We Built an AI That Designs Battery Systems - Here's How It Works
Designing an off-grid or backup power system has always been a process. You research components, dig through spec sheets, run sizing calculations in a spreadsheet, second-guess whether your inverter can handle your peak loads, and then try to figure out if all the pieces are actually compatible before you spend thousands of dollars.
We've been on the engineering side of that process for years — designing battery energy storage systems for RVs, cabins, boats, workshops, and commercial facilities. And we kept noticing the same thing: most of the early design work follows a predictable pattern. The loads go in, the math happens, and a system comes out. The judgment calls come later, but the foundational sizing? That's engineering, not art.
So we built a tool that does it automatically.
Meet the Alchemy Advisor
The Alchemy Advisor is an AI-powered system design tool built directly into our online store. You open a chat window, answer a few questions about your application, and it engineers a complete battery power system for you — batteries, inverter/charger, solar array, charge controller, monitoring, wiring, and overcurrent protection. The whole process takes about three to five minutes.
To try it, head to shop.alchemyindustrial.com and click the "Design My System" button in the bottom-right corner. No account needed, no obligation, no cost.
It's not a product finder or a generic chatbot. The Advisor runs real engineering calculations — the same formulas our team uses when designing systems in-house — against our live product catalog. Every recommendation comes with specific part numbers, verified specs, real-time pricing, and the math behind the selection.
Why We Built It
The honest answer is that we kept answering the same questions over and over. Someone building out a van wants to know how many batteries they need for their fridge, lights, and laptop. Someone setting up an off-grid cabin wants to know if 400 watts of solar is enough. A contractor specifying a commercial backup system needs inverter sizing and wiring calculations.
These are all solvable problems with well-established engineering formulas. The variables change — daily consumption, peak loads, backup duration, solar availability — but the process is the same every time. It made sense to put that process into a tool that anyone could use, not just people who already know how to read a Victron spec sheet.
The Advisor doesn't replace our engineering team. It handles the 80% of the work that's deterministic — the load calculations, battery bank sizing, solar array math, cable gauge selection — so that when you do talk to a human (which you can book for free directly from the tool), the conversation starts at a much more useful place.
What Happens Under the Hood
The conversational interface is powered by AI, but the actual engineering runs on purpose-built calculation engines. Here's what they do:
Battery sizing accounts for your daily energy consumption, desired backup duration, 80% depth of discharge limits, 95% round-trip efficiency losses, and a 15% safety margin on top. It also checks BMS current limits against your inverter's maximum draw and determines whether you need parallel battery strings.
Solar array sizing takes your daily kWh requirement, factors in your region's peak sun hours and 85% system efficiency, and calculates the total array wattage needed. It then matches an appropriate MPPT charge controller to the array voltage and your battery bank voltage.
Inverter matching looks at your peak simultaneous load, adds a 25% safety margin, and selects the right Victron MultiPlus or Quattro model for your system voltage — whether that's a single 3,000W unit or a 20kVA split-phase configuration.
Wiring and protection calculates cable gauge (AWG) with voltage drop analysis at a 3% maximum threshold, then sizes fuses and breakers at 125% of maximum expected current for every circuit in the system.
None of this is the AI guessing. These are deterministic formulas with fixed inputs and outputs. The AI's job is to have a natural conversation with you, collect the right inputs, and present the results in a way that makes sense — not to improvise electrical engineering.
What You Get at the End
When the Advisor finishes a design, you get a full system recommendation with an itemized component list, quantities, and pricing. It also includes performance projections — estimated runtime on a sunny day, a cloudy day, and on batteries alone — plus installation notes and any relevant warnings about your configuration.
From there you have a few options. You can add the entire system to your cart in one click and check out through our Shopify store. You can email yourself the quote with itemized pricing and 0% APR financing details to review later. Or you can book a free consultation with our engineering team to review the design, ask questions, and make adjustments before buying anything.
What It Can Design
The Advisor covers a pretty wide range of applications and system sizes:
RV and van conversions — LiFePO4 battery systems with solar charging, sized for your actual daily usage instead of a generic "weekend warrior" template.
Off-grid cabins and homesteads — multi-day autonomy systems with proper solar array sizing for your specific region and load profile.
Boats and marine applications — Victron-based systems designed around the unique constraints of marine electrical (space, weight, charging sources).
Workshops and garages — systems sized for high-draw tools, compressors, and welders, with inverters matched to your actual peak loads.
Commercial and industrial backup — from small critical-load backup to full facility coverage, including split-phase 120/240V configurations.
System sizes range from around 1 kWh of battery storage up to 57+ kWh, with inverter capacity from 3,000W to 20kVA. If your project falls outside that range or has unusual requirements, the Advisor can still generate a starting point that our team can refine.
What's in the Product Catalog
Everything the Advisor recommends is a real product in our store with live inventory and current pricing. The catalog includes Alchemy Industrial LiFePO4 batteries (24V and 48V), the full Victron Energy lineup of inverter/chargers, SmartSolar MPPT charge controllers, Cerbo GX and Ekrano GX monitoring, Lynx distribution and BMS components, DC-DC chargers, solar panels, and pre-built industrial system bundles.
No hypothetical components, no "contact us for pricing," no parts that are out of stock. If the Advisor recommends it, you can buy it right now.
Try It
The Alchemy Advisor is free, no account required, and takes about five minutes. Head to our store, click "Design My System" in the bottom-right corner, and see what it comes up with for your project.
And if you already have some components and just need to fill in the gaps — a charge controller for an existing battery bank, an inverter upgrade, compatible monitoring — you can ask the Advisor about that too. It searches the catalog and checks compatibility just like it does for full system designs.
Ready to design your system?
Launch the Advisor · [email protected] · (832) 981-5505