The vacuum pump is the obvious one, and without it the cups fall off and milking ends. But the vat is the quieter problem: milk that sits warm past its cooling window can be rejected at pickup. Then there is the hot water cylinder for the plant wash, the yard lights for the early start, and the in-shed feeding system if you run one.
An outage at 4.30 in the morning, halfway through the herd, is the worst version. A UPS-mode inverter switches over instantly, so the milk pump, vacuum regulator and plant controller do not reset and nobody has to restart a wash cycle from scratch.
Overnight, while the shed is idle, the electrolyser runs on off-peak power and tops up a low-pressure hydrogen buffer held at 30 bar or less. That store keeps for weeks without leaking away its charge, so a fault in the middle of calving still finds it full. A 30 to 40 kWh LiFePO4 battery covers the first minutes and any surge when the vacuum pump starts.
How it works →
The system delivers 15 kW continuous. That covers a lot of small and medium herringbone and rotary sheds for the vacuum pump, milk pump and controls, but a large rotary with big refrigeration compressors and a high-draw water heater all running at once may exceed it. Those sheds would need a larger or multi-unit setup, worked out during the pilot from your actual loads.
Round-trip efficiency is 30% or less, so this is not a cheaper way to milk every day. It is a way to never lose a milking or a vat to an outage, and to stop relying on a tractor-driven generator that someone has to back up to the shed and start in the dark.
On many smaller sheds, yes, within 15 kW continuous with the battery handling start-up surges. On a big rotary with large compressors it may not, and the pilot would size a larger or multi-unit setup from a load log of your shed rather than guess.
That depends on how much hydrogen is stored and what is running. The point of the design is that the store holds its charge for weeks, so it is full when the fault comes. Runtime for your shed is calculated during the pilot, not promised up front.
It is designed to AS/NZS 60079 and ISO 19880, with redundant leak sensors, automatic shutdown and venting. The storage is low pressure, 30 bar or less, and there is no engine, exhaust or fuel tank to refill beside the yard.
Pilot installs go to people on this list first. Rural homes, farms and remote sites especially. No spam, no payment.