CleanTechnica has carried reviews on a number of backup battery systems in the last few years, including Anker Solix, Bluetti, and Jackery. Reading the reviews, I got ever more intrigued by what I found. These are not just batteries, but power stations with charge controller and inverter built in. They have multiple inputs, including not only AC power but also DC, so solar panels can be plugged in directly. They also have a slew of outlets, for 110 AC, USB ports, and other DC outlets. In my last CleanTechnica article on batteries, “A Backup Battery For The Rest Of Us,” I took a look at the general concept of such battery systems. They are quite different from anything available in times past, so different, in fact, that a person who has not kept up to date might find it difficult to imagine what they can do. I would have been astonished by them thirty years ago. In those days, I lived near the top of a steep hill in New Hampshire. The view was great, looking down the Connecticut River Valley, but the area was cold. I heated with wood that I cut from the hundred acres the house sat on. I used an electric chain saw for cutting the wood. It was powered by a generator, and that was a good combination. I could set it up so the generator’s exhaust was downwind from me, as far away as the power cord allowed. That way I didn’t have to deal with breathing the toxic exhaust of a gas-powered chain saw. With a generator, I also didn’t have to live with the engine noises of a gas-powered chain saw, which I find really offensive. The generator just chugged along at a rather constant level while I cut wood. It was a somewhat annoying sound, and at the end of the day it felt really good to shut the thing down. But its sound was never as grating as the assertive, chaotic racket of a gas-powered chain saw. As I looked into battery systems, I realized that I could do away with the generator by using a portable battery system, if I were still heating with wood. Imagining this made my mind race. My next thought was, “Can I be creative and do things differently today, now that I have such energy sources?” For me, life in Vermont is a bit different from what most readers might expect, even those living in in the same state. I have occupied one apartment for 22 years, and I have had a pretty good relationship with the landlady. We are both interested in sustainability, the environment, energy, gardening, and general food production. There is not a lot of land, possibly a third of an acre, but our interests have led us to have what I might call a plantation on this small property. (She deserves far more credit than I do.) We grow vegetables, in the ground and in the greenhouses. We have trees, both in the ground and in pots. And we have other things going on. This year we are probably going to revisit aquaponics, which we tried about ten years back. Having modern battery systems available brings me to some interesting questions: What can I do better, now that I can use their flexibility? What creative abilities do they enable? Each winter, various potted plants overwinter in my apartment, and they have to be moved outside in the spring. We might have more than 25 trees in pots, and more than half of them overwinter in my quarters. I don’t mind. Now and again I am hit with a sweet scent in the middle of winter, and I find that some tree has decided to go into bloom. Delightful. The process of taking them out for spring involves a good deal of effort over a period of weeks. I want to get them used to the sun and warmth, but I can’t leave them out over night if it’s cold. At the end of the day, some or all of them get moved inside again. I had seventeen potted plants in my apartment this winter. They included two tea plants. There are also two species of orange (blood orange and bergamot), several species of lime (Persian, Makrut, and perhaps three cultivars of Australian finger lime), Meyer lemon (not really a lemon), two cultivars of actual lemons, calamondin, and Minneola tangelo. Maybe I have missed something, but you get the point. It’s a lot of citrus. In Vermont. A couple of days ago it was warm. I moved them all out to the back of the driveway. I could leave them out for the first night, but the next night was too cold to leave them out. About half of them came back into my apartment, including all that were bearing fruit, had flower buds, or were in bloom. The rest went into a greenhouse. And that is where battery power comes into the story. There has been no electric power in the greenhouse, because a power line would cost too much. My first thought was that by using a small battery system, I could power a computer that could keep track of both the air temperature in the greenhouse and for the battery itself. I could program it to send me a signal via a WiFi connection to a desktop computer I have inside. But that is just a start. In our past experiment in aquaponics, we spent some time thinking about heating. The issue was not keeping a greenhouse at a temperature human beings would find comfortable, but keeping things from freezing. We have five tanks, ranging from one hundred to three hundred gallons, and we would have to keep at least one of them sufficiently ice-free that the fish can stay healthy. A generator is absolutely out of the question because of noise and pollution, but having a battery system I can plug into a few solar panels means some amount of clean electricity is nearly always available, provided that I am realistic about how it is being used. Since we are keeping some things from freezing in a greenhouse, a battery does not need to power a lot of heat production. The building collects heat during the day, and the thermal mass of all the water in the greenhouse, combined with the latent heat of fusion (the energy released when water freezes) means a small amount of heat can go a long way. The greenhouse is largely inoperable when it is really cold. I figure batteries might help reduce the amount of time the greenhouse has to be out of operation for winter by a month or more. The jobs the batteries might do would include providing minimal heating, powering air pumps for aerating the water, and pumping water for filtration. These needs are not big, but they are fairly constant. That is a perfect job for a small solar array with a battery system that can get its power from a small set of PVs. And it’s a lot less expensive than having a utility pole installed. Another advantage of battery systems is having a portable storage system available for emergencies. If the power goes down, we could move the backup power to the house for some purpose, such as powering a refrigerator. I have given thought to having a computer track the temperature in the greenhouse, along with the temperature of the battery, and send a signal to my desktop computer if either gets too low. The greenhouse computer could also send alerts for high temperatures during summer. An old Raspberry Pi computer with a temperature sensor and WiFi might use less than ten watts, depending on the model, barely adding to the power demand. Today, we live in times when we can choose to be independent, and I believe everyone should think about how to feed themselves. By the way, if you have never eaten a calamondin, I suggest it, but only if you like things that are really tart. They are fabulous for marmalade. And a small tree can produce a lot of fruit. We had about 230 on a tree that was only four feet tall, ripening at just about Christmas. It can be fun to decorate a Christmas tree, but it is fabulous when nature does it for you. Image: A small calamondin tree (a Tarom, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)