Storage sizing gets presented as a capacity question. It is really a question about which circuits you are willing to lose.
The circuits conversation
Whole-home backup in a Houston house means backing up central air conditioning, and central air is the largest load most homes have by a wide margin. Size a battery to carry it and you have sized an expensive battery.
Most households, given the choice, find they want something narrower: the refrigerator, enough lighting to live normally, internet and network equipment, phone and device charging, a few kitchen outlets, and medical equipment where that applies. That set runs a long time on a modest battery.
A critical-load subpanel is how this gets built. The circuits you want backed up move to a separate panel fed by the battery. Everything else stays on the main panel and goes dark with the grid. The design work is deciding what goes where, and it is worth doing carefully, because moving a circuit afterward is real work.
Air conditioning does not have to be all or nothing. Backing up a single mini-split, or one window unit for a bedroom, gives you somewhere tolerable to sleep without sizing the system to cool the whole house.
Why Houston households ask
Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 and Hurricane Beryl in July 2024 both produced extended outages across this region. They failed in opposite directions — one a freeze, one a summer storm — and the second one made the point that this is not a once-in-a-generation problem.
That history is the honest reason this equipment sells here. It is also why the sizing conversation should be grounded in what an actual multi-day outage looks like rather than a brief flicker.
Siting
Two Houston-specific constraints shape where a battery goes.
Heat is the first. Garage temperatures here run high for months, and battery systems have operating temperature ranges that affect both performance and service life. Placement matters more in this climate than in most.
Flood history is the second. Kingwood and Friendswood carry documented flooding from Harvey along the San Jacinto and Clear Creek respectively, and parts of the Addicks and Barker watersheds saw it too. Putting energy storage at floor level in a structure with a flood history is a decision worth making deliberately rather than by default.
We ask about both before proposing a location.
Transfer
The changeover has to happen without anyone being home to do it. Automatic transfer equipment isolates the house from the grid and brings the battery online on its own — which also protects utility crews working on the line, because a system back-feeding an outage is a hazard to them.
That isolation is not optional and it is a large part of why this is licensed work.
Working alongside other equipment
A battery and a standby generator solve different halves of the problem. The battery is silent, instant, and finite. The generator is noisier, takes a moment to start, and runs as long as fuel holds. For a household that experienced both Uri and Beryl, owning both is not redundant.
If you drive an EV with bidirectional capability, vehicle-to-home may cover part of this need with a battery you already own. Worth checking compatibility before committing to stationary storage.
What we install
- Listed battery energy storage equipment with integrated inverter
- Automatic transfer switch or integrated microgrid interconnect
- Critical-load subpanel where partial backup is chosen
- Siting that accounts for garage heat and flood history
- Expandable configurations where the budget is staged over time
- Utility interconnection coordination and permitting
Workmanship warranty: [[NEEDS: verified workmanship warranty terms]] Manufacturer coverage on stocked hardware: [[NEEDS: confirmed manufacturer warranty period for stocked hardware]]
Start with the list
Write down what you want still running at hour thirty of an outage. That list, not a capacity figure, is where the design starts.
Call (346) 406-1223.