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Comment by stbenjam | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call 1.6kWh tiny, running your fridge and charging phones for a day will have a big market in places that might get outages during the winter that last a day or two. How about apartment dwellers in cities? Not everyone needs something gigantic or permanent.

They support up to 1200W of solar with the expansion pack. Running a cable out a window during a prolonged outage doesn't seem like a huge deal, but I'd guess most of the use case is shorter outages < 48 hours.

The solution is far cheaper than something like the Tesla powerwall (which I have and adore, but it's definitely a bigger investment).

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> The solution is far cheaper than something like the Tesla powerwall

That's like saying a $120K luxury pickup truck is a good deal because it's far cheaper than buying an entire semi-truck.

This is a UPS. Comparing it to the Powerwall is a marketing trick to distract people from the high price.

Powerwall is a UPS as well. It’s just larger and more expensive.

Right, just like a semi truck is a truck as well. It's just larger and more expensive.

But comparing the two doesn't make sense.

I'm not a fan of these devices in general as I'm more of a DIY, but...

A Ecoflow Delta 2 Max is $1100, gives you 2kWh capacity and 1000W of solar input. if you have a power outage, you can actually keep it topped off w/ solar while keeping your fridge, gas furnace, etc running.

If you're gonna hang a wire out the window, why pay the premium for the pretty enclosure and screen?

Not to hard pivot but any DIY links you’d recommend? I’ve been getting into this field and would like to DIY something around this scale. Keep a fridge running, maybe have a little dc circuit for a home lab.

In addition to Will's channel, don't overlook thermal battery links, too, which often can be made out of old water heaters that folks dump on craigslist all the time. The gist behind thermal batteries is to help with the (solar->battery->coil->hot water) efficiency loop by changing it to (solar->coil->sand->hot water) e.g. https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/making-a-do-it-yourself-sand... (I love his channel, too) or https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/18/1091481/how-to-b...

They also have vastly different failure modes than pumping a bunch of DC voltage into battery cells

There was also recently a post about flow batteries <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41235789> which are also very interesting to me, but I haven't gotten far enough into that learning curve to know if they're a good fit

Will Prowse on youtube a great resource.

For <$1000, you can get a 3-5kWh system (battery+solar charge controller+inverter)

Pila allows you to plug in solar as well.

I agree, 1.6kWh is a good bit of energy during an outage. Get the expansion pack & you get 3.2kWh. My house, most of my consumption is large loads. If I just needed essentials backed up, this would be perfect. Fridge, Starlink, and phone.

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