Storage carries the house when the grid stops. The technology is mature and the reasons people ask about it here are specific and recent.
Why this is a normal request in Central Texas now
February 2021 is the reference point, and it does not need embellishing. Extended outages across this region during a hard freeze changed how households think about the assumption that power is simply there. The demand since has been steady rather than seasonal, and it is usually framed as insurance rather than as an energy project.
That framing matters, because it should shape the design. Insurance against a multi-day outage is a different specification from a system bought to shift consumption or maximise solar self-use — and the second one gets sold to people who asked for the first.
The subpanel decision is the design
Almost every meaningful cost lever on this job is the same question: what, exactly, are you backing up?
Whole-home backup requires the system to carry whatever the house might demand at once. In a climate where the largest load is air conditioning and the outage risk is highest in extreme weather, that is an expensive specification.
A critical-loads subpanel is the alternative. You choose the circuits that genuinely have to survive — refrigeration, enough lighting to live by, outlets for devices and medical equipment, networking, often one HVAC zone rather than the whole system — and the battery is sized against that list. The result is smaller, cheaper, and runs materially longer on the scenario you were actually worried about.
We build the list with you before quoting hardware.
Heat is a siting constraint, not a footnote
Batteries have an operating temperature range and cell life degrades faster at the top of it. A unit mounted where it takes direct afternoon sun through a Central Texas summer is spending months in the least favourable part of that band.
So placement gets designed rather than defaulted: a shaded elevation, a garage interior, or conditioned space where the product permits it. It costs nothing to decide well at installation and cannot be corrected cheaply later.
Interconnection, and six different answers
Any system that operates alongside the grid needs your utility’s agreement about how it behaves — particularly that it disconnects properly during an outage so it cannot energise lines that someone else believes are dead.
The requirements are not uniform across this service area. Austin Energy, Georgetown and San Marcos are municipal utilities with their own processes. Pedernales and Bluebonnet are cooperatives. Oncor territory works differently again. We establish which applies before promising a timeline, because the approval usually sets the schedule rather than the installation work.
Working alongside the charger
Where there is already an EV circuit, or one is planned, the two get designed as a single load calculation rather than sequentially. A charger, a battery and possibly solar on one service is an integration problem, and solving it once at the start is considerably cheaper than solving it three times.