How does the device handled grid isolation from a single outlet?
Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
111–120 of 492 posts
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#112> What's been your experience with home batteries? What recent power outages have you had, and how were you affected? I love my Powerwall, but it's not powerful enough to power my HVAC. (Heat pump in a northern climate.) I wish I spent more money on a more powerful one. The payout I got last year for the virtual power plant was phenomenal. If they continue for a decade or so, the Powerwall will come close to paying f…
Wait, a Tesla exec flew into a power line? When was this?
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#113What a noble mission to make energy independence more accessible like this, even to renters! I read your site, watched the video, but I still don't understand why you implemented a mesh network? Why multiple batteries need it to synchronize? Aren't they completely independent? Why would the fridge battery need to communicate with the other battery powering your lights? Also, as an angel investor, I'm curious to know…
To give more functionality around energy management, we wanted all of the batteries to be able to work in concert. We could have gone with "any old wireless" network to coordinate the batteries. One thing that's really stuck with me from building products at Span and Tesla is how important reliable connection is over years of operation. Depending on consumer wifi is a huge pain for reliability (changed passwords, inh…
By "more functionality around energy management" you mean what? For example if a battery powering a fridge detects a loss of power, it could inform a battery powering less essential things to shut down, so that the user would have the ability to swap batteries once the fridge one runs out? Is this the type of use case you have in mind?
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#114I’m in the market for a solution like this but I have one concern.
Will the software and schematics be made open if you go out of business or if your acquired and the product is cancelled or ceases being supported.
If I invest in the product I want to know I can fix it if you can’t or won’t.
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#115Very cool. You mention powering connected devices - is it feasible to push power back through the outlet to power parts of the home? Euro solar panels are doing this I believe.
Yeah great question. The hardware is capable of bidirectional power, and electrical codes and standards in the U.S. are now catching up with Europe. “Balcony Solar” has taken off there, especially in Germany. Utah just passed H.B. 340 which allows up to 1200W of plug-in solar backfeed. It wasn’t so long ago that grid-tied batteries like Powerwall were working through the same kind of standards updating process to par…
So this is supported in the EU?
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#116This made me realize that I should get a UPS. After seeing the price tag, I'll search elsewhere!
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#117I don't understand this. It's a tiny backup battery with an expensive enclosure, with only 100W of solar input? How are you expected to run solar wiring with this in your living room?
The places that can afford this rarely have power outages, so having an dedicated appliance sitting in your living room or kitchen for those 1-2 times a year doesn't make sense. The capacity is barely enough to run your fridge for a day, I'd rather have a higher capacity unit that just sits in my garage that I can actually charge on solar (that costs the same price).
For the places that really need backup power, this is way too expensive.
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#118Will these continue to work without support from your company, in the event you decide to release v2 or go out of business? Or are they dead at that point?
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#119Definitely a product I've been thinking about... Lead-acid based UPC products have lingered on way too long into the lithium battery age.
I had a lead-acid based UPS which I plugged one DSL modem and my cordless telephone base station into the wall which would give me 3 days of modern communications into a power outage, which happens quite frequently in my location. Once my DSL got upgraded to fiber-to-the-node (with a 10x speed increase) my DSL would quit working when the power went out at the node so the UPS wasn't quite worth using anymore.
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#120So it's just a smarter UPS, (that can integrate with solar panels) but you only compare it to a standby generator. Seems like you need to compare it to a UPS too, because that's what it really, really is.
At first I thought it was some kind of UPS that would automatically "inject" AC to the house when it detected that there was no current in the mains (hence the connection to mains). But it seems it is just a glorified UPS... is that what the tesla "Wall" is?