That said, I like this idea -- a modern coordinated UPS. I live in an area where people have 3-10 days a year of no power; being able to pick and choose what power they'd use during an outage would be a significant benefit to them.
Good luck!
This is not a new product, though. Battery power inverters with AC and solar input are a popular class of products.
You can buy similar products with higher capacity and better solar input at Costco or Best Buy.
I think people are confused by the "Show HN" tag and the misleading way it's being compared to a Powerwall, despite not being a comparable product.
My problem with this post is that it's a "Show HN" from an account that registered 2 months ago. Their only activity is this post. It's pushing a product with misleading marketing comparisons (It's not comparable to a Powerwall) instead of similar products on the market. The poster is also making claims in this thread that contradict their own marketing on the website. Their website says it will run a fridge for 1.3 days, but one of their employees is in this thread making claims of 2-3 days in some places and 3-4 days in other places.
The negativity is because this is a misleading marketing piece and a lot of people are getting tricked into thinking this is a new type of product.
Some examples of competing products with better specs and lower prices:
https://www.bluettipower.com/collections/power-stations
https://us.ecoflow.com/collections/delta-series
EDIT: This thread is being astroturfed. Someone affiliated with Pila is alternating between talking about developing Pila and pretending to ask questions about Pila. See this comment pretending to ask if it qualifies for the Investment Tax Credit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339416 . It took me 10 seconds to find his LinkedIn page where he's clearly associated with Pila: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chadconway_pila-energy-is-8-o...
EDIT 2: Here's another comment where 'chadconway' pretends to ask a question and 'coleashman' answers it: https://archive.is/ws9bp . Both accounts are associated with Pila. This is a clear attempt at astroturfing.
100% this. I had to read a whole wall of text to get to "it's a really fancy UPS". Definitely places that will be useful, but I think a lot of people here are far more excited by the possibilities of products like Powerwall which move us towards a greener future than by large, stylish batteries.
This account's first comments started 4 days ago on another Pila thread. It says "This is awesome! The end of power outages for all of us!"
I'm going to guess this is another Pila employee.
The competing products also have apps with good UIs.
This is a marketing play. It appears to be working, given how many people are convinced it's a new idea.
Often "totally new product" == bad (or more accurately, "first mover" == bad)
I think there is a misconception that totally new products make the money. But the second (or later) mover is often in a better position [1].
Dropbox was not new. File sharing existed prior. AirBnB was not new. Vrbo existed prior. Ethereum was definitely not the first crypto.
The iPod was not new. MP3 players were popular enough to be found at most electronics stores.
My rule of thumb is I want competitors. I want a product category to have some existing popularity (so I know there is money to be made), but not universal.
I think we're far from battery storage being universal in homes and world-wide.
So, if someone can become the iPod or Dropbox of battery storage, that might be a $100+ billion company.
I don't know if Pila is it. But the idea of a battery mesh, instead of the all-or-nothing powerwall sounds interesting.
I would love to be able to build up my home battery storage 1-kwh at a time instead of financing a giant battery all at once.
I can especially see that having value in middle-income countries.
Edit: Adjusted my 10-kwh statement to 1-kwh to make the example make more sense.
[1]: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/the_second_...
My kitchen is already built with a fridge integrated into cabinets. There’s no place to put the battery. And even if there were, it would be a $1k machine dedicated to the fridge. That somewhat makes sense in that food can spoil, and we still want to be able to use the fridge, but I wish more could be powered.
The next obvious thing is lights in the home. But this doesn’t allow me to do that outside of lamps; chandeliers and overheads do not apply.
I’d love this to power the garage door opener, but right now there’s power that goes to it on the ceiling. It’d be really difficult to find a way to mount this to also include the opener without being super janky or needing an electrician to totally rewire that circuit. At that point the price has gone considerably up.
I guess the last bit would be internet / networking gear, although I could get a cheaper UPS for that. I’m also not entirely certain I’d even have internet to connect to if the power was out given I have fiber.
If I were remodeling the house that feels like the right time to add such a thing.
Here we are, rightfully thrashing a product because of disinformation, while we have a president product doing this on a global scale. Not a peep. It's always the little guy (with the exception of Google at HN) who get gets the flack when they do something wrong.
Misdirection is the most powerful political weapon, and we currently have a criminal making sure only he can wield it, with a fan base that loves the exercise of power, loves to see destruction, all in the name of (power to) Christianity. Christianity was losing so it got on board with a loser. No more "by faith" and "Jesus is the Lord". Now they cheer on the hole the USA is digging for others, only to fall in it themselves. Then "Elon" can save it and establish himself as the emperor of the world. The USA is just a pawn being played right now.
All this while we get upset with a small competitor and by the same rules we can't put our eyes on the big players. Dang, because we can only talk about tech. Well, dang, just make a section where we can go to make X-rated, tangential, comments. Because we sure don't want to go to X.
Maybe there is value in marketing such a product to ordinary people that are not in IT or electrical engineering. Maybe you can improve on existing control interfaces and design. But don't be surprised when an established UPS vendor copies your product and crushes you with better numbers because of size.
Most (vocal) participants on HN that comment on product launches have almost no understanding of what will make a successful product / company.
I’ll put my money where my mouth is - check my comments on the ethereum launch thread.
Most of them are overall positive, a few are overwhelmingly positive (it's true even when you exclude silly fun ones and focus on actual products); "had positivity" is such a low bar, it's absurd you're "not aware of any". Even this one has your comment at the top, apparently that doesn't even count as "had positivity" to you.
Moreover, even if 100% of Show HNs get 100% negative commentary, there's still zero logic in the statement "judging by the negativity here you're going to be a massive success".
Edit: Okay you said "successful" Show HNs. Then we'll have to argue about what's successful, and I can't be bothered. But you can go to the all time results instead and I certainly spot a few what I would consider success stories.
Thanks for considering!
Now they might be conservative and you could maybe advertise a bit more liberal times but if you're competition claims their (almost identical) product has substantially lower times people might question that. Obviously EcoFlow is your real competition here and people are going to go check them out.
So by all means claim somewhat better times ;) but maybe not as much as you are.
Don't get me wrong though, you have a cool product and there's definitely room in that space for more options!
https://us.ecoflow.com/products/delta-2-max-portable-power-s...
Don't buy things you cannot afford and won't have to live paycheck to paycheck.
> The foreign equivalent of a merely descriptive English word is no more registrable than the English word itself. "[A] word taken from a well-known foreign modern language, which is, itself, descriptive of a product, will be so considered when it is attempted to be registered as a trade-mark in the United States for the same product."
Worse yet, it might happen that the USPTO does mistakenly approve the trademark, but then revokes it when it's challenged.
Because Spanish is the second most spoken language in every US state, I'm pretty sure that in any city in the US there is a store where you can walk in today, ask for a "pila", and walk out with a battery. At least here in Argentina that's the term we normally use for single-cell batteries like a AA, while a car battery is a "batería".
Being 2nd most common language does not mean this, by a long shot. It definitely won’t work in most of the Seattle, Portland, Denver, Salt lake, Minneapolis, stores for example.
(If you go to the deli section and say “costillas marinadas” to the right person, you will be given a bag of deliciously marinated short ribs.)
lol not the same in Brazilian, but interesting :)
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?
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 :)
$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.
The average fridge loss is estimated at $300 per outage, and the average fridge outage insurance claim is $600 I just learned today from an insurance agent at SXSW at our booth (apparently a lot of lobster is bought the day of the outage :P).
Holy crap, I don't think our fridge fits 300 dollars' worth of food. We have trouble fitting a ~140€ grocery run into the fridge and probably at least half of that is non-refrigerated products. Hard to say how many days' food this is, probably close to a week, so a 36h+ outage (where the fridge actually got warm for a while) would have an average occupancy of much less than the initial 140€, maybe 60 or so? Idk. Not that I remember ever having a power outage longer than 8 hours in my life, neither the Netherlands nor Germany nor Belgium nor Finland (the countries I lived in)
Either Americans and their fridges are built different or this risk (chance & impact) is way overblown
Does this perhaps include opportunity cost where you can't work because you need to get new groceries? Generously, let's say you spend an hour in the store and an hour planning, going, and unpacking, so you'd be valuing those 2h at a consultancy rate of some 100$/hour
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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!
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...
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 :)
A top-loading chest fridge/freezer is of course most efficient, but don't think many people have those in their kitchens.
That’s a lot of energy! What fridge do you have?
[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)
[0] https://www.samsung.com/uk/refrigerators/bottom-mount-freeze...
https://www.energysage.com/electricity/house-watts/how-many-...
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.
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.
Food in an unpowered fridge will be unsafe within 4 hours: https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-safety-charts/food-safety-du...
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 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….
Anecdotally my parents had a fridge fail recently and the food heated up alarmingly quickly.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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 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
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.
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)
"Don't open the fridge so everything stays cold" is a lot more difficult with three teenagers.
So hard to keep the fridge closed & how do you know whether the food is still safe?
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.
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.
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.
My experience with sump pumps is low wattage and intermittent use. Sounds like this does not correspond to yours.
Pila is great value.
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.
Seems like you need to compare it to a UPS too, because that's what it really, really is.
"Reserve now ... Orders are expected start shipping by the end of 2025."
Can't get funding? Or just testing demand without a real product? Nobody does Kickstarters for a me-too product.
It has an "app" user interface, requiring both a cellular connection and the service remaining in business. Plus it wants WiFi so it can receive "software updates". What could possibly go wrong?
That is the true purpose of the entire operation - all other functionality is a distraction (and can be taken away at any time by a software update despite any promises).
As per their FAQ (https://pilaenergy.com/tech-specs#faq):
> As balcony solar and plug-and-power products gain momentum, we welcome collaboration with AHJs and utilities to help responsibly shape the future of home energy. If you're interested in partnering with Pila, reach out!
The plan is to find enough people to buy these so they have enough aggregate storage capacity to solicit "collaboration" and "partnerships" (https://pilaenergy.com/press) with utilities and make profit (I'm fairly confident the device is currently sold at a loss), with the buyers getting scraps in the best case scenario, and nothing in the worst/expected case.
I guess the buyers of the batteries will at least be satisfied with the knowledge that they have paid to "responsibly shape the future of home energy".
Do not be so dismissive so fast without reading. The FAQs and the website says that they have a local interface and requires no internet for controlling it. E.g from https://pilaenergy.com/tech-specs
"While we think you’ll love the Pila App, you’re welcome to connect your own monitoring platform with our free local APIs. We embrace and actively support open standards like Home Assistant, Matter, and Thread for local data streaming from Pila Batteries — Because your data should always stay yours. Local API documentation coming soon. "
"Pila does not require internet to provide backup power, monitoring, or smart energy management features. The Pila Battery Mesh Network keeps all batteries working together, even when your home Internet goes out. The Pila App includes a Local Connection Mode for reliable battery control and monitoring without internet.
For reliable Remote Monitoring, all Pila batteries are equipped with a cellular 4G LTE radio for backup communication when home Wi-Fi fails.
However, we highly recommend keeping Pila batteries connected to Wi-Fi to receive the latest software updates and unlock new features, enhancements, and performance improvements—ensuring your system gets smarter and more capable over time."
We know we're not the first people to think of automatic plug in backup :) Aspirationally, we aim to do to the UPS what the Powerwall did to the lead acid battery bank -- Bring it into the 21st century, level up to better technology, add software intelligence so it's not sitting idle 99% of the time, and improve the design and usability to make it a more exciting and valuable product for more homes
Its a battery backup, how would it not be sitting idle 99% of the time?
Half the problem with home-generation is a cutoff/sync device that synchronizes the frequency of your local generation with the grid, and kills power going back into the grid from your home generator when there is an outage, so line workers can do their jobs safely. And unless there is a more expensive/complicated device that can 'smear' the frequencys between the two systems slowly so they match after a disconnect/reconnect, most of these systems will shutdown local generation if there is no reference frequency from the main power feed.
If you backfeed during an outage, and then the grid reconnects, you're fighting the grid. If you backfeed during an outage and an electrician is trying to fix lines near you, you can hurt them.
Why does the OP say it "disconnects in 20 ms of detecting an outage"? If it's a UPS, it doesn't need to disconnect - It's just no longer fed by the grid. If it's back-feeding, the point would be to _start_ the connection when you detect an outage. But backfeeding is an extremely bad idea.
Yes, plus an auto-transfer-switch
I couldn't find a price on the website (the $99 is just for a reservation) but from this thread it looks like it's priced at $1k [1].
For context, in the USA, 30 KWh is a rough estimate for average daily home usage [2].
[0] https://pilaenergy.com/tech-specs#faq
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43333996
[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
Also, spot on that the average home draws about 30kWh, and with an EV driven average daily ranges that'll jump to about 60kWh.
Before starting to apply voltage to a home electric gird, I guess you need to disconnect it from the central grid - how do you do that? Or do you detect when the grid goes down and comes back up?
This is meant as a more precise, room-by-room backup solution!
Maybe I’m wrong though, just wanted to position.
The pre-order page says it will be $1300 after the pre-order period.
This makes the LCD displays on the front page of the website listing "5 days 6 h ours" and similar on a single unit very misleading. That amount of backup would cost $128,000.
The places that can afford this rarely have power outages, so having an dedicated appliance sitting in your living room or kitchen for those 1-2 times a year doesn't make sense. The capacity is barely enough to run your fridge for a day, I'd rather have a higher capacity unit that just sits in my garage that I can actually charge on solar (that costs the same price).
For the places that really need backup power, this is way too expensive.
This could still have been useful if we weren't home, but as you said these things happen so rarely here that I cannot see myself getting something like this, especially for the fridge since ice just works.
To be fair though, it did mean we could not open the fridge willy-nilly, maybe that helped me lose some weight...
Pila is meant more as a set-and-forget solution if you want something seamless and connected.
That’s the part of the market we’re trying to simplify things for :)
Your marketing page says 32 hours for a fridge (1.3 days, first icon in the table)
Your other comment said 2-3 days for a fridge.
This comment says 3-4 days for a fridge.
Yes - such devices need a constant grid output to sync to. When the grid drops, their output drops. Furthermore, at 800W, it wouldn't be able to put any voltage onto the grid even if it tried to as it would get overloaded (it'll be trying to power up the entire neighborhood).
They support up to 1200W of solar with the expansion pack. Running a cable out a window during a prolonged outage doesn't seem like a huge deal, but I'd guess most of the use case is shorter outages < 48 hours.
The solution is far cheaper than something like the Tesla powerwall (which I have and adore, but it's definitely a bigger investment).
That's like saying a $120K luxury pickup truck is a good deal because it's far cheaper than buying an entire semi-truck.
This is a UPS. Comparing it to the Powerwall is a marketing trick to distract people from the high price.
A Ecoflow Delta 2 Max is $1100, gives you 2kWh capacity and 1000W of solar input. if you have a power outage, you can actually keep it topped off w/ solar while keeping your fridge, gas furnace, etc running.
If you're gonna hang a wire out the window, why pay the premium for the pretty enclosure and screen?
They also have vastly different failure modes than pumping a bunch of DC voltage into battery cells
There was also recently a post about flow batteries <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41235789> which are also very interesting to me, but I haven't gotten far enough into that learning curve to know if they're a good fit
For <$1000, you can get a 3-5kWh system (battery+solar charge controller+inverter)
Based on experiments like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtNq-0kV8YM, I'm extremely skeptical. Can you back this claim?
Also, why are people going to spend $1,300 on this when a good UPS is a fraction of the price, and (for example) an Anker SOLIX F3800 Plus is $3,200?
Batteries can provide significant savings but for that you need to actually use them fully, either by load-shifting significant loads (if you have enough to fully consume the battery capacity), or just charging/discharging the battery directly into the grid (essentially acting like a grid storage system - charging the battery to full when energy is the cheapest, and dumping it back when it's the most profitable). Even better when you have solar - instead of selling that energy at low feed-in prices, save it in batteries and use it once the sun goes down so (if you have enough battery capacity) you never ever need to actually "buy" any energy from the grid.
I believe the Pila can technically do the above, although its battery capacity is probably too small to ever recoup its purchase price on this type of arbitrage. However, the underlying concept is absolutely workable and profitable with the right equipment.
That's my point, thank you for putting it so succinctly. The front page opens showing the Pila being used for a refrigerator — presumably doing load shifting, given the front page marketing copy I quoted — so I think asking for data showing that this is a legitimate use case is fair.
The win for me is the form factor. It can slot right next to any appliance or utility room shelf. The cost is not bad by comparison to portable battery systems, but portable battery systems fall into two form factors:
1. Garage / basement stacks that have to connect to a generator hook-up: which itself costs kilo-dollars. And what if my garage / utility panel isn't heated? Extreme temp swings can degrade these I'd imagine.
2) carry or roll-away. Which is great for camping or pulling out of the closet during an outage, but that's not convenient and not what I'm looking for
And finally, the UPS-like standby power beats both options as well. The solar generator types don't do passthrough power well (they warn against it) and the garage/basement stacks have to be connected to a cutover switch anyway.
Correct me if I'm wrong nowadays but this product beats both those for these reasons.
The other thing is that rewiring a main panel for generator and/or solar to provide emergency power to a subset of circuits is preferred to simply trying to power everything with a tiny battery pack. This usually means adding a subpanel and an automatic transfer switch, which is a heck of a lot simpler than running extension cords through the house and much more fine-grained than powering everything with backfeed.
I love my Powerwall, but it's not powerful enough to power my HVAC. (Heat pump in a northern climate.) I wish I spent more money on a more powerful one.
The payout I got last year for the virtual power plant was phenomenal. If they continue for a decade or so, the Powerwall will come close to paying for itself.
That being said, when I was a renter, I once went looking for a UPS for my CPAP. I never experienced long outages. (Just the one where the Tesla exec flew into a powerline and died.) I don't think I'd spend $1000 on one of these. Even if I hacked together a solar panel onto one, apartments are so small that it seems like it's overkill.
When was this?
Does it have any power cleaning functionality? I have occasional issues with voltage drop and it and confuses some of my stuff. The input V is out of range and it cannot get it back up to 120V so it ends up just turning off to avoid passing through to the equipment.
And how about any automatic load shedding? I have some which will start turning off outlets based on percent battery left, to power the most important stuff longer.
You also mention moving past the basic lead acid UPS. I can't seem to find it anywhere, are you not using lead acid batteries? Or what are you using? Will I be able to buy a replacement battery up the street at the battery store like I can my current UPSs? Or will I be locked in to buying replacements from you?
Also looks like you have Smart Outlet Strips mentioned, which are only 3 outlets. Any plans for something more substantial? Like 12s? Most places I have UPSs there are many things plugged in and a single 12 would be preferable over multiple.
Automatic load shedding will be configured by appliance priority we were thinking, but open to feedback. The fridge should go out last, the wifi first.
We're using a 1.6kWh LiFePo! Replacement is something we're working hard on, I unfortunately can't speak to that until we're closer to shipping (Q3/Q4).
There are 4 outlets btw - 2 on the front, 2 on the back. Plus 4 USB-C outlets that output 100W DC. 100% we are planning something more substantial (240V is also requested a lot), but we're only launching with 1 SKU that fits a lot of use cases for now.
As soon as the power's going through our inverter, it'll be the clean sine wave you are talking about.
1. Have you considered building a “microgrid interconnection device” to go with this to allow the batteries to backfeed a house in the event of an outage? (This would require native 240V split-phase capability and/or an auto-transformer.)
2. Have you considered removing the fade-in-when-scrolling abomination on your website?
In addition to that you're feeding energy back in through a much smaller wire so you're limited to the capability of the circuit it's connected to and the devices have to be smart enough to actually limit their output to what the wall can handle. Otherwise imagine you have 2 of these each on 1000W circuits (not a normal circuit but for convenience lets pretend) and you have 1500W of load running elsewhere in the house. One runs out of power because it had a lower charge state when power failed, now unless the remaining UPS limits it's output and browns out everything you're pulling 150% the rated power of your circuit, potentially damaging the wires or the loads you're powering.
This is potentially what's causing fires on nVidia's high power connectors, one connection wears out or is simply loose so more power flows through the remaining pins and it's too much for those wires causing fires/melting the wires.
Technically possible, irresponsible, bad advice, and probably won’t work in most scenarios.
First the smaller circuits will trip first, that's where the current is actually flowing, there wouldn't be any actually flowing through the whole house breaker in your idea. The main circuit to your house is 100+ Amps (this would be a tiny old circuit most houses have larger main feeds these days) at least. You'd have to feed at that much through the main disconnect for it to trip.
Second even if you could push that many amps through the main breaker somehow to trip it you'd be feeding it through wires designed for 15-20 amp nominal loads which would cook them.
Well, you'd end up tripping the 15-20 amp breaker protecting those wires first.
The fault current that a breaker is required to be able to interrupt is two orders of magnitude larger than we're talking about feeding into the wire, and a 15 amp breaker is designed to _not_ interrupt a 150 amp load until a second has passed (there's a rating curve for this): some loads might require that much current briefly, and the wire in the wall is not going to overheat in that time (that's why the breaker has the curve that it does: to model and therefore protect the allowable heating of the wiring).
2. Feedback taken hah
I suppose another potential issue would be exceeding the capacity of a panel bus. Balcony solar has the same problem, and I guess no one os likely to connect enough balcony solar units to cause a real problem.
- Some services cannot be switched at the meter ring. This includes services that use a current transformer separate from the meter. (As far as I know, this includes all services over “Class 320”.)
- Some apartments aren’t separately metered. Fortunately, this is rare.
- Some users will want to back up only part of a service.
DER = Distributed Energy Resource ?
SPAN = an energy device company https://www.span.io/ ?
Just had to check the definition of some acronyms and thought others might find the results helpful inline.
How does that work? Is just not putting energy out the input "plug" count as a MID?
When utility power drops, Pila & Powerwall react exactly the same. They both detect the outage, open the MID, and power load downstream of the MID. In the case of Pila it powers loads downstream / plugged into Pila.
That way, three small batteries that only power part of your house would be cheaper than powering your entire house.
Similarly, I hope that Pila can crack localized Peak Shaving, with limited or no cooperation with utilities. I imagine the Pila ecosystem tracking critical dynamic pricing events and take action accordingly. I’m not sure how to get this done with so many North America residential utility companies but I’d love to see them try.
PS, a 100 Watt PV input seems silly. The 1100/1200 watt input via the expansion pack makes much more sense. I can’t help but to think these should be three different components: Pila Base, Pila Expansion, Pila PV
But I don't think you should be setting yourself up against Powerwalls so directly. You're not really competing for the same market. The power storage solution for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls is in fact Powerwalls (or similar) if you have solar panels/want a serious amount of backup power storage.
Your offering is not that. In fact, I can imagine some people with Powerwalls might want to add your product to their house as well, so no point in immediately turning off that 0.3% in your messaging.
Do your batteries need any kind of an internet connection to set up or operate? Assuming I wouldn't want to use the app.
It has a 20 ms switch-over to battery backup. APC UPS' range from 2 - 6 ms.
There is a StackOverflow answer that says the upper limit for servers is 25 ms but 20 ms might be cutting it fine.
https://serverfault.com/questions/564156/what-is-the-interru...
How many people regularly experience power outages (ok, if you're American relying on Canadian electricity, you might have a right to be concerned).
I'm surprised you're not touting the "save on your power bill" benefits. Could this not store power when rates are low, and use the battery when rates are higher, while maintaining a balanced minimum storage amount to ensure power is available should the power go out?
I'd think it could be quite smart about this if you looked at weather patterns and other factors to calculate a likelihood of an outage, and ensured more back-up was available.
From a selling stand-point, isn't saving money every day a better feature than "just in case the electricity goes out"?
Anecdotally in a major city it was rare I would not have a power outage several times a year. In a more rural location now, it's rare I have a month without a power outage, some very extended.
We have a backup generator and it has saved our frozen foods at least a dozen times over the last few years. Installing a backup generator costs about $10k for a whole house permanently installed unit, so it's not a small cost, and the running and maintenance costs are not zero ($5 an hour when running, $100+ a year for parts and consumables)
Does your generator require maintenance? Is it loud?
At ~$600/kWh for capacity, the ROI isn't great. I have a pretty big differential on my rates because I have an EV, and even then I'd need over a decade to make the $1,000 back assuming I fully discharged it every day.
You don't have to go that far. Puerto Rico is a United States territory with a third-world tier power grid. Most Puerto Ricans rely on electric generators and battery backup systems to survive their day-to-day.
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/31/nx-s1-5243984/puerto-rico-pow...
This is bordering a humanitarian crisis and I'm surprised it gets little attention in the mainland. These outages have a real human cost: the elderly struggle with maintaining their generators. Hospitals rely on generators. Roads and sidewalks are in the dark. The haves get diesel delivered; the have-nots struggle. Some, especially the elderly, die in fires or asphyxia due to their constant operation.
https://www.univision.com/local/puerto-rico-wlii/hombre-muer...
https://www.primerahora.com/noticias/policia-tribunales/nota...
A woman died on New Year's Eve due to a fire in her residence while trying to operate a transfer switch. The power was out all night across the island.
https://wapa.tv/noticias/locales/falla-en-planta-el-ctrica-p...
Apologies for derailing, but it bothers me how little attention this gets. The privatized power company has successfully externalized its costs--thousands of Puerto Ricans are going into debt to install solar panels. Half of the island lives under the poverty line.
People are desperate. A year ago, the Dept of Energy established federal incentives for solar panel installations in the island. These were the kilometric lines to get a voucher:
https://www.telemundopr.com/noticias/puerto-rico/cientos-de-...
In short:
a) This is a real problem. Puerto Rico has 3.5 million American citizens, more than some states.
b) Battery backup systems, solar panel installations and generators are a necessity in these areas.
I wish this product was targeted towards lower income families, but any innovation in the space is welcome.
- Power instability causes serious economic damage to individuals, families and small businesses. Imagine establishing a business in an island where you don't know if you'll have power today.
- In PR, you don't buy groceries for an entire month. The power goes out once and all your food is ruined. Families bear the brunt of these reliability failures.
- Outages damage your appliances. This is even more economic damage to families and the poor. A couple years ago, in jest, protesters from across the island took their damaged appliances to the power company headquarters and dropped them off there.
- Diabetics have to use generators or special machines to keep their insulin refrigerated.
I could keep going. It's a shame that this absurdity is happening in the wealthiest country in the world.
Until then, I don't see any hope of meaningful federal support in times of Puerto Rican crisis. Too many Americans are not sure whether Hawaii is a state, or if Rhode Island is an island. The amount of time that PR occupies anyone's thoughts in Real America™ is basically nil. Just like Trinidad, or Turks and Caicos. "Oh, I know someone who took a cruise there. They don't speak English do they?" That's it.
† I also support Puerto Rican self-determination and independence. :) But that path will not bring FEMA, or infrastructure investment.
I already use an Ecoflow as quasi-UPS in my networking closet and one for a chest freezer and its worked great for that. They advertise a ~25ms switch over. I think (could be wrong) they also have features like scheduled tasks to managed recharge/discharge schedules.
Is the main difference between an Ecoflow and this basically the form factor?
The form factor and the potential rugpull in the future when this turns into a subscription and/or a "virtual power plant" where you get the homeowners to pay for the device while the manufacturers sells the aggregated capacity to source/sink power to the highest bidder and keeps the profits. There's a reason these have built-in cellular; you don't put that in (and pay the ongoing data charges) without one.
This thing is too "nice" and polished for its price point, so profits will have to come from somewhere down the line (because they're definitely not making any on the actual device sales).
I had a lead-acid based UPS which I plugged one DSL modem and my cordless telephone base station into the wall which would give me 3 days of modern communications into a power outage, which happens quite frequently in my location. Once my DSL got upgraded to fiber-to-the-node (with a 10x speed increase) my DSL would quit working when the power went out at the node so the UPS wasn't quite worth using anymore.
If it's the former it's nothing new and inconvenient, if it's the latter how do you avoid backfeeding the grid?
Wtf would I care about managing the real time draw from the grid for a tarted up UPS
If I'm right, the copy on the website seems to assume the reader already knows about the whole "charge at night, discharge during the day" thing. Could use some reframing if the target demo is "the 99.7%"
I'm not trying to poo poo the product, just some honest analysis of what it can do and the cost or savings.
I kind of don't really get what having an app for a battery does that just sticking UPSs everywhere doesn't, other than maybe having a better battery.
Also, FWIW, it appears your web page pricing is slightly cheaper per kWh than the Lion, so good on you.
I really wish someone would make something like this for my AC though because that’s the biggest energy draw by far (aside from the EV). A cost effective battery system for the AC system during peak use hours would be very interesting for me.
One 5kWh Pylontech module would cost around 1K too, but that's 5kWh. Plus 500 for an inverter. That would require a couple of wires to be connected, but 5x more power for nearly the same money?
And yes, you can run a heat pump and/or a washing machine on pylontech. I doubt that's possible with these modules.
> When an outage happens, the onboard inverter detects the power loss within 20ms and automatically disconnects from the grid (islanding)
How does this work? Do I need to install anything additional in my grid? Like, how does the fridge "know" that it should now draw power from Pila?
Sorry for my noob questions :D
My one question would be: does it work with home assistant? It would be great to integrate in te energy dashboard.
As an important caveat on solar: if I'm reading correctly, it appears that the main unit only has support for a small amount of solar input directly connected to it (100 W, which makes me suspect it may be using USB PD for input), while larger amounts need the expansion pack, or a separately installed system.
In Europe we have plug-in batteries that just cycle PV every day to lower your electrical bill. But these are usually 2,5kWh or 5kWh.
In Europe you are hard limited to 800watt on a normal plug, no way you can do 2,4kW without a special fuse.
If you add the battery to a 16A circuit then you can theoretically draw 3,8kW + 800watt on it with the battery.
With this Pila battery you could put 3,8kW + 2,4kW on the same circuit!
If you want more than 800watt you can't use a regular plug in your house, it has to be a dedicated circuit.
Love this! I am tentatively interested. I might put down a deposit after a bit more research.
My personal goal is that the software outlives the hardware (and the batteries, inverter should last around 10 years with normal use).
We have no ecosystem or cloud to lock you into yet, because we're new :D
The bigger issue is how many amps the heating system draws. Assuming it's really a furnace that pumps hot water, (as opposed to a boiler that sends steam to radiators) those pumps really do draw a lot of current.
Whats the idle power consumption of the unit itself without devices connected?
I got rid of an old UPS recently that had surprisingly high power draw, and it didnt have any of these advanced features, screen, radios, etc.
It would take several full refrigerators worth of food to make that up, not counting the intangible inconvenience…
We'll be there ASAP!
https://bigbattery.com/products/48v-eg4-powerpro/?srsltid=Af...
I think you have a great shot at being successful. Because the cheaper options, software isn’t great or fully integrated with the hardware.
These systems are a fraction of the cost of powerwall though.
I learned a lot about the DIY side of this from Will Prose on YouTube. It’s amazing how much markup Tesla has on top of LFP batteries.
I guess you could flip the trip switch to isolate the circuit?
Are you planning to charge a monthly fee? I’d be open to that, but it would be nice to not pay for more than the hardware. I.e. build the operating costs into the cost of the initial purchase
This thing is way too "nice" and polished for its relatively low price tag, meaning it's likely being significantly subsidized by investors, who will eventually want a return on their investment and all these promises will go out the window.
Might be suitable for a rack assuming all the cloud bullshit can be turned off.
Insanely cool!
During a recent major weather event outage, a neighbor up the street was running a generator, that I think was not properly islanded. I experienced it by having some devices making weird sounds because they were receiving some low level voltage. They were probably leaking to tens of neighbors and losing generator output in the process.
I think there are two markets for this and I feel like you are already addressing the homeowners. Have you reached out to utilities who are looking to shave peak loads with DER?
Consumers (incl me) will not update their 2nd Pila to their new Wifi password when they change it, or not even pare it properly with their first to start with. Also, in an offline situation like a power outage where the internet goes down, you won't be able to communicate over the cloud and synchronize them there. If our servers ever go down (they won't) then you want to be able to rely on local communication.
The local mesh is going to set up new follower devices over an open MQTT api and talk to each other over it - but yes it's more of an enable than a feature in and of itself.
Why not leverage an existing smart home mesh networking technology? I know the industry has made a hash of the whole Matter/Thread thing, so if the answer is "we didn't like the existing solutions" that's understandable to some extent.
That said, Zigbee seems like an obvious fit here. Adding resilient links to a vendor-agnostic smart home network seems like a selling point to me.
What features will and won't be available in the MQTT interface? Given this product's narrative revolves around resilience in the face of infrastructure failures, I'd hope that the app can use MQTT to provide a complete user experience even when the mothership can't be reached.
Sounds like I just want a LiFePo4 UPS customized...
The retail cost (low end) for lifepo4 batteries is $125/kWh, and for hybrid inverters it's $175/KW, thanks to decades of Wright's Law.
Currently Pila is $625/kWh, but what is stopping it (or clones) from being $200-400/kWh eventually? Their high prices are probably temporary artefacts of (1) lack of current scale, (2) premium due to UI/brand/lack of competition. But markets will catch up.
If the price does drop to that level then it's a big deal because you don't have to pay labor installation costs, which is a large proportion of total costs for end consumers.
The main question I'd have at that point is about electrical and fire safety relative to the standard setup.
It's unfortunately illegal to push energy back into the circuit without a permit in all states except Utah in the US :D
These products are a lifesaver in places where the electric grid is unreliable. Most Puerto Ricans rely on generators and battery backup devices to power their day-to-day life.
1) At the price point, lower-income countries with unreliable grids are not the target audience. If not that, then who? Off-grid wealthy individuals?
2) This app-controlled system MUST work offline. In wide-scale power outages, diesel generators in cell towers die out or get looted fairly quickly. Cable coax repeaters for home internet stop working almost immediately.
This latter scenario must be first in mind. Telecommunications will be gone in give or take 5 days after a large disaster or outage.
As for positive notes: loving the industrial design and battery mesh idea.
Yes, yes, and yes on offline performance! We're on it!
I read your site, watched the video, but I still don't understand why you implemented a mesh network? Why multiple batteries need it to synchronize? Aren't they completely independent? Why would the fridge battery need to communicate with the other battery powering your lights?
Also, as an angel investor, I'm curious to know how much capital you have raised or invested so far?
Thanks.
re: funding, We've not yet made our detailed financing info public, but you can check out crunchbase for some insights on our investors to date!
Two or more Pila batteries (1.6 + 1.6 = 3.2 kWh)
One Pila battery plus a Pila Expansion Pack (1.6 + 1.6 = 3.2 kWh)
- Literally nobody but you (founder) cares about this "mission" to create a battery-backed distributed grid. Regular people don't live in silicon valley talking to VCs and software developers, they don't care about mission statements. If it's a consumer product, please drop the bullshit. (Is your website built this way because VCs told you to? If so, for god's sake please stop listening to them, they are not normal people)
- What exactly is the purpose of this battery? To provide power to a single 15/20A circuit, to power a fridge, tv and microwave for a day? So it's not going to help a multi-day outage. If I buy a dinky solar panel it's going to take forever to charge, assuming there's good weather on the day of the emergency. So really if I wanted to survive multi-day outage, I need a bigger battery. Which Jackery already sells, with solar panels, for cheaper than your unit, in a more portable, easier to move form.
- Why aren't the expansion pack and solar panel listed on the front page?? It's under tech specs?!?!? Is this a VC-focused B2B SaaS pitch panel, or a consumer product? If it's a consumer product, get rid of all these stupid I-have-to-scroll-for-a-week-to-find-information pages, and just show me what you want me to buy, right there at the top of the page, with pictures of happy people using the product in real life. That sells product to consumers. This silicon valley design dreck doesn't. (I just counted... there are 20 pages with virtually no information on the front page. Jesus christ.)
- Now if you had pitched this as a "save on your energy bill" solution, I can totally see buying one or more of these with a solar panel, if you have software that'll pull power from solar alone when the battery is full. Even if it didn't actually save me much money, I'm still stupid enough that I would buy it anyway. But you didn't pitch this... so I'm not buying it.
- What it actually seems most useful for in its current form is people in developing countries with inconsistent power and short brown-outs, but I don't see wide adoption there at this price point.
When you say it is bidirectional, what does that mean? It sounds like it means backfeeding into the wall outlet, but I dont think that can be right.
I am also missing how this is different from other inline device battery backups that have been around for decades and cost 20% the price. Is it that it has a built in DC charge controller for an optional solar panel?
Overall, This seems like a tough space to carve out a niche. It seems like the product is trying to position between whole house batteries ( powerwall), multi-purpose power stations (ecoflow), and generic outlet battery backups. As an outside observer reading your website, it wasnt immediately obvious how this solution is better than any of those in their respective domain, or how its own domain is different.
Edit: Maybe I misunderstand the solar charging? How does this work? Does it charge from AC outlet during solar production? Is this managed with a timer, or other smart connections to the solar inverter, ect?
On bidirectionality: Yep this would involve backfeeding an outlet - It's new here in the U.S. but not unprecedented. Plug-in "Balcony Solar" systems have taken Germany by storm in recent years, and Utah just passed the first bill in the US (HB340) to allow plug-in solar panels to export to the grid. Pretty cool to see new these options emerge for renters. There's still work to do to take this to mainstream and get all jurisdictions, utilities, and equipment manufacturers aligned on final standards but I'm optimistic.
On solar: You've got 2 options -- Timed charging with a rooftop system just like how "AC-coupled" batteries like Powerwall work. Or, "DC-coupling" by connecting solar PV panels directly to Pila. If Pila is in your kitchen, running a DC-coupled panel wire may only be practical in a multi-day outage, but for a fridge in the garage it's a relatively easy option.
On differentiation: We're up for the challenge :) - With Powerwall and SPAN (or other home devices like Nest) my take is it's the software and integration value that sets them out ahead. That's where we're really excited to create value and carve our niche. But zooming out, it's a big market, and our goal is to give folks more options to fit their needs, and it's totally going to be the case that simpler portable camping batteries are right for some, and big Powerwall-like batteries are right for others.
Portable camping batteries, generally: More options come out every year, but on the hardware side they're not optimal since most use e-mobility battery chemistries, which are great for delivering high power on demand but wear out fast when cycled daily for home energy use. And since they’re meant to be manually deployed, they’re not always charged and ready when you actually need them—unlike a system that’s always on, managing power in the background without you having to think about it.
Soooo this product ?
I can't see how this product can backfeed to the household circuit safety/legally unless there is some technology I'm not aware of?
How long will this keep a fridge powered?
How are you funded?
Hardware products are capital intensive. The cost of inventory alone can be a killer. The problem with buying a product like this is that an underfunded company can go "poof" inside of a year by quickly getting over its skis and gasping for air (money). And, of course, warranties are only as good as the life of the company.
How much/how was it tested?
Managing power can be dangerous. I get that your experience telegraphs that you are more than qualified for the task. However, established companies invest a non trivial amount of money into products in order to, among other things, ensure they are safe when manufactured and deployed at scale. Heavy abuse with environmental chambers, EMC emissions and susceptibility, as well as corner cases (fridge compressor over-current event, SMPS on a computer exceeding startup currents, etc.) are examples of this. This kind of testing isn't trivial, can take a long time and cost a lot of money. BTW, just going through UL, CE, TUV, etc. testing isn't equivalent to a solid testing program.
EDIT: Sorry, one more question.
What's the power-in/power-out efficiency?
Not through the inverter, but in the power-in -> charge-battery -> battery-power-out cycle.
This alone could negate savings. If each side is ~80%, the plug-to-plug (through the battery) efficiency is only 64%, which means you consume much more energy to deliver the same outcome.
100% agree, must be used and abused to ensure it’s ready for 10yrs. Pila extensively tests their units through multiple accelerated testing schemes.
Plug to plug efficiency is >80%
All of our software and hardware is local-first, and will work without our servers/cloud, without any connection to the outside world. We are a backup company after all :)
How this works is that we broadcast and listen to (pubsub) MQTT topics. You can pare it with Home Assistant in 10 years, we also support Alexa, Home Assistant, Google Assistant, whatever.
My goal is to make our apps and software so good you'll want to use them. But we don't have an ecosystem to lock you into, so we won't. Your hardware belongs to you!
It does not compare to or replace Powerwall and similar backup solutions. It's a UPS with 4 x 120V outlets and some USB ports. It has inputs for a single 100W solar panel.
Looks polished, but I think the marketing department really got carried away with everything on this one.
Some random thoughts:
- I really like the industrial design on your device. The form factor for right above the fridge is exactly what I was envisioning.
- I would love a lower than 20 ms switching time. This is right on the border of might keep your machine on or not. I don't understand why battery backups for hardware have been so stuck and mediocre for so long. Last i checked there was only really one company selling LiFePO for this target. A Pila mini 200-300 Wh with a faster switching time would be amazing and would sell a lot i think if under $300.
- I was hopeful when I first saw this that you had sorted out some way to easily have this run on mains or at least a single circuit. Which i understand would require some level of electrical work but i don't understand why that has to be such a big barrier and why it can't be simplified and standardized enough to the same level as like installing a smart thermostat so even if you are renting it is just a minor inconvenience/cost thing.
- There are significant diminishing returns to the amount of battery backup in my opinion. There is a huge advantage to having any system at all even just a few hundred Wh just to run some lights and charge devices or fridge for a bit. I don't have the data but anecdotally most outages are in the hours range not days range. Still for some reason a HUGE percent of people have absolutely no battery backup at all. And then on the other end full sized power your whole home with no lifestyle adjustments for days systems that costs tens of thousands are equally ridiculous. The sweet spot is a couple kWh in terms of giving you still a lot of flexibility but reasonable prices, oddly to me this seems the most underserved segment.
On my original idea I was thinking of a device similar to your form factor but target squarely at running fridges for ~8-12 hours. Fridge alone won't work for time of use but if you could manufacture this as cheap as possible and make a deal with utilities from the demand response angle and some sort of special time of use deal I think there could be a sweet business. You would have to target specific utilities/regions at a time but if you could get 50k plus units in a region and at under $200 to the consumer I think utilities would be interested.
- Bluetti Elite 200 V2 portable power station: $999, 2073 Wh LiFePO4, 2600 W inverter output (120 V only), 1000 W DC input at 60 V max, Bluetooth & Wi-Fi connectivity to app, 53 lbs [1]
- LiTime 51.2V 100 Ah battery: $999 (includes charger), 5120 Wh LiFePO4, local Bluetooth connectivity to app, 82 lbs [2]
TOTAL: $1,998 for 7.2 kWh = $278 / kWh (before 30% tax credit). Plus tax and a few hundred more for the random bits and bobs.
Here's a video that talks about using the big bulk LiFePO4 battery to extend the power station: [3] This setup can supply 2600 W for about an hour (limited by the Bluetti's inverter and internal battery capacity), or 1000 W average for 7 hours (limited by the Bluetti's DC input). Limited to 120 V loads only, of course.
For me, this made the recent outage smooth sailing, running a few hundred watts average load for furnace / fridge / small conveniences. A friend nearby had pipes freeze and burst ($$$ repair and highly inconvenient) during a 20-hour winter power outage. It was nice to have a longer buffer to get a good night's sleep and know that everything would be fine even if utility power didn't come back quickly!
I think the original poster here is latching on to a basic issue that the consumer-grade UPS companies (APC, CyberPower) are being slow to adopt LiFePO4 batteries. At the same time, the "portable power station" companies (Bluetti, Anker Solix, Ecoflow, etc) have been recklessly marketing that they have UPS functionality, without delivering on that until recently. Be careful if you buy one: many of these portable power stations will not turn back on their AC output unattended if they fully discharge before the utility power comes back on! Just recently, they are starting to roll this out on some models: Bluetti calls this option "System Switch Recovery", and Ecoflow calls it "AC Always On" -- and neither are enabled by default!
And I 100% recognize that I'm in the tiny minority willing to combine these products together to get a lower overall $ / kWh. But maybe you are too :)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCJV9LTB [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DG9BDB36 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ODIF2EfsUA
Even if you have to buy 2.
They look cool, but it would need to be a bit bigger I think to realistically power an appliance like a refrigerator. And also, can you boil a kettle with it?
Yes, you can boil a kettle with it!
Inspired by nature’s own electrical engineers, he stacked metal plates to mimic the organs inside electric eels, transforming a wild phenomenon into a scientific breakthrough.
Like Volta, we’re reimagining energy storage with nature as our guide — building a smarter, more adaptable battery system designed to bring peace of mind, control, and energy savings to every home.”
https://pilaenergy.com/mission#:~:text=Pila%20%20(that%E2%80...
Will the software and schematics be made open if you go out of business or if your acquired and the product is cancelled or ceases being supported.
If I invest in the product I want to know I can fix it if you can’t or won’t.
I’ve had ten power outages in the past six months, one mile from an international airport. I’ve lived through hundreds hours of power outages due to PG&E’s fucking incompetence in the past ten years. You’ll have to judge for yourself whether that justifies my comment - but, if you were a startup considering a 240V outlet on your home battery solution, I’m pointing out an entire category of uses that they may not have considered:
US kitchen countertop equipment that runs at higher power draw when a 240 outlet is available.
As an apartment renter, I have no reasonable solution today for a battery that can cope with my kitchen at all, prior to this one — and if they go 240V, I can upgrade my kitchen appliances, take them with me when I move, and be more resilient to power outages. And if that puts more weight behind the 240V purpose so they eventually offer a model for people’s furnaces, cool beans. I may not be able to convince my landlord to install a Charlie range, but I already have battery backups in every room except my kitchen, so there’s an unmet need that this startup’s a very close fit for already.
Being dismissive about someone’s questions will cause you to overlook potential market niches that have no viable solutions today. Your competitors thank you for your service :)
That should mean there are UPSs already available, although possibly they don't come in small sizes.
Any timeline yet for international distribution?
Parts of Pila's power electronics are already 230~240V capable. We've just launched in the US, and are doing our best to stay focused on excellent support for our home market before expanding. That said, I could see 2026 being the right time for expansion... stay tuned mate!
My well pump is 120V, but I don't keep it in my house. It's in a shed out back built over the well and tank. The shed is not insulated, but does have a 400W space heater plugged into one of these [1] that tries to keep it above freezing in there. I think most of the time it succeeds but it is possible that for a few days a year it might get below freezing for a while.
I have no idea what the humidity is like, or how hot it can get in the summer.
Would the current Pila be OK in that kind of environment?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Farm-Innovators-TC-3-Thermostatically...
This UPS has LFP cells so that is a huge improvement on safety of LiPo but I am still not sure about a large capacity indoor UPS.
Edit: I am not sure why I am attracting so many downvotes.
Great work on the local API first approach. I can't remember the last SmartAppTM device that was local API first and not wholely dependent on some fly-by-night SaaS that requires you to sign-up. Hope we see more of this in the industry. Span is infamous for removing local API control of their panels.
Here's a tiny scooter battery going on fire spontaneously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld00r-tEEJ4
Can we use something other than lithium for home battery backups? Weight isn't really a concern.
how energy efficient is your website? is it really needed to run loads of scripts to display mere text?
Oh wait, that’s $99 to reserve. $999 to purchase! Ouch
I have set up a solar array to charge a couple of LiFePO4 batteries that I use to power a 12V water pump inside a rainwater tank that serves part of our garden. It's similar to a home built NAS using JBoD since I just bought things from different vendors instead of buying a prebuilt system to manage the tasks. I'm building it out to supply lights, heat and cooling so I will be expanding over the summer.
I also bought an EcoFlow Delta 3 Pro or something like that for one of my kids who lives in an apartment in an old building in a large city in tornado alley. They have experienced power outages during storms and since they're working on their PhD right now and teaching classes I figured that backup battery power sufficient to power a refrigerator and a bunch of devices and that functions like a UPS would be handy. I don't have any performance data right now since they just got it this past weekend. It looks like a solid unit and has good specs.
I am in the market for a similar product to use here at our home. I like the whole house systems that are reasonably portable and can be charged from multiple sources. The Pila is interesting. I had considered the Jackery and the EcoFlow product lines but would like to work out how the Pila compares. Do you plan to add comparison graphics to your site so that interested parties can see where you shine and make accurate cost comparisons?
>What recent power outages have you had, and how were you affected?
Here in N Texas we had the Feb 2021 freeze and grid breakdown that lasted several days. I won't dig into the details about how part of it may have been intentionally manipulated to take advantage of knowledge about supply constraints to capture as much money from consumers as possible. Nothing surprises me about the corruption of these grifters running this state any more.
During this period, we did great because I'm kinda data-driven and was able to take notes about outage timing and duration and use that to our advantage so that we never lacked for hot food, water (we're on a private water well), heat (we have a wood-burning fireplace), or light.
I bought a big diesel monster, a 20kW generator/light tower, after all that but haven't done anything to connect it to my house panel yet. It is handy as pockets on a shirt for doing things out on the property though. I can pull it out to wherever I need power and run all kinds of stuff with it. I may keep it or just set it up to power my shop in emergencies or sell it to one of my dumbass relatives or some local redneck.
The power it produces is not conditioned so I need a way to clean the power if I am to run my workstation or network devices and a simple battery solution like the Pila looks great for this compared to that generator.
Many questions that I had have been answered on this thread or by reading your FAQ or the pages on your site.
I am interested in reserving more than one Pila. I see that they are available in four colors, none of which match the earth-tone palette that I use in my house. Are there plans to add colors or should I invest in rattle-cans and painter tape to help these units blend in?
From your order page where I took an order to checkout I didn't see a way to make a single order that would get me multiple Pilas, all different colors. If you are interested in buying multiple Pilas but don't want all of them to be the same color can you do that in a single reservation order or do you need to make separate orders for each color?
The first photo on your home page shows a Pila on top of a fridge. It looks large and I know the placement is done to illustrate some of the features of the unit and not to show how it would look in real life on my fridge since I can't imagine having that large unit hanging out to the outside door edge. My fridge has a decorative arch in the center that would cover part of the display.
Anyway, that photo started me thinking about the placement of the Pila. A fridge needs air circulation in order to function normally and there are minimum air gap requirements for the sides and top so that it can pull enough air over the cooling coils to be efficient. In the configuration shown in the photo I think that fridge will be struggling since the Pila will be exhausting some heated air as it runs and that won't help the fridge chill things efficiently. The side gaps are too small and the top gap is consumed by the Pila. Mounting it behind the fridge will subject it to all the things that appliance techs love to see - dusty cooling coils, tight spaces with insufficient clearance for airflow, opportunities for water problems, etc.
I think it could be hard to place a big unit like the Pila near a fridge especially if your kitchen has a built=in fridge cabinet since they usually are designed with minimal clearances and all models won't fit. What is the length of the power cord for the Pila?
What is the operating temperature range, and dust and water intrusion rating? I don't see this information in the tech specs. For something that may need to be installed inside a cabinet with limited air flow or behind an appliance like a fridge where you will see significant dust issues and share a cavity with an icemaker line these are useful things to know.
I see a powerstrip in your product line but don't see a way to order one. I like that it appears to use the same app as the Pila battery. It's possible that the unit pictured is renderware though.
Is this available or when will it be available? If someone buys the powerstrip will they need to pair it with a Pila for it to be useful or can they use the app with it to help them monitor power usage by things attached to it? What sets it apart from the plethora of other power strip options that offer more outlets, more connection types, but with a dumber interface?
I use temperature sensors around my property and other places. I noticed that the Pila will work with Home Assistant and in the app photo on your site I see the fridge using temp measurements from a sensor. Will you be producing sensors or is that intended to show that Home Assistant sensors can be used to drive part of the battery backup power usage? My sensors are from SensorPush and they are great. Maybe a partnership could be developed to bundle third party items with a Pila so that the buyer could build a system in one purchase.
In that app example there is power backup information given for multiple rooms. For that example are we seeing how the app looks with multiple Pilas in different rooms or are we seeing how a single Pila can distribute power in the event of a power loss?
Perhaps more info about the app could appear on your site. I know it is probably in a state of flux while you get all this ready but we all know what fluxed up things look like before they get polished for delivery.
One other thing that I did not see on the site is a view of the back of the Pila that would show the outlets, the power cord input, etc. Maybe adding a 360 view would clear that up.
I'll hang up and listen now.
Thanks for sharing your experience re: the Feb 2021 freeze, and cool that you got your kid a big battery for their apartment!
Which color would you like to see next? Sorry none of our current 4 match your palette! Unfortunately, as a capital constrained startup going super broad on colorways/SKUs is not very financially prudent for us, but still curious :)
If you want to hack your way around Shopify's UI for color selection, you can technically hit "checkout" with 1 color, hit back and it'll still be in your cart, then repeat with as many color options as you like until you have all colors/options you're interested in. Sorry for the trouble - we're launching with an off-the-shelf e-commerce solution so as to spend our time on the product itself.
Our temperature, dust and water ratings need to be finalized once we're closer to final shipping product, but we're definitely planning for constrained indoor use, even in a hot summer garage for example. Sorry to not be more specific!
As to the powerstrip, pre-orders are only to signal intent to purchase, and we'll be reaching out to all pre-orders to see who wants solar, expansion and powerstrip before we actually ship! Great question - thank you!
There will be Pila sensors and third party sensors - we integrate directly with them. So more than illustrative! Once the data is in your Home Assistant for example, you can do as you please, of course. Hope that answers your question?
Great point on more app-specific details. We'll showcase more soon!
Thank you for your inputs on showing more of the product angles and the spacial situation - great feedback.
Thanks again, and let me know if I missed anything.
looks at fridge in marketing photo with estimated 2 days of life
Bullshit on that one. A modern day french door fridge will use 1.6 kWh per day. Even more if they have bullshit features.