How much will it cost though? 1.6KWh of LFP or such batteries isn’t cheap…
It would take several full refrigerators worth of food to make that up, not counting the intangible inconvenience…
Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
351–360 of 492 posts
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Pila includes an MID onboard How does that work? Is just not putting energy out the input "plug" count as a MID?
The Tesla MID is in the Tesla Gateway or Backup Switch meter socket adapter. The Pila MID is onboard inside the battery. Pila can push power back through the plug. When utility power drops, Pila & Powerwall react exactly the same. They both detect the outage, open the MID, and power load downstream of the MID. In the case of Pila it powers loads downstream / plugged into Pila.
Im having trouble understanding this, if you back feed into a circuit why wouldn't it go out via the beaker and onto the power grid?
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#353It looks beautiful. But I honestly don't understand what the market is. OP answered in one of the comments that it will run a single fridge for 32 hours. I understand the benefits of a UPS that will run your desktop computer during a brief power outage of a couple of hours. And I understand a generator that will keep your house running for 10 days after a natural disaster. And I understand a Powerwall that can suck u…
My recently installed Powerwall 3 will only power my home for a few hours. If I don't stop HVAC and car charging, I may be out of power before I even wake up in the morning.
What I really want is my milk not to spoil (keep my family fed, not opening the fridge is defeating the purpose) and to charge devices if the outage will last more than half a day. Pila is WAY cheaper and more targeted.
I considered buying a Jackery Explorer 1000 and pushing my refrigerator out to plug it in during and outage but that seemed ridiculous.
https://www.jackery.com/products/explorer-1000-portable-powe...
EDIT: Other people are mentioning arbitrage, which is also pointless for me. My Powerwall 3 will save me a few hundred dollars a year if I set it send power to the grid AND during that time I lose backup protection.
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#354Given the founder’s background, Pila seems well positioned to create a new Virtual Power Plant. I’d welcome an opportunity to participate in a VPP at a smaller scale than a traditional power wall. Similarly, I hope that Pila can crack localized Peak Shaving, with limited or no cooperation with utilities. I imagine the Pila ecosystem tracking critical dynamic pricing events and take action accordingly. I’m not sure ho…
Thanks for the great feedback! We’ll definitely take this into consideration.
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#355How much will it cost though? 1.6KWh of LFP or such batteries isn’t cheap… It would take several full refrigerators worth of food to make that up, not counting the intangible inconvenience…
$999 with a $99 pre-order. Normally $1299
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#356Hi, I develop firmware for mesh networked communications tech. What exactly does Pila's mesh network do ? Why do the units need to talk to each other?
TLDR it's so that we can seamlessly synchronize settings and events between them. When to charge from solar, cheap utility rates, or when a storm is incoming.
Consumers (incl me) will not update their 2nd Pila to their new Wifi password when they change it, or not even pare it properly with their first to start with. Also, in an offline situation like a power outage where the internet goes down, you won't be able to communicate over the cloud and synchronize them there. If our servers ever go down (they won't) then you want to be able to rely on local communication.
The local mesh is going to set up new follower devices over an open MQTT api and talk to each other over it - but yes it's more of an enable than a feature in and of itself.
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#357Not a bad product, terrible pitch/focus.
- Literally nobody but you (founder) cares about this "mission" to create a battery-backed distributed grid. Regular people don't live in silicon valley talking to VCs and software developers, they don't care about mission statements. If it's a consumer product, please drop the bullshit. (Is your website built this way because VCs told you to? If so, for god's sake please stop listening to them, they are not normal people)
- What exactly is the purpose of this battery? To provide power to a single 15/20A circuit, to power a fridge, tv and microwave for a day? So it's not going to help a multi-day outage. If I buy a dinky solar panel it's going to take forever to charge, assuming there's good weather on the day of the emergency. So really if I wanted to survive multi-day outage, I need a bigger battery. Which Jackery already sells, with solar panels, for cheaper than your unit, in a more portable, easier to move form.
- Why aren't the expansion pack and solar panel listed on the front page?? It's under tech specs?!?!? Is this a VC-focused B2B SaaS pitch panel, or a consumer product? If it's a consumer product, get rid of all these stupid I-have-to-scroll-for-a-week-to-find-information pages, and just show me what you want me to buy, right there at the top of the page, with pictures of happy people using the product in real life. That sells product to consumers. This silicon valley design dreck doesn't. (I just counted... there are 20 pages with virtually no information on the front page. Jesus christ.)
- Now if you had pitched this as a "save on your energy bill" solution, I can totally see buying one or more of these with a solar panel, if you have software that'll pull power from solar alone when the battery is full. Even if it didn't actually save me much money, I'm still stupid enough that I would buy it anyway. But you didn't pitch this... so I'm not buying it.
- What it actually seems most useful for in its current form is people in developing countries with inconsistent power and short brown-outs, but I don't see wide adoption there at this price point.
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#358Can't wait to buy one of these for my homelab! I've been waiting for someone to basically make an eco-flow that's meant to be on constantly and has decent cooling that's quiet and intended to run continuously! Insanely cool!
Thanks! What color are you going to order?
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#359This whole discussion is very confusing to me - is this just a UPS you have to plug all your items into, or does it somehow back feed into the plug to power the circuit?
If it's the former it's nothing new and inconvenient, if it's the latter how do you avoid backfeeding the grid?
Re: Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
#360I keep having multi-hour power outages a few times a year, so I decided to build a battery system a few months ago. I was happy with it during a recent four hour high-wind winter outage, powering my 120V furnace, fridge, desktop PC, some lights and chargers. Here's what I ended up with: - Bluetti Elite 200 V2 portable power station: $999, 2073 Wh LiFePO4, 2600 W inverter output (120 V only), 1000 W DC input at 60 V m…
If low cost is the goal, a box store generator is considerably cheaper.
Even if you have to buy 2.