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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

It 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 up electricity at night when it's cheap to use it during the day.

But this doesn't fit any of those categories. It's way too expensive to run a desktop computer, doesn't last anywhere near long enough for power outages from natural disasters, and isn't going to make a meaningful difference in your energy bill if a single device can only handle 5% of your home's daily energy needs.

And you don't even need it for a fridge/freezer -- it'll stay cold enough on its own for a day without power as long as you don't open it much.

I applaud the creativity, but I genuinely don't understand who the market is supposed to be?

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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 :)

Have you looked at any of the integrated options?

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.

Or, perhaps they could work up a package where the battery gets sold with a well pump by a house builder/well driller/plumber doing the pump install?

After one lengthy power outage and no running water to flush a toilet, most homeowners would consider that a worthwhile investment.

> 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.

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)

I lost $1000 in groceries in the Bay Area in 2023. Four multi-day outages on the peninsula.

I’m on the Peninsula. Don’t remember an outage longer than few hours in my lifetime.

You're lucky. Really varies by where you live. Santa cruz mountains get the worst of it, but other parts like where I am are pretty bad too.

> Great points - however this can keep your fridge running for 2-3 days (a pretty long outage).

Your own marketing page claims 32 hours (a little over 1 day).

It's the very first icon in the table.

EDIT: And your other comment now says 3-4 days for a fridge ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43338397 ). Getting hard to believe all of these different numbers.

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.

Price is $999 for people who pay $99 for pre-order. Normal price is $1299

I can’t afford something like this but I would absolutely get something similar to this if I could.

My sump pumps are literally one of my biggest home ownership worries.

> My sump pumps are literally one of my biggest home ownership worries.

There are a lot of sump pump backup solutions on the market at around half the price of this unit.

There are also a lot of similar lithium battery + solar devices at less than half the price: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/delta-2-portable-power-stati...

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:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Basement-Watchdog-Emergency-Batt...

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 :)

I struggle with the math on how this is running your typical fridge for even 16 hours

Are the batteries COTS units? In 10 years when they fail, can I get new ones from Grainger or Amazon or wherever and replace them?

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.

> 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)

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.

[0] https://www.samsung.com/uk/refrigerators/bottom-mount-freeze...

According to this, it really is not:

https://www.energysage.com/electricity/house-watts/how-many-...

Wow that’s crazy! What fridge is that?

The market exists - I have a product from another company - Bluetti - (1).

The Pila is a beautiful device, but that beauty comes at a price - it's a lot more expensive than, say, Bluetti's range of portable power stations and others too. They are also expandable, connect to solar panels and so on, and apparently the German market has embraced batteries like this with solar panels to give your home a degree of independence very easily.

(1) https://www.bluettipower.com/collections/power-stations

The DELTA EcoFlow is another line of similar products: https://us.ecoflow.com/collections/delta-series

These are everywhere. You can even pick them up at Costco, Best Buy, and other retail electronics distributors. They're a lot cheaper than the linked product, too.

I think people are getting misled by the Powerwall comparison. This isn't a powerwall competitor. It competes with all of the other battery power stations on the market, of which there are many.

EcoFlow, as best as I can tell from chats with Ukranian folks, has become a generic term for such battery backups. They are very common given the load shedding.

> it'll stay cold enough on its own for a day without power as long as you don't open it much.

Food in an unpowered fridge will be unsafe within 4 hours: https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-safety-charts/food-safety-du...

So when you have the pack of cheese on the table at 19°C for 45 minutes for perhaps a week before it's used up... you should drive to the hospital? Most of the continent does this as far as I know (having lived in and visited friends around northwestern Europe) and I have yet to hear someone tell a horror story of getting food poisoned after leaving the cheese/salami at room temperature for a cumulative 2 hours

This is not realistic, this is perhaps an "absolutely 100% guaranteed still safe for your baby while it is sick" value, which I guess makes sense for a government agency but they could communicate whom this advice is for

Edit: scrolling further down the table, also cooked pasta, rice, potatoes, vegetables, and sauce should be discarded. These products cooked, so they cooled down through optimal breeding temperatures while you had dinner for an hour, before they even started their journey from room down to fridge temperature. They should be discarded according to this table and never consumed in the first place (explicitly: don't even taste to see if it's still good). Not to mention what spoiled while it was on your plate

That’s much too conservative in opinion, at least around eggs, cheese and dairy.

In the US our store bought eggs are washed and are not safe to store unrefrigerated. If you get your eggs from the back of a hen it's a different story.

After 2 hours above 4C? No way! This is just them being conservative so they don’t get sued.

My fridge is set to 6C, I should have gotten sick long ago then.

> will be unsafe

That is absolute BS - food is considered unsafe after the food itself spends 4 hours above 40*f, so the website you’re linking to assumes a fridge and everything in it immediately warms to 41+* upon losing power? Physics doesn’t work that way….

You've misread the table. 40F for 2 hours is the guideline. A typical fridge is around 35-38F.

Anecdotally my parents had a fridge fail recently and the food heated up alarmingly quickly.

Sounds like your parents fridge was poorly insulated, and thus consumed way more electricity than a modern fridge needs to.

I tried to warn them about french doors...

I live in an area where we get a handful of outages every year. From a few hours to a few days.

My current setup is a 2.8Kv generator I haul our of the shed, run a few extension cords to core things like fridge/freezer, internet, office etc.

This is a nice fit between a generator and a Powerwall. Generator is a pain if you have to setup + if not home the fridge stays off or my wife will leave to me unless its urgent. A Powerwall (or similar) is a significant investment.

This product covers people like me with occasional outages but it doesn't have the setup or out of home hassle, and its a more financially accessible solution than a Powerwall. I could def see people interested in this.

I looked through the material, but I'm still at a loss how this is different than any recent battery/inverter combination like Ecoflow/Jackery/etc or a UPS with an app. I'm an electrician, and very in to new electrical products but this one just makes me wonder how it's different.

Look up most of those products and you can see that they aren’t meant to be used daily, kept charged at 100% etc.. This is a commercial energy product scaled down to a consumer level, not a camping battery with a shiny exterior.

Also their apps are bad and don’t offer anything of value.

I think it can charge when power is cheap (or off solar if you have it), and then power a device (like a fridge) when power is expensive, even if you aren't in the midst of a power outage. So it's a bit more than a UPS, and isn't just for handling outages.

Regarding cost, looks like this is $1k for a 1.6kWh battery. The Powerwall 3 is $9874 (plus installation costs) for a 13.5kWh battery. So Plia costs $625/kWh, while Powerwall 3 will run you $731.41/kWh. So it does seem the Plia is price-competitive, assuming my paragraph above is correct. And Powerwall will cost you even more than that per kWh since Plia is a self-install, while Powerwall is not.

Granted, there are cheaper options than Powerwall.

Plia certainly has its downsides: if you want it to power everything in your home, you have to put one (or more) in each room and plug everything into it (that's 8 or 9 Plias per Powerwall-equivalent). Presumably a whole-home battery can charge faster than a Plia, since you're probably plugging it into a 15A outlet where it'll be pulling less than 1800W.

> I think it can charge when power is cheap (or off solar if you have it), and then power a device (like a fridge) when power is expensive

Yeah that is a cool feature, but at least where I live there is only a few cents / kwh difference between peak and non-peak, which means this 1.6kwh battery system would save at most a nickel a day (~$20/year).

Good points, I want to clarify that ~$9874 is just the price of one powerwall alone. Add in electricians, wiring, permits and you’re looking at an additional $10k in install costs. Pila’s whole point is that it’s a plug and play solution with no install costs.

powerwall load capacity is significantly higher. pila could never come close to the sort of load that pw3 can sustain

meanwhile, i can find battery solutions that output 120v on aliexpress, for $700 for a 1.8kwh battery

anyways this show hn post is clearly an ad for a not particularly novel product. sorry plia!

I agree that this doesn't seem useful for time of use arbitrage.

I think it depends on what your electric outages look like. Short outages, a desktop ups probably makes sense. But if you regularly get 12-36 hour outages, this might be a reasonable product for you. Personally, I expect two nines of utility power, so something like this could possibly work (but I already have a 35kW propane fired standby generator)

Yeah, this sounds perfect for the suburb I grew up in - a couple outages a year, but they only lasted about half a day.

"Don't open the fridge so everything stays cold" is a lot more difficult with three teenagers.

Pila has temp sensors that can monitor fridge & freezer temp to give you piece of mind.

So hard to keep the fridge closed & how do you know whether the food is still safe?

Yeah I get that, this will last longer than a UPS. I’ve thrown away a few in the last couple years that broke. That’s the lead acid UPS vs. LFP chemistry at work.

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.

if your concern is keeping your family fed, consider the last time you had an extended outage. then run the numbers

if it was recent, such as living in certain parts of texas, you should be keeping large amounts of stable water for each person for at least a week (gallon jugs + water filter pens), fuel/burner/pot, rice/beans/etc in a water sealed emergency kit

if it was a long time ago, you should be keeping enough water, vitamins, and high density calorie bricks for 96 hours

it'd be nice to have fresh food, but it's way more practical and reliable to have sustenance stored in a closet somewhere

for a family of four, premade emergency kits for 7 days will run you about $150, and youll need about 25 gallons of water - <$25

$175 or a $1000 battery + $25 for water. idk choice is easy

A use case I can see is for people who are dependent on things like insulin or other temperature sensitive medications. If you have to get out a dose every few hours or even every day or two, you might not be able to rely on thermal mass, and if you have a month's prescription or more on hand, it could cost thousands to replace if it perishes during the power outage.

You could probably run a dorm-style mini-fridge for a lot longer than a 25-cubic-foot side-by-side, and it would be perfect for that case.

Hell, buy the guts of a $79 dorm fridge, bolt the Pila product inside the chassis, and sell it as a "medical supply" for 10 times its cost-of-goods.

If you can put a backup battery into an outlet and have it work well like an appliance there is a lot of utility there. Pumps and fans for gas hvac systems as well as sump pumps are more critical and less power hungry than a fridge. I would much rather have a web page on wifi to monitor it than another blu tooth app, but whatever.

That being said 1.6 kw/h for $1000 is WAY overpriced. Lithium Iron Phosphate battery prices are dropping like a stone. This should be a third of the price and eventually that's exactly what someone will sell it for.

>It looks beautiful. But I honestly don't understand what the market is.

People who are willing to buy several individual UPS devices for appliances but aren't willing to pay an electrician to install a grid cut off switch so they can power their whole house with a slightly bigger UPS.

Honestly, I could see someone buying one or two of these for their fridge and another for their home office or similar, but they are competing with existing companies that sell a similar product without the UPS feature, like you see nearly every youtuber advertise.

Backup can be extended to 62 hours through an expansion pack. A foldable solar array can be plugged in as well to extend backup indefinitely for long outages.

Indefinitely? The device has 2.4kW output and allows plugging in 1.2kW of solar which will work for a part of the day. That's not how "extend indefinitely" works.

"foldable solar array" lmao how much do you think those generate. please, respond before you look it up

I might get this for my basement sump pump in case the power goes out during a storm.

This can start up a Sump Pump with a 7.8kW surge (2.4kw running output)

A suitable UPS for that application costs less than $100.

Do you have any examples? I haven't seen what you're describing despite shopping UPSes, but something less than $100 that could last 10+ hours would be amazing.

My $200 1500VA/1000W CyperPower UPS could handle a short one or two hour storm, but storms can last for 10+ hours here during the wet season. One long power outage could cost me a lot more than $1000 in basement damages (my basement is finished).

A comparable all-in-one product to this pila battery would also be around $1000: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/delta-2-max-portable-power-s...

You can easily cut that in half shopping for an inverter and battery separately:

$240 for an inverter: https://www.homedepot.com/p/VEVOR-2500-Watt-3-4-HP-Sump-Pump...

$200 for a battery: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Basement-Watchdog-Maintenance-Fr...

But a lead acid battery might last 5 years where the pila battery is designed for 10+ years, so you're looking at $400 total on batteries. That quickly gets close to the $1000 for one pila battery.

I want to believe $100 is all you need, but to me the math with the numbers that I've seen suggests $1000 is not unreasonable for something like this.

> A comparable all-in-one product to this pila battery would also be around $1000

That unit is more powerful, higher capacity, and has more solar features than the Pila product. The Pila is also $1300 after pre-orders are over.

I'd pick the Delta unit, personally. They go on sale and you can even grab them from local places like Costco with good return policies.

You buy lithium battery (lifepo4) not agm, much longer life time. I have exactly the same Vevor inverter + lithium battery total cost was 400$. But I regret doing this setup, I should have just gotten Ecoflow power station, it's a bit more expensive but more versatile.. You can take it with you anywhere

Thanks for the suggestion. It looks like 100Ah LiFePo4 batteries are pretty easy to find too.

It depends on the wattage and duty cycle of your sump pump.

My experience with sump pumps is low wattage and intermittent use. Sounds like this does not correspond to yours.

That makes sense. Mine runs every few minutes sometimes in heavy rain.

Exactly, traditional lead-acid UPS cannot power much for long and often last less than 3 years.

Pila is great value.

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