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What volt are you running? What appliances are DC direct? Did you wire any of your plugs for DC to spare inverter? Any problems running both NiCd/NiFe?
12VDC. When I started, 24VDC and others were rare but I think I'd stick with 12 VDC anyway. I've yet to see 24V peanut halogens at 2.50 or so. I have a separately grounded, separately wired 12 V system. All the recepatacles and switches are beige to help distinguish them from the 120vac. They are also wired in a fail-safe manner to avoid damage in case someone should plug a 120 appliance into a 12vac receptacle. Positive (black) is wired to the narrow terminal of a standard duplex receptacle and negative/ground is wired to the ground terminal. Nothing goes to the brass (hot) terminal. Each 12vdc appliance or switch is individually fused with an ATO-type fuse. I used 6ga buss cable to supply each of the fuse boxes which I put together myself, using the advice of the inspector. Ihave 6 fuse boxes scattered around the house to minimize run length. All dc circuits use 12ga luminex, with the ground and white wire soldered together. All wire-to-wire connections are soldered. Ac is as usual. Out from inverter to service panel and so on.
Water pump (12V floating on water in large diameter well), small fans, most lights (track lighting with the transformers by-passed), water circulating pump, sump pump. It is an advantage in low battery situations (below 10.5, where most inverters kick out) to be able to see and have water until I decide either to go out and start the generator or wait until the sun gets its act in gear.
I don't think I'm having any problems running both NiFe and NiCd. I have a blade switch I can use to disconnect the NiFe if I want. I bought 10 new NiFe's at 250/cell in 95 and found them to be just awful in the winter. They got down and just stayed down. I found out later -after much, much searching - that they are what is called a cycling battery and prefer to be fully charged and then discharged and so on. In the winter that just wasn't happening. So now I recognize that and get them as fully charged as possible and then disconnect them until an emergency situation comes along, like having to run the espresso maker on a cold Saturday morning and not wanting to go outside. I just close the switch and use them that way. Actually, now, I leave the switch closed pretty well all the time.
Thanks for the thoughts on wood-fired boilers. My house is at close as I was able to make to an R2000 house. R60 walls, R80 ceiling, intact 6 mil cmhc vapour barrier, lots of south windows, few north windows, double-glazed low-e windows with no basement but 2 1/2 floors, no breaks in the insulation envelope, that sort of pretty standard thing really.
