Portable Power Stations

[Aaron Stack]

Anyone running their sugarhouse on portable power stations? Came across the category and for my needs they should work great. Not exactly cheep, so wondering if they work as advertised.

Happy pre-season.

[maple flats]

The big question as to if it will work or not depends on your power needs. Most of the "power Stations" are now LiFePo4 storage units.
Calculate what power you need then add at least 30% and get that one. Make sure you count everything including start up surge needed. Be sure to get a pure sine wave unit if you will be connecting to any electronic items, also, most motors need pure sine wave.
While I don't use a power station in my sugarhouse, I do have a full solar set up, in fact 2 at the sugarhouse. I have an array of 1480 watts of panels, 4 Gel batteries at 12V and 200 AH each wired in series tied in to a 48 volt 6000 watt inverter. That is just my backup. Then I have 4840 watts of solar array on an inverter tied directly to the grid on net metering. I sell my excess power to the grid and the credit for it is applied to my home bill. I usually only get one or 2 bills a year when I owe anything on my sugarhouse bill, this year it was 2 months totaling under $10.00. However I'm considering getting off net metering. What bothers me on it is that I had to buy the wires from the main pole to the sugarhouse but the utility charges me about $25.00/mo for me to send my excess power to the grid and for it they only credit me at the lowest rate they can buy power for on the grid. I'm thinking if I just keep all of my power stored onsite (with more battery bank) I would be farther ahead. Then I'd convert most everything to electric. Even if I don't add batteries and rather than sending the credit to my home bill I'd build up a lot of credit. In fact when the 4840 watts of solar were added I was not sending the excess to my home and I quickly built up a nice amount of KWH in my account. For some reason if I send the excess credit to my home bill they charge me about $25.00/mo but if I just hold it for future use they don't charge me. Enough harping I guess!
Back to your question, yes a power station can run the sugarhouse if sized correctly. Some things to reduce the size needed. Have all lighting be LED, use propane when possible especially for all heating equipment. Never try to charge a frozen LIFePo4 battery, it will fail. Read the instructions on the lowest temperature the particular one you get can be charged at. Some need to be at 32F +2-3 degrees, some can go down a few degrees below freezing.

[aamyotte]

For my setup I have a 30W solar panel connected to a 12V battery (don't remember offhand capacity). I run a shureflow pump to pump from my storage barrel up to my head bucket for gravity to the pan. I have a 12V bilge fan for air under fire which runs continuously on my boil days.

For scale to compare on what you are doing, I process 50 gallons of sap on a boil day, usually a 6 to 8 hour day and this setup works well for me. The setup was really cheap.