Review of Anker Solix F2000 during a Hurricane
I live in Ocala Florida and on Sept 26th 2024, Hurricane Helena passed a couple of hundred miles west of our home. We stayed put, we had maximum sustained winds of 40mph with gusts to 60mph for maybe 2 hours. Our main concern was keeping the food in the house fridge good and lighting/charging things in the house.
I had looked at buying a whole house generator for about $13K installed. We decided against that given we’re in central Florida, away from the coasts and in a storm big enough to give cat 3 or higher winds at Ocala, we would likely evacuate rather than stay put and the cost of food lost in the rare occurence isn’t worth $13k and a couple of hundred bucks a year in maintenance costs.
So, what did we do? I had purchased an Anker Solix F2000 with an extra battery for my home office. I use it to power my office and home Wifi network when the power fails. I bought these refurbished on Ebay for about $2K. It has 4Kwh of lithium batteries and the inverter is good for about 2kw.
As Helena came closer, I moved the Anker from my office to the kitchen and plugged the fridge in to the Anker and the Anker in to the wall. This is how I used it in my office. All my ‘critical’ loads are powered by the Anker and the grid keeps the Anker charged.
So, we set that up and waiting for Helene to arrive. The first issue I saw was the Anker kept tripping the socket the fridge was originally using (thats where it was plugged in). I suspect a bad circuit breaker but then again, the fridge has worked just fine for the last 3 years and it’s working post Helene also.
The breaker for the fridge is a 20A square D one. Here is the item at Lowes. It’s a “Square D Homeline 20-amp 1-Pole Dual Function AFCI/GFCI Plug-on Neutral Circuit Breaker”. This is part number HOM120PDFC. This is a dual function AFCI/GFCI item. Somehow, the Anker trips this very quickly. I remedied this by plugging the Anker in to a socket with a normal breaker and that worked fine.
The power did briefly go during the night and I noticed that the fridge was “rebooting”. My fridge is a Samsung Family Hub with a screen so it’s very obvious when it restarts. It seems the Anker does not switch fast enough from external power to battery for my fridge, at least for the screen parts. I didn’t like this so I just unplugged the Anker from the main power. The UPS kicked in and the fridge powered up and was happy. With my fridge, I think I would get a day and a half from my Anker. Here is the proof. I took 2 photos, one when the Anker was full and another after 18 hours.
The Anker drains the external battery first and then the internal battery. You can see from the photos that the external battery drops from 100% to 28% in 18 hours. With the total battery at 200% then that means per hour, I use 4% per hour. So, 200% means 50 hours or just over 2 days.
This is real world, what I saw in my house. The time period was between 6:12pm and 9:30am. So, we were opening the fridge door to some degree until bedtime at 10pm then it’s staying closed all night.
If we had an extended outage then we need a way to recharge the Anker. I purchased a cheap dual fuel portable generator from Amazon to do this. I use it with a 20lb propane tank. The generator was this one:
This is a Pulsar 2.2Kw generator, cost about $430 delivered. It came, I had to fill with oil (included) and buy a 15A cable to connect it to the Anker when I needed to charge it. I had problems here. The Anker is normally set to charge from AC at 1450 watts. The generator (which was not on economy) took time to spin up to deliver that. The Anker would first charge at about 400W and then try 1450W only to lose patience as the generator spins up and then try that sequence again. So, the system sits in a loop a few seconds long of the generator trying to spin up and then spin down and try again. The fix for this was to set the max charging power of the Anker to 750W. This stopped the doom loop and leads to the Anker charging at an indicated 920W. It’s not 1450W but it’s not bad either. But, it would extend recharge times when we’d have to hear the generator running for a couple of hours daily.
All in all, this is a workable system for my scenario. All together, I had the Anker, anyway, for my office/home network UPS. I spent an extra $430 for the generator, $70 for the cable and finally $70 for the propane tank which will last forever in all likelyhood. We would not use the generator unless we had an extended power outage of 2 days, this seems unlikely in our area but we can deal with it regardless.
