A typical dairy effluent system washes the yard into a sump, where a pump lifts it to a storage pond or straight to land through a travelling irrigator or pods. A stirrer keeps solids in suspension in the pond, and float switches and a controller decide when to pump. During heavy rain, the sump fills from both the yard wash and the stormwater that lands on it.
If the power fails and the sump pump stops, the level keeps rising. An overflow into a drain or waterway is both an environmental problem and a compliance one, and it tends to happen at night when nobody is watching the sump level.
The hybrid inverter switches over instantly, so the sump pump and float controller carry on without a pause. The battery takes the motor start surge, and the fuel cell runs from hydrogen made earlier on off-peak power or wind and stored at 30 bar or less. Since the store keeps for weeks, it is full when the storm arrives, not drained from last month.
How it works →
Sump pumps on smaller and medium dairy farms often fit within 15 kW, especially if the stirrer and irrigator are not run at the same moment. Large effluent systems with big pond stirrers, high-lift pumps and long pipelines may exceed one unit and would need a larger or multi-unit setup sized in the pilot. Round-trip efficiency is 30% or less, so the case is preventing an overflow, not cheaper pumping. Your consent conditions still apply in any outage.
On smaller systems, possibly, within 15 kW. Big stirrers are heavy loads. In an outage, the sump pump comes first and the stirrer can be scheduled around it. The pilot would log both to see what fits.
It is designed to keep pumps running during outages, which helps avoid overflows. Compliance with your effluent consent remains your responsibility and your regional council's to judge, so keep following your effluent management plan during any outage.
It would be sited at a sensible distance on dry ground with the switchboard. It is designed to AS/NZS 60079 and ISO 19880, with redundant leak sensors, automatic shutdown and venting, and low-pressure storage.
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