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Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls

pilaenergy.com

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Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls

#41

Post by teekert »

tw04 wrote: post #34
shafyy wrote: post #8

This looks great! > When an outage happens, the onboard inverter detects the power loss within 20ms and automatically disconnects from the grid (islanding) How does this work? Do I need to install anything additional in my grid? Like, how does the fridge "know" that it should now draw power from Pila? Sorry for my noob questions :D

This is essentially a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) with an app. The UPS basically passes power from the wall to your fridge until there's a power outage. At that point it flips to using the battery to send power to your fridge.

But with the added benefit that it charges during the day on solar and then powers device during the night.

My one question would be: does it work with home assistant? It would be great to integrate in te energy dashboard.

Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls

#42

Post by Symbiote »

altairprime wrote: post #39
coleashman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our first product is focused on 120V, but we'll be iterating on a 240V option. Out of curiosity which 240V loads are you most interested to connect?

I’d like to be able to use a 240V hot water kettle to boil water for tea (or for sanitization during an outage). I live in the US and 120V is slow and inefficient, especially at family-scale.

Do you have frequent enough power outages that waiting an extra minute for tea is a concern?

Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls

#43

Post by altairprime »

Symbiote wrote: post #42
altairprime wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to be able to use a 240V hot water kettle to boil water for tea (or for sanitization during an outage). I live in the US and 120V is slow and inefficient, especially at family-scale.

Do you have frequent enough power outages that waiting an extra minute for tea is a concern?

> Do you have frequent enough power outages that waiting an extra minute for tea is a concern?

I’ve had ten power outages in the past six months, one mile from an international airport. I’ve lived through hundreds hours of power outages due to PG&E’s fucking incompetence in the past ten years. You’ll have to judge for yourself whether that justifies my comment - but, if you were a startup considering a 240V outlet on your home battery solution, I’m pointing out an entire category of uses that they may not have considered:

US kitchen countertop equipment that runs at higher power draw when a 240 outlet is available.

As an apartment renter, I have no reasonable solution today for a battery that can cope with my kitchen at all, prior to this one — and if they go 240V, I can upgrade my kitchen appliances, take them with me when I move, and be more resilient to power outages. And if that puts more weight behind the 240V purpose so they eventually offer a model for people’s furnaces, cool beans. I may not be able to convince my landlord to install a Charlie range, but I already have battery backups in every room except my kitchen, so there’s an unmet need that this startup’s a very close fit for already.

Being dismissive about someone’s questions will cause you to overlook potential market niches that have no viable solutions today. Your competitors thank you for your service :)

Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls

#44

Post by pandemicsyn »

> no bidirectional power, no integration with solar or smart home systems, and no ability to manage home energy dynamically. They tend to be boxy, ruggedized, meant to be moved around, not seamlessly integrated into your living space. On top of that, many use e-mobility battery chemistries, which are great for delivering high power on demand but wear out faster when cycled daily for home energy use.

I already use an Ecoflow as quasi-UPS in my networking closet and one for a chest freezer and its worked great for that. They advertise a ~25ms switch over. I think (could be wrong) they also have features like scheduled tasks to managed recharge/discharge schedules.

Is the main difference between an Ecoflow and this basically the form factor?

Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls

#45

Post by jorgen123 »

Would you be able to avoid leaking back into the grid?

During a recent major weather event outage, a neighbor up the street was running a generator, that I think was not properly islanded. I experienced it by having some devices making weird sounds because they were receiving some low level voltage. They were probably leaking to tens of neighbors and losing generator output in the process.

Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls

#46

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

jorgen123 wrote: post #45

Would you be able to avoid leaking back into the grid? During a recent major weather event outage, a neighbor up the street was running a generator, that I think was not properly islanded. I experienced it by having some devices making weird sounds because they were receiving some low level voltage. They were probably leaking to tens of neighbors and losing generator output in the process.

Not just that, it's a danger for the linemen trying to fix the neighbourhood.

Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls

#47

Post by coleashman »

jorgen123 wrote: post #45

Would you be able to avoid leaking back into the grid? During a recent major weather event outage, a neighbor up the street was running a generator, that I think was not properly islanded. I experienced it by having some devices making weird sounds because they were receiving some low level voltage. They were probably leaking to tens of neighbors and losing generator output in the process.

Yikes! I’ve heard so many similar sounding examples of misuse of generators and sketchy generator setups. Pila has the grid disconnect built in so there’s no risk of un-intended backfeed when islanded

Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls

#48

Post by [deleted] »

jorgen123 wrote: post #45

Would you be able to avoid leaking back into the grid? During a recent major weather event outage, a neighbor up the street was running a generator, that I think was not properly islanded. I experienced it by having some devices making weird sounds because they were receiving some low level voltage. They were probably leaking to tens of neighbors and losing generator output in the process.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls

#49

Post by coleashman »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #46
jorgen123 wrote: post #45

Would you be able to avoid leaking back into the grid? During a recent major weather event outage, a neighbor up the street was running a generator, that I think was not properly islanded. I experienced it by having some devices making weird sounds because they were receiving some low level voltage. They were probably leaking to tens of neighbors and losing generator output in the process.

Not just that, it's a danger for the linemen trying to fix the neighbourhood.

Right! Unintentionally back-feeding is a huge safety risk, and I hope that smarter safer solutions will prevail over the all-too-common hacky unsafe approaches. But also, I get it. I’ve wired generators back into panels - safely - in situations where it’s that or no power for days, you start taking matters into your own hands
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