 65W, power supply units for PCs, at the back of Monitors....e.t.c , you need to add all these up, then give a margin of error (short, chinese workmanship, etc) then come up with a ballpark figure. 

The easiest and most realistic one though is using your electricity bills if you use the entire (or most) of the elec on your systems, this will give you a monthly KWH usage (1 unit => 1 kwh) and youll realize how many you need to store depending on KPLC (Twitter hashtag TIKP (from TIA ) ... 

Outback: 
http://www.outbackpower.com/products/sinewave_inverter/

On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 9:45 AM, <arebacollins@gmail.com> wrote:
What does a load calculator do? Give you realtime usage or help in design to meet requirements?

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 21, 2012, at 8:00 AM, Tusker 21 <tusker212@gmail.com> wrote:

Cool stuff. Thanks for all the suggestions. I have always wondered what is the best solutions for backup. I migh consider the last option @Areba does this also have a load calculator like for the UPS?
 
 
regards,
 
Tusker

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 4:03 PM, Collins Areba <arebacollins@gmail.com> wrote:
This may shed some light: 

1: Outback Inverter charger : 3KVa ~ 250k. 
2: 100Ah 12 V Deep cycle pair (inverter charger is 24V), approx 24k each. 

Total for the lowest power capacity: approx 300k. 
The Significance of this assembly is that unlike fixed rated UPSes, here you have a system that by just adding batteries in parallel, you can have a significantly high power storage, decreasing cost for every additional KVA added to the system. 

Suffice to say you can have three inverters connected to have Asynchronous power, single or three phase, and these can be treated as a cell and added to a pair to get 27KVA ....e.t.c. 

If this is a long term backup solution, I suggest this. 

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 3:56 PM, Philip Musyoki <pmusyoki@gmail.com> wrote:
There are many factors  that affect battery life, but the rule of thumb is after 3 years they have lost most of their ability to store charge.

And no, car batteries can not be used. The type of batteries used in UPS and for solar power is the type know as 'deep cycle' which can handle the frequent charging and discharging. |Normal car batteries are not designed for that.

One of the leading manufactures of deep cycle batteries is a Korean company known as Gaston,. So whenever you are looking for solar or inverter batteries, always check for their batteries. They have batteries ranging from a few AH to over 200 AH and abovr. Most telcoms use them as backup system for the BTS equipment,.

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