A family-sized packhouse might run a bin tipper, a wash or brush bed, a small electronic or mechanical grader, conveyors to packing stations, a strapping or carton machine and a label printer. Add lighting for the packers and a lunchroom, and the load is real but not enormous. When the power drops mid-afternoon, the line stops with fruit on it, label printers lose their batch, and packers stand about while bins keep arriving from the rows.
The hybrid inverter runs in UPS mode with a 30 to 40 kWh LiFePO4 battery, so grader controllers and printers carry on without rebooting. A PEM fuel cell then takes the steady load from hydrogen made overnight on off-peak power and stored at 30 bar or less. The store keeps for weeks, so it is full on the day the storm arrives, even if it was filled before the season started.
How it works →
At 15 kW continuous, one unit suits a small packhouse with a short line. Large packhouses with long multi-lane graders, optical sorters, many conveyors and their own refrigeration plant draw far more and would need a larger or multi-unit setup sized in the pilot, or are simply not a fit. We would rather tell you that before a pilot than after. Round-trip efficiency is 30% or less, so the payoff is never losing a packing day to an outage, not a lower power bill across the season.
Only if the cool store is small and the combined load stays within 15 kW. Packhouse coolrooms are often much larger than the grader line itself. The pilot would log both and tell you plainly whether one unit covers them.
No. The inverter switches over instantly in UPS mode, so controllers, printers and scales see no break. Settings and batch counts stay where they were and packing carries on while the grid is down.
The fuel cell keeps running while there is hydrogen in the store. How long that lasts depends on the store size and the load, which the pilot calculates. When the grid returns, the electrolyser refills the store on off-peak power.
Pilot installs go to people on this list first. Rural homes, farms and remote sites especially. No spam, no payment.