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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power

That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.

Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.

Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].

I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.

[1] https://www.idahopower.com/energy-environment/energy/energy-...

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> Batteries have gotten so cheap

Any pointers for a regular Joe Shmoe homeowner looking for a backup battery? The Tesla Power Wall stuff and similar costs are halfway to six figures.

For full house backup, it sort of sucks right now. They are all charging a premium over what you can otherwise get if it's not specifically a whole home product.

What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery pack for $400 right now. A comparable home battery backup is charging $1300 per kWh of installed storage.

I currently have a 2kWh battery pack for my computer/server/tv and a 500Wh pack for my fridge. Works great and it's pretty reasonably priced. The 500Wh gives my fridge an extra 6 hours of runtime after a power outage.

If I wanted to power shift, I have smart switches setup so I can toggle when I want to.

In the EU €1800 gets you a 10kWh battery (ex install)

That's on the high side, I would guess. Depending on what brand you want, you can get 10kWh of LFP for under a grand right now in the US.

With a BMS and inverter? What brand should I be looking at?

You will get a battery and BMS for that price. Decent inverters are expensive, however, so you won't get a whole 10kWh setup with appropriately sized inverter for under US$2K. Probably twice that.

I hesitate to offer any brand advice, because that is very situational, depends on what you're after, what experience level you have, what trade-offs you want to make, etc.

I don't know if the market has improved but when I looked at this a year or two ago I concluded that the consumer market here was utter crap with hugely inflated prices.

The cheapest per kwh way I could find to buy a home battery (that didn't involve diy stuff) was to literally buy an EV car with an inverter... by a factor of at least two... I ended up not buying one.

Unfortunately cheap batteries doesn't translate to reputable companies packaging them in cheap high quality packages for consumers instantly.

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