Anker goes big with new whole home backup system
theverge.com
theverge.com
Will does a great job distilling a ton of useful information without any sort of agenda. I've purchased his books simply to support him. I'm glad to have watched him go from his early days to a lot of success just by being himself and staying honest to his reviews. Brilliant young guy.
- Could get expensive flying a technician to every household to upgrade hardware in the racks
- Probably don't want everyone at home having physical access to storage devices
- Massive theft risk
- Homeowner's insurance would probably be irked
1. Power fail-over (battery + generator backup) in every house? - I recently listened to a Planet Money episode about how DC/AI infrastructure needs are driving up electricity prices in Ohio. Ordinary households end up paying higher bills while big entities plan/build for reliable power. - Maybe household-level infrastructure could be improved as part of making this kind of model viable. This applies to networking infrastructure too
3. Could get expensive flying a technician to every household to upgrade hardware in the racks - People with enough education can be trained, and with the incentive of being paid, households themselves could become the technicians.
4. Probably don’t want everyone at home having physical access to storage devices - Same idea: if households are being paid and it’s “their role” to manage, the access concern gets reframed as operational responsibility.
5. Massive theft risk - Theft risk already exists today (even in good neighborhoods). The incremental risk might be negligible.
6. Homeowner’s insurance would probably… - If we squint hard enough, there are arguments here too (e.g., payments not missed, additional compensation).
(Planet Money link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id2907834...)
Data centre in the shed reduces energy bills to £40
Probably a bit of a nightmare to oversight all the resources and ensure consistency and privacy but hey why can't we dream?
If you put a rack in a datacenter, and it's a decent datacenter, you'll probably have at least 2x10G connectivity off the rack; if you need more, you can get more. If you put it at someone's home, good luck.
from google AI, YSRMV (Your Search Results May Vary).
Heata: Attaches servers to your hot water tank, providing free hot water during trials, saving users money on bills.
Thermify (SHIELD Project): Installs "HeatHubs" (often with Raspberry Pis) in sheds or homes, running remote data centers and using the heat for homes, aiming for low-cost heating for tenants.
Carno: Offers devices like the QB1 (digital boiler) and QH1 (computer heater) that integrate microprocessors into heating systems, reimbursing electricity costs.
> the average US home consumes about 889kWh per month, or about 29.2kWh per day
I assume most of that is HVAC? I use about 1500kWh a year, but I don’t need aircon and heating is district heating.
But yes, most of that would be heating and cooling single family homes. Many built during a time when insulation was an afterthought. Now homes are well insulated, but they are larger.
Family of 3 in a Bungalow.
I’d love a system like this to charge on my cheap overnight tariff and use during the day. Solar just isn’t worth it here.
A 12kWh system costs £5880 including VAT. Assume 95% round trip efficiency and 80% cycle each night gives savings of £565 annually.
That's about the same as the cost of a loan at 5% for the total amount paid back over an estimated useful life of 15 years.
This assumes it doesn't need servicing in that time and you can DIY install.
I don't know whether home systems like this will get much cheaper as the batteries themselves probably only make up about 20% of the system cost.
There are huge economies of scale for utility scale storage with all in project costs now down to $125/kWh meaning 12kWh would cost just $1500 rather than $6600 for this home system. So I wouldn't be confident the price differentials between day and night rates will remain as high over its expected lifetime.
I don’t think these differentials will last either but I do like the idea of smart charging when there is too much wind. I suspect these grid storage systems currently being built won’t handle these peaks and will be designed for the average case so there will still be periods of cheap electricity.
My supplier already controls my car this way and charges it on a schedule it defines each night and also ad-hoc during low demand.
There is also some benefit to have a backup system for when the power goes out which happens a few times a year.
That likely means you'll still be able to charge your car cheaply most of the time but it probably makes home battery investments less attractive since you might only get 100-200 opportunities a year to charge it cheaply instead of 365, halving the annual savings.
But then given so much of the cost of a home system is in the inverter and control unit maybe it will become economic to buy several days consumption worth of batteries.
1920s era homes are even worse, single hung windows in wooden frames, no insulation, no conception of managing airflow.
Modern homes are much more efficient, but they're a bit impractical to buy these days, and are increasingly built so shitty that their lifespan is less than their inhabitants.
That's 171 W on average, that's about the same as my refrigerator (~150 W on average).
If so, it should be noted that the average German household uses in the 3000-3500 kWh range per year, and even the average one person household uses around 2000 kWh per year.
In the US we are more likely to to use electricity for a couple of things than Germans are. For example in the US around 80% of households use a clothes dryer, and about 80% of those are electric. In Germany only around 40% of households use a clothes dryer.
4 loads a week for a year would would be around 600 kWh, so we are already up to 40% of your usage just from that.
Water heating in the US is split pretty evenly between electric and natural gas, with a smaller number using propane or oil. The energy use label on my water heater says it should take about 350 kWh a year for a typical household. Google is telling me electric water heating is much much less common in Germany.
I think those are the major non-HVAC things where Americans and Germans significantly differ on whether they use electricity or some other form of energy to accomplish the task.
Take those out though and it is still hard to get down to your 1500 kWh a year. I'm the only person in my household, don't have air conditioning, and in those parts of the year where I don't need to use heating and it is not so hot that I need to keep a fan running to not feel uncomfortable, and it is not a laundry day (so no use of the dryer nor use of hot water for the washing machine) and I don't use the dishwasher (another user of hot water) the lowest 24 hour use I've seen has been maybe 7.2 kWh. If I could keep that up all year that would be ~2600 kWh. Add in a load of laundry a week and 2 or 3 uses of the dishwasher a week that would probably be close to 3000 kWh.
Your 1500 kWh a year would be 4.1 kWh per day average, so 3 kWh a day less than my minimum days. I suspect that a significant part of that difference is due to my water heating, from one or two hot showers a day.
One thing I've got that you almost certain do not is a well with an electric pump. I don't have a meter on my water, but I'm pretty sure it is under 100 gallons a day. One shower and a few toilet flushes with both an efficient shower head and an efficient toilet should be way under that, and drinking/hand washing/teeth brushing is not more than a few gallons. I don't know the actual power used by the pump, but if it used the maximum power circuit it is on is rated for it would only use around 0.3 kWh a day.
My fridge is just average on efficiency, but it is only using about 0.4 kWh a day. I assume you too have a fridge, so I doubt the fridge accounts for a significant difference.
My computer stuff (M2 Mac Studio, 27" 5k monitor, 24" second monitor, powered speakers, powered USB hub, 4 bay Thunderbolt drive enclosure with 4 SSDs, network switch) is using 1.78 kWh per day. The cable internet gateway is another 0.35 kWh per day. I assume you also have a decent computer setup so not sure if there is much difference here.
Oh, I just remembered one thing I had that was using more power than I expected in those summers when I saw usage as low as 7.2 kWh a day. I was not putting my A/V receiver in standby. I had assumed that when it was not actually playing the power usage would be very low, but apparently that's not the way these things work. It turns out it was using about 50 W all the time. That's 1.2 kWh a day! I only actually play stuff an hour or two a day, so that was about 1.1 kWh a day of wasted energy. No I have it on standby when not in use (0.07 kWh per day) so I may get down to 6.2 kWh on non-laundry/non-dishwashing days in 2026.
I wouldn't expect so - I have gas heating and no A/C and I average around 700 kWh / month.
Is it UL9540(UL energy storage system safety standard) certified? I didn't see it listed in the specs but several of the ecoflow models are.
I don't know about "remote rural". But in those places, I don't think anyone could afford an energy storage system even if needed......
Which prompts a question- do you run a server / destop / NAS type system, or are you one of the many phone / tablet / other device users that are already somewhat independant of the power grid being fully on 24/7?
Asking about "remote rural" wasn't about whether people there could afford off grid power of their own, rather it was about the grid quality and delivery for people that live there and rely on it.
Where I am we get relatively few "outages" (minutes without power) but glitches and 20 second outages are common enough in lightning season ( we get a lot of ground strikes compared to other ares of the world ) and the power lines and transformers are surge protected which is seen as glitching on the long arms of the delivery network.
As for the remote rural argument, I totally agree with you: it's just that I don't know about those places. What I said about affordability was regarding the article: I don't think Anker would be able to sell those in China, since those who might want one probably couldn't afford it.
Our cities (we only have a few big ones) all have pretty solid power delivery - as do most US large cities.
The US has "two" major grids, \1 most of the USofA, and 2\ Texas (which traditionally had minimal connection to elsewhere)
The \1 grid is most robust in the north east, patches into Canada (IIRC), and has some long connections to the West Coast.
Texas had some major outages in severe winter conditions, there's a whole story about that
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
it's interesting as a systems failure.
Elsewhere in the US it's a function (by my guess) of how far some people are from major centres, whether there are major wildfires (california, and other parts), and if they're bridged across via "private" operators that have poor standards.
The US doesn't have uniform federal / state capital infrastructure (roads, rail, powerlines, telecomms, sewerage, water, etc) which is a strength / weakness depending on how people view these things.
There's enough weak connection to accomadate some slosh that helps to smooth things and enough long connections to have potential issues in geomagnetic storms - although these should be well and truly mitigated by now.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm
^ Québec, but interconnected with NE USofA.
A system is in the tens of thousands of dollars and bills are maybe a few hundred.