When a residential microgrid is more than the house needs.

The honest version

Five situations where the answer is smaller, and one where it is nothing at all.

A company that designs residential microgrids has an obvious interest in finding that every house needs one. County Line's interest is longer than that: the builders who put it on new houses every year do so because its answers hold up, and a homeowner sold a system larger than the house needs tells the neighbors. So the first part of every design conversation is whether the house needs the design at all, and the answer is often no. Here are the common cases.

The common cases where a smaller answer fits.

The house on the valley floor with a gas main. A home in the middle of Thousand Oaks, Camarillo or Westlake Village, outside the Fire Hazard Severity Zones, with city water and natural gas, has ordinary outages, not multi-day shutoffs. The right answer there is usually a Generac standby generator on an automatic transfer switch, sized from a load calculation, and nothing more. It covers every outage the house will realistically see, and adding a battery and a gateway to it buys quiet, not resilience. County Line installs that generator and says so.

The house that is empty during fire season. A second home in Malibu or Montecito that is closed up from September to December does not need to run through the shutoffs; it needs the refrigerators, the security system, the sump pump if there is one, and the network to stay alive. A modest battery on a small critical-loads subpanel does that silently and without a service call, and a generator would be running for nobody.

The townhouse, the condominium and the house with no yard. A standby generator needs a pad, clearances and a fuel supply, and a propane tank needs more. Where there is nowhere to put them, the design is a battery with a transfer device, possibly with a bidirectional EV in the garage, and it is designed for hours, not days, because that is what the equipment can honestly deliver. County Line will not promise a multi-day island from a wall-mounted battery.

The house whose service cannot carry it. On a 100 amp service with an old panel, the honest first project is the service upgrade, and sometimes that is the whole project this year. Stacking a battery, a charger and a generator onto a service at its limit produces a system that trips the main on the first hot afternoon, and a contractor who sells that has sold a problem.

The owner who wants solar for the bill, not the outage. Solar without a battery is a bill-reduction investment that goes dark in a shutoff, and that is a perfectly good thing to buy as long as nobody has promised it is backup. County Line does the electrical interconnection for solar and tells owners plainly that the roof alone will not carry the house when the grid is off.

And the case where the answer is nothing: an apartment, a house with a landlord who will not permit it, or a family whose outage plan is to drive to the other house. Backup power is a response to a specific risk at a specific property, and where the risk is low or the plan is to leave, the honest recommendation is to spend the money elsewhere. County Line walks the panel and the yard, asks what has to stay on and for how long, and then says which of these cases the house is. The residential microgrid is for the properties where the pumps, the gates, the days and the family make it the right answer, and those properties are exactly where County Line does its best work.

Back to the overview: Residential Microgrid.