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Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily the point. If it provides a normal wall outlet I'm happy to plug essentials around for the one time per 1-2 decades this happens for longer than 4 hours and the fridge/freezer/laptop needs a boost

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As long as you're not opening the fridge / freezer during the outage (and you have sufficient thermal mass of food in it) you don't need to worry about "boosting" it during a power outage of only 4 hours. I don't recall the rule of thumb off the top of my head, but for at least 6 hours I'd expect the contents of normal fridge / freezer to be just fine (as long as there's thermal mass there).

Can confirm from years of load shedding in the past in South Africa where my area had 4 hour outages.

That duration was tough for various reasons, but fridge and freezer were not really an issue.

I was very happy when they changed to 2 hour outages (albeit twice as many), and then even happier with not having load shedding for about 2 years now.

They said longer than 4 hours

Yes, thanks, indeed I'd start doing this *after* 4h if I have such a battery since fridge, freezer, and laptop are all in different places and they'll run for 90 minutes to cool or charge and it's probably not bad to get around to all towards the end of the first day with no stress. It was just an arbitrary starting point really. Freezer contents are also all fine after 24h but maybe some edges got towards the thawing point. I've not tried it out and simply wouldn't care to find out

The issue there is the plug would be on the battery which you're unlikely to have mounted in a convenient location for things like your main fridge, router, and computer. For me all 3 of those are pretty far away from the most likely places I'd put a battery bank. I have a mobile one I keep charged up for emergencies and long power outages and have a small portable solar panel for it for multiday outages.

Ah, right I was picturing an oversized car battery that you can lug around. Extension cord then? Not sure but this seems surmountable without having to rewire the house and get a permit or licensed unit for feeding the grid

The size the article is talking about are usually around 100 pounds or ~50kg at least. My solution is the much smaller Anker Solix C1000 and it's outboard battery extension. It can output up to 1800W sustained with a 2.4 KW peak and the two units together have about 2100 Wh of capacity. They're small enough to move around by hand when disconnected but can't do the kind of peak shifting the OP article was talking about so they're purely backup or car camping power. I used them to power my WFH setup while my electrical service was being upgraded a while ago though and it worked well enough.

Right, and some of us have a fine tradition of using extension cords as a way of powering some things during an outage with, eg, a portable generator buzzing away outside.

It's clunky and haphazard, but it can work well-enough for rare use.

But one of the big sells in the article for this device is that it can be used to buy power when it is cheap, and sell power when it is expensive (at least in markets that support that kind of operation). This can be good for the owner (who can make some money doing it), and also good for the grid (the price fluctuates when supply and demand aren't well-balanced, and this function helps to balance things).

That kind of functionality, on its own, can tend to require some real wiring changes and permitting.

(Or not. Electricity rules vary wildly around the world. They aren't even necessarily consistent within one nationality.)

Must be nice. I live in Virginia, outside Richmond. For the past 8 years, the power company has failed to provide me with even 3 nines of power availability (that means at least 9 hours of outage every year for the past 8 years. Just had a 17 hour outage as of last night, lost everything in my fridge. Again.)

I dunno. TBH I'd rather just let the food go bad than bother with the expense and hassle of having a battery and keeping it charged. I guess other locations may have less reliable grids than I do, but I've only experienced one power outage that lasted so long[1] that our food went off in my entire 40 years living in the Twin Cities area.

[1] About 96 hours, major storm took down a ton of trees through the whole metro area that took days to clear.

I can't even remember the last power outage we had that was not self-inflicted (a year ago our old microwave oven permanently tripped the residual current device).

Also, according to the article, it seems to pay itself back in 11-12 years. I'd rather pay the little extra to not have a huge lithium battery in our appartment that cannot be extinguished with a normal fire extinguisher if it decides to ignite itself.

The device's primary use would be using excess solar power from during the day, or excess wind on rare occasions. This would just be a nice benefit and I just meant that it doesn't have to keep up with the whole house during an outage to still help out in a pinch

I’ve generally come to this opinion as well. The only thing I would seriously consider auxiliary power for is the furnace.

Winter storms tend to come in cold stretch’s that can cause major freeze havoc.

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