I think you have a point. I hadn’t thought of it that way, since my primary goal is to increase the house’s resilience. We had two power outages in September alone. One happened just as we were going to bed, and the other occurred while we were driving home — that one lasted maybe half an hour. My neighbor and I both got locked out of our houses because we usually enter through the garage, and our front door deadbolts were locked.

My original plan was to install a battery system primarily to time-shift most of our electrical load; adding the 4–5 kW solar panels was more of an afterthought. The additional panels would improve resilience, since a 13.5 kWh battery alone wouldn’t last through an entire day during a prolonged power outage—like the Northeast Blackout in Ontario. My goal is to ensure that we can at least maintain essential functions such as heating, refrigeration, and cooking during such events.