411–420 of 492 posts
> Most portable batteries are missing the functionality that makes a home battery useful: no bidirectional power Soooo this product ?
This product is capable of bidirectional power.
I can't see how this product can backfeed to the household circuit safety/legally unless there is some technology I'm not aware of?
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> Judging by the negativity here you're going to be a massive success -- search up the dropbox, airbnb, coinbase and ethereum launch threads This is not a new product, though. Battery power inverters with AC and solar input are a popular class of products. You can buy similar products with higher capacity and better solar input at Costco or Best Buy. I think people are confused by the "Show HN" tag and the misleading…
> This is not a new product, though...Battery power inverters with AC and solar input are a popular class of products. Often "totally new product" == bad (or more accurately, "first mover" == bad) I think there is a misconception that totally new products make the money. But the second (or later) mover is often in a better position [1]. Dropbox was not new. File sharing existed prior. AirBnB was not new. Vrbo existed…
My kitchen is already built with a fridge integrated into cabinets. There’s no place to put the battery. And even if there were, it would be a $1k machine dedicated to the fridge. That somewhat makes sense in that food can spoil, and we still want to be able to use the fridge, but I wish more could be powered.
The next obvious thing is lights in the home. But this doesn’t allow me to do that outside of lamps; chandeliers and overheads do not apply.
I’d love this to power the garage door opener, but right now there’s power that goes to it on the ceiling. It’d be really difficult to find a way to mount this to also include the opener without being super janky or needing an electrician to totally rewire that circuit. At that point the price has gone considerably up.
I guess the last bit would be internet / networking gear, although I could get a cheaper UPS for that. I’m also not entirely certain I’d even have internet to connect to if the power was out given I have fiber.
If I were remodeling the house that feels like the right time to add such a thing.
One 5kWh Pylontech module would cost around 1K too, but that's 5kWh. Plus 500 for an inverter. That would require a couple of wires to be connected, but 5x more power for nearly the same money?
And yes, you can run a heat pump and/or a washing machine on pylontech. I doubt that's possible with these modules.
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> This is not a new product, though...Battery power inverters with AC and solar input are a popular class of products. Often "totally new product" == bad (or more accurately, "first mover" == bad) I think there is a misconception that totally new products make the money. But the second (or later) mover is often in a better position [1]. Dropbox was not new. File sharing existed prior. AirBnB was not new. Vrbo existed…
I really like this concept. Except I don’t know where / how to integrate it. My kitchen is already built with a fridge integrated into cabinets. There’s no place to put the battery. And even if there were, it would be a $1k machine dedicated to the fridge. That somewhat makes sense in that food can spoil, and we still want to be able to use the fridge, but I wish more could be powered. The next obvious thing is light…
Sounds like I just want a LiFePo4 UPS customized...
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> Great points - however this can keep your fridge running for 2-3 days (a pretty long outage). $1,000 buys a lot of groceries. It's cheaper to to have a small supply of shelf stable food for outages. > It can also do arbitrage and charge when it’s cheap and deploy the power when it’s expensive. This has the same problem. It takes a long time to make back the $1000.
I lost $1000 in groceries in the Bay Area in 2023. Four multi-day outages on the peninsula.
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> 2kWh per day. That’s a lot of energy! What fridge do you have?
Wow, I was surprised by this claim too, and found the specs for my fridge[0]. 755 kWh/yr, which works out to just over 2 kWh/day. Damn, that's a lot! [0] https://www.samsung.com/us/home-appliances/refrigerators/4-d... (my fridge is probably around 15 years old, so it might even be less efficient if this one is a newer model)
[0] https://www.samsung.com/uk/refrigerators/bottom-mount-freeze...
I like the idea and would probably reserve some if I still lived in the US. But I don't think you should be setting yourself up against Powerwalls so directly. You're not really competing for the same market. The power storage solution for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls is in fact Powerwalls (or similar) if you have solar panels/want a serious amount of backup power storage. Your offering is not that. In fact, I…
Where do you live now?
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> Second even if you could push that many amps through the main breaker somehow to trip it you'd be feeding it through wires designed for 15-20 amp nominal loads which would cook them. Well, you'd end up tripping the 15-20 amp breaker protecting those wires first.
Probably but I'd rather never send that big of a pulse down a 15/20 amp line at all.
The fault current that a breaker is required to be able to interrupt is two orders of magnitude larger than we're talking about feeding into the wire, and a 15 amp breaker is designed to _not_ interrupt a 150 amp load until a second has passed (there's a rating curve for this): some loads might require that much current briefly, and the wire in the wall is not going to overheat in that time (that's why the breaker has the curve that it does: to model and therefore protect the allowable heating of the wiring).
Whats the idle power consumption of the unit itself without devices connected?
I got rid of an old UPS recently that had surprisingly high power draw, and it didnt have any of these advanced features, screen, radios, etc.