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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

I’m confused by two things…

First: this is an electrical power source with a male plug… And I understand the intelligence inside of it, but… can this possibly be code compliant? Something similar to this is often referred to as a Suicide cord …

Second: this is back-feeding electricity into the power grid and, again, I understand you can address this with onboard intelligence and millisecond switching… But I don’t think the power company cares. I don’t think there’s any way you can legally plug a power source like this Into your home electrical bus.

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Suicide cords are from dumb generators. Pila has smart safety controls that don’t feed power back through the plug unless it’s connected to grid.

Utah just passed a law allowing this & Germany has allowed it for years.

It's a UPS. It doesn't do any back feeding. Compare it against APC SmartUPS and CyberPower.

The OP described it as plugging into mains outlet and then, in the event of an outage, feeding power back into that mains circuit to power every outlet on the circuit.

Did I misunderstand?

The description was very poor. They could only feed power back into the one circuit that hardware is on, and the would also be a violation of multiple safety standards, as well as the National Electrical Code. That’s a good way to get someone hurt or killed, and to have your ass thrown in jail for sporting such a stupid device.

This is why you have lockout devices on breaker boxes, if you’re going to have an emergency generator that plugs into the same box.

Or you have automatic transfer switches that handle cutting off your feed back to the power company, before turning on any battery or power generation equipment at your site.

Take a step back and look at how it’s constructed, and what the inputs and outputs actually are. It is clear that it’s just a pretty UPS with a weird proprietary wireless communications system, and should be compared against the likes of APC and CyberPower.

This is mostly correct. One additional feature is that it can back feed when the grid is up. This allows you to save money on your energy, charging when energy is cheap or from solar and discharging when energy is expensive.

Even with solar panels, you have to have the right equipment at your meter and in the first box connected to the meter, in order to backfeed power to the grid. You can’t just slap random gear inside your house and have it start feeding current back. That would violate the National Electric Code (NEC) and could get someone hurt or killed if they thought the power was out but your equipment was providing current back onto the lines.

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