Great points! This is meant as whole room backup - so it’ll keep your fridge (and a few other small devices like wifi, etc) running for 2-3 days - a pretty long outage.
It’s basically a huge, 21st century UPS.
It can also do arbitrage and charge when it’s cheap and deploy the power when it’s expensive.
The main problem with a powerwall is it doesn’t work for renters, and costs 20,000+ (and permits, etc) if you do own your home.
A pull-sting generator (gas) is great - and a push-button one is around 1K also btw- but it doesn’t go on automatically if you’re out, and be noisy, can only be started after the hurricane, etc
Finally, local-first is super important to us for outage or otherwise - we integrate with Home Assistant and have public MQTT topics you can directly hook into no matter what happens to Pila the company, as long as your hardware lasts (predicted 10 years).
Idk - that’s where we feel like the position and gap in this market is? But we may be wrong :)
Apparently a company in San Francisco put together 110V electric stoves with induction cooktops and integrated batteries --- they then sold them to folks applying for tax rebates to replace gas stoves in kitchens which weren't wired for 220V.
One notable appliance you don't mention on your website is electric water pumps for wells in rural areas....
Similarly, are your devices able to provide sine wave power to run small electric tool motors? Folks with CNC machines might be interested, or perhaps they could run tools on jobsites? How many small tool batteries could be charged from one? Would it fit in a Systainer? Might make a nice fit for folks w/ Festools.
> One notable appliance you don't mention on your website is electric water pumps for wells in rural areas....
We had a well in one of the houses we lived in when I was a kid, and its pump was wired directly to our mains panel. So this sort of thing wouldn't work with a Plia, which assumes you're dealing with stuff that plugs into a normal electrical outlet.
Certainly this type of setup could be rewired to have an outlet and a plug in the middle, but for most people that would mean hiring an electrician.
Definitely! It’s primarily backup, and secondarily an arbitrage device :)
The average fridge loss is estimated at $300 per outage, and the average fridge outage insurance claim is $600 I just learned today from an insurance agent at SXSW at our booth (apparently a lot of lobster is bought the day of the outage :P).
> The average fridge loss is estimated at $300 per outage
Holy crap, I don't think our fridge fits 300 dollars' worth of food. We have trouble fitting a ~140€ grocery run into the fridge and probably at least half of that is non-refrigerated products. Hard to say how many days' food this is, probably close to a week, so a 36h+ outage (where the fridge actually got warm for a while) would have an average occupancy of much less than the initial 140€, maybe 60 or so? Idk. Not that I remember ever having a power outage longer than 8 hours in my life, neither the Netherlands nor Germany nor Belgium nor Finland (the countries I lived in)
Either Americans and their fridges are built different or this risk (chance & impact) is way overblown
Does this perhaps include opportunity cost where you can't work because you need to get new groceries? Generously, let's say you spend an hour in the store and an hour planning, going, and unpacking, so you'd be valuing those 2h at a consultancy rate of some 100$/hour
American fridges are generally much bigger than European ones. Mine is something like 27 cubic feet, which I understand is around double the size of an average European fridge.
I don’t think I’ve ever lost power for long enough that I lost anything in the fridge though, but there are parts of the country with a much less reliable grid (usually due to severe storms or other natural disasters).
It's pretty simple - europeans are more frequently going to shop. US/AU/NZ drive and do a bigger shop to last half a week or so.
Also most of Europeans live in apartments - your power cables are underground. In suburbs, putting cables are underground is too expensive and overhead wires are easily damaged during storms.
Yeah I'll never understand the people that go to the store daily or bidaily to see what's for dinner tonight, that seems like a big waste of time with increased exposure to whatever flu is currently popular. On the other hand, the planning involved in "where will I be, what will I be doing five days from now, will the potatoes have sprouted and the tomatoes be mouldy again by then" is also not fun, but yeah half a week (3-4 days) is the minimum of how often I ideally go
Anyway I was keeping in mind (I mentioned) that one might store a week's worth of food, but now that I consider it again, also in the context of apartments vs. bigger buildings: I don't have a big family that lives with me (no children or parents or so, just partner), so I should perhaps multiply this by two extra persons. It still doesn't add up to more than half of the 300USD figure, but it's less outlandish if the 'average' household is considered to be 4 people who all eat adult-sized portions (as teenagers probably already would)
TLDR depends on the efficiency of the fridge. You’re right of course though - I edited linked comment to be more conservative at 2-3 days also. I can get my personal lab fridge to last 5 days though (110W power draw, once every hour for 5 minutes). :P
If your outage is longer than expected, the battery will recharge in a little over an hour and be ready to go again (if the grid comes on for a bit, or from your generator, a neighbor's etc).
Hmm ... "Stores power from your generator" might be a market with room here since generators are often inefficient (and produce weird power) and batteries have grown a lot lately. OTOH, in practice home generators are more limited by "how often do we need to (and given the state of the infrastructure, can we) go buy a new can of gas" than efficiency. And even if efficiency does matter, how long will it take to pay off?
Practical problems we had the one time we actually needed our generator were:
* (remember to turn off the main breaker)
* whoops, we blew the GFCI when we tried to back-feed power through an external outlet, so we had to run an extension cord through a door (with all that implies). This is the only thing that actually took us by surprise and took some debugging in the weeks following.
* the 120V generator only one half of the split phase, so every other circuit in the breaker box doesn't work. Pick your half carefully!
* the generator is strong enough to run normal appliances, but not the well pump (note: we had a completely different plan for heating). Here I suppose a battery could've been useful ... but then, the reason we didn't just buy a bigger generator in the first place was cost (for an extended-outage event that only happens once in multiple decades; for anything shorter you can just ... not open the fridge).
* (just a note that with the increasing electrification of cars, some variant of "plug your house into your car" is likely to become more of a thing)
While I've seen the grid flicker, this has only ever happened just at the start or just before it comes on permanently, so I'm not sure how useful it is to consider the "comes on for a bit" case either.
The portability of the unit also makes a great use case for off-grid, getaway or usage in a remote location, or perhaps just as an additional option for existing setups.
Being able to plug it into a NA standard plug into a more capable generator (or other outlet) to recharge is useful.
Without knowing the price point... van life folks have solar batteries and the published power specs seem to be competitive and useful for powering higher-draw appliances and devices.
The payback period to make arbitrage useful would be very specific to the user and how much electricity costs in their locale, but this calculation should take into account the delivery costs component of a utility bill that can be the same or higher than the cost of the actual electricity.
My dad put together a backup system- in spring time, they get weeks of water running at their house, so he's got two pumps on two separate batteries in case either pump or battery dies.
You can even get an all in one system for around $200 if you want to save up for something more robust:
You should address that with exterior grading and diverting gutter run off so far away from the structure that it can’t seep back toward your basement.
If water can get in, it will. And it will do it when your sump is not operating.
If you’ve already addressed it externally and you’re still seeing water come in, then you didn’t address it completely. End state should a totally passive system where the sump never even fills.
And if that doesn’t work, sell the house and get one on top of a hill!
We can start a Sump Pump with the 7,800W startup power (2,400W running).
I’d recommend DIY if you don’t want/need/can’t afford an integrated solution. I built my own with parts off Amazon but it doesn’t take a bit of knowledge and research. Fun project though.
This is definitely aimed at the other 99% that’s not gonna wire this up themselves though, of course :)
Bullshit on the fridge. A modern day french door uses almost 2 kWh per day at the mid range model level (which really isn't that different from older top freezers). Higher end fridges use even more. The 1.6 kWh capacity isn't enough for 2-3 days.
Sadly, a modern day french door is pretty inefficient. Consumers prefer them because of their looks but they are very far from being an efficient way to keep food cold.
Why are they any less efficient than a single-door fridge? Losses in between the two doors? I don't see why it should be much different. Both types of fridge causes the cold air to "fall out" when you open the door(s).
A top-loading chest fridge/freezer is of course most efficient, but don't think many people have those in their kitchens.
French door has less insulation because there's more "seams". Also typical french doors tend to have an ice machine or water dispenser, which is even less insulation and/or more seams.
Check out this[0] and think about regional markets: half the capacity with 108kWh/yr consumption. I had theirs previous gen one and can attest that the number is correct.
It’s basically a huge, 21st century UPS.
It can also do arbitrage and charge when it’s cheap and deploy the power when it’s expensive.
The main problem with a powerwall is it doesn’t work for renters, and costs 20,000+ (and permits, etc) if you do own your home.
A pull-sting generator (gas) is great - and a push-button one is around 1K also btw- but it doesn’t go on automatically if you’re out, and be noisy, can only be started after the hurricane, etc
Finally, local-first is super important to us for outage or otherwise - we integrate with Home Assistant and have public MQTT topics you can directly hook into no matter what happens to Pila the company, as long as your hardware lasts (predicted 10 years).
Idk - that’s where we feel like the position and gap in this market is? But we may be wrong :)