Would it make financial sense to store electricity to battery during cheap periods?
Question:If you could charge a bunch of batteries during the night time when electricity is cheap and run your house off of battery during the day - might that be a way to save some money? Or would the cost of the storage batteries to run typical house be so expensive that the savings would not be worth it?
Answers:
no here is the reason why. A battery aray will be very expensive. Then there is the problem of resistance, and voltage loss. you will need an expensive inverter to change the power fro DC(the batteries) to AC(usable power) you will have to do the opposite of this to charge the batteries, the inverters are only 90% efficienct and much less for transformers. This is why it is cost prohibative to buy power at reduced rates then use it during peak usage hours
Thats not a good way to save your money. 1) batteries that would be able to run your house would cost a fortune. 2) batteries loose their charge over time so in fact you will be loosing some of the electricity you stored up.
It depends are you looking for long term savings or short term savings. The scenario you describe only saves you money in the very long term scenario and would require a large startup cost. A better alternative would be be either to adopt a solar or wind solution to charge the batteries to run your home. This is becoming more and more common especially with state and federal grants and tax incentives to make it more feasible. I have researched the solar alternative and aside from the batteries taking a huge foot print (unless you use non battery which is essentially you use the energy you produce immeadiately) no one can tell me how long the life of a residential solar panel is here on earth. They tell me that there have been solar panels in space for decades with pride until I point out that space does not have weather or seasons. At this point they confess they do not know.
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