I know a couple of guys back in Albuquerque that ran their
emergency backups off of national labs surplus. For example, big honkin'
power supplies designed to keep mainframes running for a few minutes
eventually become outdated and replaced- and surplused. If you ever want
to see some real lab surplus, Albuquerque is the place to be.

Albuquerque is also the place to be if you want to suffer heavy
plant losses if the power goes out in, say, August. Here in the Phoenix
suburbs, it's much worse, but the power is more stable- excepting the
occasion massive transformer fire at an APS substation, of course.

Anyway- buying big, old emergency backup supplies, swapping out
the lead/acid batteries (which are recycled) and putting in new ones
solves a sticky problem in a very short period of time. The nice thing is
that the capacity of your battery bank is limited only to the size of your
wallet. Provided one does not exceed the power limits of the backup in
terms of amps, you can put pretty much as many deep cycle or marine
batteries in parallel as you wish- and even that is a function of demand
(fans, blowers, pumps, etc.), rather than supply (12 VDC cells). You just
have to remember to wrap the handles of your long tools in electrical tape
when working in the ol' battery box.

Companies are now selling evaporative coolers and fans that run on
solar power, which makes them darned near uninterruptable here in the
desert, so long as the sun is high in the sky- and, for evap coolers, the
water line is intact.

I've also seen some clever "failsafe" systems- one in which a
solenoid opens when the power goes out, and a large gravity-fed tank of
water is allowed to spray through open jets through the greenhouse,
keeping the temperature low enough that the paging system can contact the
owner. It would be interesting to use a similar principle to cut loose a
spool of shade cloth from the crest of the greenhouse so that it unfurls
down the side of the glass to shade the plants.

I'm sure Rube Goldberg would be proud.

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Cheers,

-AJHicks
Chandler, AZ