BioLite Takes The Financial Sting Out Of Home Backup Power
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There’s a big problem with home backup storage: cost. To power your whole house for days at a time, you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to install huge banks of lithium batteries. Paired with solar power on the roof, you can pretty much be completely off-grid, but you often also have the ability to sell power back to the grid, charge batteries when cheap, and do many other things to reduce home energy costs while improving reliability.
But for those of us who can’t plop big stacks of cash on the table or afford a monthly payment, this isn’t helpful. For people who don’t own their own home, the dream of a fridge that doesn’t let the food go bad during power outages is just about completely out of reach.
The Solution: À La Carte Backup Power
If you think about the high cost of whole-home backup power, right-sizing seems to be the obvious answer. If you can’t afford to back up the whole house, sometimes it makes more sense to take a look at what needs backup power and what doesn’t.
The essentials are pretty easy to spot in most houses. For example, the fridge is something you don’t want losing power if you’re away from home all day. Food’s expensive these days, and losing hundreds of bucks’ worth of food isn’t fantastic. Essential medical devices, like CPAP machines, are another important thing to keep the juice going to. Every household’s needs are going to be different, so aside from setting up a whole-home system, there is no one-size-fits-all setup.
Power stations, the boxes with a battery bank, inverters, and converters, are a good option in some ways. You can take them outside to charge on solar during long outages, and around the house, you can walk (or wheel the bigger ones) around the house to where they’re needed during outages. They have the added benefit of being portable for things like camping trips, too.
But, anything that requires you to get the device out, pull appliances like fridges out, and plug things in manually has the downside of not being ready to keep things cold if you’re away. They’re also generally not built to be left on the counter next to a fridge plugged in and doing pass-through charging all day. Some power stations will cut off after a number of minutes or hours, while others aren’t durable enough for constant use.
BioLite decided to do something between power stations and whole-home backup power. Like a Tesla Powerwall, you can mount the BioLite Backup on the wall for a professional look. But the units are a lot smaller and a lot more affordable than whole-home solutions, with storage similar to what you’d get from power stations.
The biggest advantage to this approach over power stations is that you can keep them ready to go at all times for your home’s most critical things. Your family’s most critical items stay powered for up to dozens of hours even if you’re out of town. You can still have portable power stations for your other needs, so it’s possible to have power for almost everything (or, everything if you have a big enough portable station) without having to own your home or invest tens of thousands.
Sadly, full details will not be out as of the time of this announcement. Storage capacity, output and input power, and other things are going to come shortly after this announcement. We’ll add them to this article once they’re revealed!
Featured image by BioLite.
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