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Plug-in solar is coming. Plug-in batteries should follow
- slackfan 3mo agoThis will lead to some new and exciting ways of starting a housefire.
- kibwen 3mo agoWhile the potential for fires shouldn't be dismissed, for batteries designed to be stationary rather than mobile (such as in an e-bike), you can use a chemistry optimized for stability rather than optimizing for compact weight and size.
- alexjurkiewicz 3mo agoHow many houses in Britain have wiring that is less than 800 W away from starting a fire? How many of those houses have the disposable income to buy a plug in battery? Yes, more electricity means more risk of fire. But 800W batteries do not seem like a major safety issue
- xbmcuser 3mo agoThe new sodium batteries are a lot safer than the lithium chemistries. And we already do have type of home batteries they are just called UPS systems. The real game changer will be when 3-5kwh plugin batteries fall below $150-200pkwh as at those prices batteries will make sense even for apartment owners/renters with no solar to use it to demand shift as time of day electricity prices get more common.
- hkt 3mo agoWhy that number in particular? Are you thinking of payback period of something else?
- xbmcuser 3mo agoYes payback period batteries as at those prices payback period falls below 5 years with just 4-5c arbitrage so even if you don't have solar like most apartments it is still useful. And the price is low enough that it can be made mandatory for all new home construction without inflating home prices.
- vvbull 3mo agoThe problem isn't the battery catching fire, it's that you no longer have a circuit breaker between your appliances and the generator. Meaning you could, especially if you have several batteries, push load through wires in the wall in excess of what is rated for.
- gambiting 3mo agoMaybe you don't know this, but in the UK every single appliance has its own individual fuse right inside the plug.
- angry_octet 3mo agoYou can have multiple loads and sources that are in-spec but the wiring between them is overloaded.
- gambiting 3mo agoSure, but now we're talking about some freak situation where you have multiple sources with a combined allowed load of more than 32amps with 3 or more connected devices drawing at their max rating or above, but only when on battery power when you have no grid connection. Like, it could happen but we're entering the "fun to think about" territory.
- reenorap 3mo agoWhy bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0). This is California. California has spent decades convincing people to convert to solar panels and EVs and now that many have switched, they doubled electricity prices and told us not to charge when it’s too hot. Now they want solar panel owners to pay a surcharge for “connecting to the grid”, upwards of $100/month or more than my actual solar bill. It’s all a scam.
- thelastgallon 3mo agoCompletely agree with you, Govts sacred duty is to protect the super rich and utilities are the biggest monopolized cash cows (Eg: Warren Buffet). However,if people work with their local governments and change the building code to allow plug-in solar and plug-in batteries, that will continuously upgrade every home to become more and more energy independent and with the explosion of products, eventually be grid free. The biggest costs are labor, permits and delays; if its just products that people can plug and play, the adoption will be faster than just rooftop solar (or rooftop + batteries). Also, most utilities have tiered rates (higher utilization at higher rates), if you can have plug in systems that can bring the total kwh down, it immediately lowers the peak rate. The only bottleneck is making products that are safe to plug in, and this will happen as building code creates a standard to plug-in.
- alwa 3mo agoSo… @lazide replied with a hahaha. It got flagged to death, understandably. If it were anybody but @lazide I’d have flagged it too, but… I can’t help but grimace and nod. To hazard a loosely-informed guess at their subtext… and politely ignoring your opening salvo of calorie-free populism… I’m not speaking from a place of certainty, but my impression is that there seem to be elements of “not even wrong” here. Some contra- lines of argument: * code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action; * individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations; * the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage; * the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere? * the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market; * one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch; * Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too; * building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is… I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove! I love your sense of empowerment; I’d encourage you to bring it to bear at a scale where it matters— much bigger than a home, much smaller than a whole polity… I think there are benefits to decentralization and to independence but I don’t think those are the benefits you’re emphasizing here.
- wang_li 3mo agoIf one is not modifying the house wiring how does this prevent backflow into the grid? Does it shutdown completely on power loss from the mains?
- eleventen 3mo agoThe standard governing this is UL 1741 in the US or VDE-AR-N 4105 in the EU. both require certified inverters to detect grid loss and immediately cut off.
- wang_li 3mo agoSo these plug in batteries are only functioning as "time shift" of power usage, but not as a mechanism to go supply standby power to the house?
- trial3 3mo agoyeah, it’s called anti-islanding. UL 3700 is the thing to look at if you want to read more about some of the safety precautions
- lukeify 3mo agoI can’t help feel without ampacity and voltage upgrades to most domestic home circuits this is like a fart in the wind.
- NavinF 3mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141066
- cyberax 3mo agoWhy? Just make it possible to buy "shares" in a larger battery bank, if you must. Home batteries make total sense for off-grid systems or as a backup power source. But plug-in batteries are not designed to do either.
- AndrewDucker 3mo agoBecause there are not enough of these large battery banks, which require planning permission to build. Whereas you can buy a battery that will save you money over a 5 year period and get on with it. (I'm hoping that enough of the larger ones get built that having one yourself doesn't make economic sense, but I suspect we're ten years out from that)
- luxuryballs 3mo agoWild that we have to ask permission to be able to make this stuff.
- Aurornis 3mo agoNot really. If it was off grid it wouldn’t be a problem, but connecting to the grid requires that all of the power generating equipment get along and operate safely. Anything that starts getting into shared territory requires regulations. Similar to how wireless equipment needs to comply with regulations so we can use the frequency spectrum.
- dghlsakjg 3mo agoThe power grid has the potential to be insanely dangerous. We largely have eliminated that danger because of tight regulations and codes. Look up backfeeding, which is a huge concern with this stuff. It is entirely possible for anyone sharing a transformer with you to send power back up the lines to your house in a dangerous way. That’s why you shouldn’t just plug a generator in with a suicide plug when the power’s out. A grid tied battery without the right protections is electrically identical to a generator with a suicide plug. We want some standards here.
- luxuryballs 3mo agoThanks for clarifying this, clearly I did not read enough into the details.
- guidedlight 3mo agoI thought plug-in solar was coming 10+ years ago.
- internetter 3mo agoMillions of households have plug-in solar. The payoff is something like 1.5-5 years. Of course, this should be tens or hundreds of millions, but this isn’t vaporware
- gambiting 3mo agoIt's already been a thing for a long time. People in the UK are talking about it more because it's about to be legalized(up to 800W) by the end of August.
- pudgywalsh 3mo agoWhat was the breaking point for modern British society where housing unwieldy and potentially hazardous electrical equipment in your living room seems like a completely normal and just thing to do?
- slyall 3mo agoI guess you've never come across electric heaters or if you want to go into the bedroom electric blankets ( 5000 fires per year in the UK in 2011 )
- hkt 3mo agoPresumably it helps that these things have their own fire suppression systems, time of use tariffs are cheap, and everybody needs a win. (I'll be putting mine outside)
- tempestn 3mo agoI assume plug-in batteries are considerably more workable in the UK on 240V, since they could charge and deploy at double the rate of a plug-in system here. Of course 240V plugs exist in North America, but they're generally only installed for dryers, ranges, and EV chargers, so people don't tend to have one just free.
- NavinF 3mo agoWhat percentage of buyers do you imagine are gonna buy a battery big enough to saturate 15A*120V=1800W for long? The average home uses 30 kWh per day = 1250W. Batteries don't need to handle peak load. Approximately nobody has a whole home UPS. Also 240V power strips are fairly common in my circles because GPU server PSUs tend to be more efficient at 240V. They're marketed as PDUs, not strips. You're not gonna install a new outlet for every server. One dryer outlet in the garage is enough for most people
- tempestn 3mo agoI'm not clear what point you're making about PDUs. Re 120V outlets, while batteries don't need to supply the full peak load, they are more effective the more of it they can supply. And a home with a heat pump or baseboard heaters, electric range, EV charger, or dryer for example is going to at times significantly exceed the capacity of the 120/15 outlet. Doesn't mean the battery would be useless, just that it wouldn't be as effective at its primary purpose of load shifting as a 240V system, and therefore less economical.
- NavinF 3mo agoMy point about PDUs is that "people don't tend to have one just free" is irrelevant. It's easy to split a 240V outlet into multiple outlets. One of them can be used to inject power. The copper doesn't care which way the electrons go. Heat pumps and baseboard heaters are pretty uncommon in the US. Natgas furnaces are nearly 100% efficient so I don't expect that to change any time soon
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- chris222 3mo agoBluetti already has a product for this available in the EU. I have been posting eveywhere that they need to bring it to the US. https://www.bluettipower.eu/products/balco-transfer-hub https://www.bluettipower.eu/products/balco-transfer-hub Balcony solar without storage is actually pretty dumb when we already have integrated battery/inverter/solar mppt units available for a few hundred dollars. All we need to do is have something like this hub inbetween to ensure grid isolation when an outage occurs. For crticial loads you would just plug those directly into the all in one battery unit. Almost all of them these day also have a <20ms UPS pass through function as well. When the grid goes down it can isolate the battery from backfeeding the house but the solar will still function and the critical loads will still function. With a solution like Pila is developing you could even use your homes wiring to transfer power (~1kW) around multiple small battery units (attached to independent circuits) each with some different critical loads and solar attached to them.
- My_Name 3mo ago"the battery pays back from around 2.5 years onwards" So around 1000 charge/discharge cycles? That is roughly the ability of a battery. By the time you break even, it's time to spend again.
- protimewaster 3mo agoI assume these would be batteries that are relatively robust in terms of cycle count, like LiFePO4.
- 0xR1CK 3mo agoLiFePO4 batteries generally sit upwards of 3000-8000 cycles to 80 percent original charge.... Depends on what your chemistry is. As the batteries improve, you'll probably want to upgrade every 8-10 years or add/swap out a 1/4 to 1/2 storage by that time, still able to use effectively even if a little lower top end. Depends on your usage and if you're still on grid.
- My_Name 3mo agoThat's god to know, I don't know why I was assuming they were Lithium ion...
- jauntywundrkind 3mo agoLithium irons are often 4000 cycle now. For full cycles. I forget who but I really want to say I was looking at some cells a year or three ago that were 10k cycle count. And it's not like the battery is worthless at that point. It just means the battery is down to 80% max capacity. You can down cycle it, find some other consumer to use it, replace it, if you need the capacity. But should keep running for a long time.
- shusaku 3mo agoAs someone with a poor background in electrical engineering, this is really cool. It’s amazing that you guys can make something like this work.
- yhcehb38r 3mo agoUK-based reader here. Homeowner, with no solar or battery, but interested in getting some decent, independent advice, how would I go about it? We are a two EV household, with oil central heating. Don’t mind paying for solid unbiased advice.
- jonatron 3mo agoCan give free advice, contact in profile
- satiric 3mo agoPlugs and sockets have the wrong gender for this. On the battery, you'd have a male plug with live 240v contacts, ready to short against anything, or anyone, that's conductive. This is the same reason why male-to-male extension cords are labeled "suicide cords".
- gambiting 3mo agoWell, yes generally speaking. But the way this works with these plug in panels is that the micro inverter won't actually start delivering power to the grid in the absence of an energised plug in the first place. So just sitting there, the contacts are completely harmless. Obviously actual physical safety where you literally can't touch the contacts would be better.
- satiric 3mo agoHow do you detect that it's plugged in? Just detecting voltage would mean that you'd unplug it and it would stay energized, right?
- hnaccount_rng 3mo agoThey need the grid frequency to generate AC. Those inverters are only allowed to be grid-following (at least for the plug-in part. I think there are systems that provide a -to-load socket that can be a PSU)
- satiric 3mo agoAh I see, thanks.
- hkt 3mo agoI've been following this for a while: Regen have a beautifully designed product. The idea that people need to be able to access time of use tariffs in a way that yields lower energy costs makes a lot of sense. But this is about energy costs rather than infrastructure, and the actual problem is that products like this are a) a bit scary to have indoors and b) a hack to compensate for deficiencies in the UK energy market. I'm also a member of the lovely https://kirkhillcoop.org/ https://kirkhillcoop.org/ - an energy coop. I own around 1kW of potential overall production from a number of pretty big turbines in southern Scotland, for which I paid around £1k. The benefit to me is I pay opex cost for energy according to the performance of that farm. I believe this is projected at around 5p per kWh - we're getting our first payouts this year. The coop model means I don't need anything in my house. It is also, sadly, not accessible because of companies like Ripple Energy collapsing. They facilitated the coop being started in the first place. No more of them can be founded. Starting these things in the first place was just too hard and too slow. Whereas batteries.. are an incentive to use domestic headroom to balance the grid at considerably lower costs than if a commercial operator did it. High costs generally mean time of use tariffs give an incentive to people to do what ought to be grid scale investments, but there's the problem: the only way individuals can capture the benefits of grid scale investment is via specially designed shareholdings in those investments. Nobody is offering that chance now that ripple is gone. Buy shares in companies operating wind turbines, or retail energy suppliers, and your gains are so much worse than with a Ripple co-op like Kirk Hill. They're worse than a battery, too. I'll be getting a plug in battery when the time comes, but it is truly insane that I have to personally take on that responsibility to feel the benefit, and that there is no easy route to buying at grid scale. Ripple were a very brief oddity I'll derive a small benefit from for a long time, but now they're gone, and all we have instead is the prospect of storing pretty scary substances in our homes instead, on time of use tariffs which also don't let us reap the full benefit from our investment. It sucks. Cooperativism and mutualism would be a nicer alternative.
- Animats 3mo agoThere are several variations on this idea, and the web sites are confusing. First, there are ones that are just a big UPS. You plug them into the wall, and plug loads into them. They may try to level your power usage. No problem with that. Good for refrigerators. That seems to be what "Pila" is selling. This class of device seems to come with deceptive ads which do not show cords from loads plugged into the box. Then there are ones that purport to pump power back into their wall outlet. That has safety issues, starting with its male power plug being an output. It can't provide power when there's no input power, because it would try to drive the the whole grid during an outage. It's mostly for taking advantage of variable power pricing. This seems to be what "Regen" is selling. These are apparently available in Germany, but must be installed on their own dedicated circuit, so you don't have a load and a source on the same side of the breaker. Otherwise, you could potentially have an overload without a breaker trip. Regen is trying to get them into the UK, but old UK ring main wiring is a bad match to this. Gotta have a breaker between load and source. The trouble with these things is that, plugged into the wrong outlet, they create a gap in overload protection that won't show up until something goes wrong.
- hnaccount_rng 3mo agoThat’s largely correct but misses the point that the battery+pv system is legally only allowed to feed in 800W [1]. On our circuits you can draw ~3.5kW without tripping the breaker. This brings you to 4.3kW max load, which - as far as I understand - is still what all the circuitry must be rated for anyways. The downside is that we have three phase power supply anywhere halfway recent. And that only gives you a single phase. In _most_ cases that’s fine, because you get a net-sum of all three phases at the meter, but technically you are only drawing/supplementing one out of three phases. In practice this likely doesn’t matter since different house put theirs on different phases and it all washes out. [1] the DC side can have up to 2kW of panels. But that’s not visible to the grid
- Animats 3mo agoHome electrical load safety is based on distribution being a tree, with a breaker for each branch. The branch breaker will trip if there's an overload on that branch. Outlet strips with their own circuit breakers are sub-branches. This is all worked out in the US under the National Electrical Code, so that you can't overload a branch circuit without tripping a breaker. The UK uses BS 7671, which has the same goals but different topology. Residential users don't have to do load calculations or make measurements. This thing breaks the simplified rules that make home electrical safety work. The obvious way to get into trouble with this is to plug in two of them on a circuit with heavy loads. Now you have a big source and a big load without a breaker between them. Germany gets this, and requires that a licensed electrician add up the loads, check the topology, and do the install. One way to make this work safely would be to require a special symmetrical connector, with both sides protected against touch. That has to be on its own branch circuit, with a breaker between it and any loads. That becomes a legit place to plug in source devices. This is essentially the same as having a dryer or A/C outlet installed.
- kazinator 3mo agoIf "everyone" uses plug-in batteries, the peak demand curve will be flattened and the utility companies will likewise flatten the rate. Then there goes the arbitrage; everyone is left with just an expensive piece of emergency equipment for blackouts.
- vvbull 3mo agoWhat happens when a consumer buys three and sticks them on the same 20 amp circuit? Cause people will definitely do that. Going to be some warm walls.
- jonatron 3mo ago[dead]
- angry_octet 3mo ago800W peak * 3 is only 2400W which is fine, it's very unlikely to be pumping out that for long. Now if you put in 6 of them you will have problems, but this is the same problem as people plugging in multiple loads, and circuit breakers handle this fine in practice. Perhaps the bigger risk is a mix of loads and supplies on the same circuit, which could result in large currents on runs without a circuit breaker. Cheap extension cords are are possible problem too. Arguably the plug in PV should have to talk to a house bus controller, which controls generation and loads. Unfortunately the standardisation process is impossible.
- vvbull 3mo agoRight. The problem is the kitchen outlets or some other heavily loaded circuit. Running the microwave and kettle and fridge. And powering via these plus the wall. Or putting three of these on an extension cord.
- angry_octet 3mo agoWhere do PVs work best? Since you can't put them on the roof, out in the back yard. So you run a long extension cord and plug them into a power board. Or in an apartment, there might be one circuit with an outside outlet, so they all plug into that. Usually it isn't sunny enough and the load on the circuit isn't large enough, so the wiring will be fine. But sometimes it won't be. It's amazing that we actually have an IOT use case and the resistance to networking equipment is profound.
- jonatron 3mo agoI don't see the point in panels without a battery, so I'm looking at a DIY system. RCBO for new circuit = £20, 5.12kWh battery = £700, ~3kW hybrid inverter from eBay ~=£400, Panels ~= £100 each. I'm not the including cost of a registered electrician for a new circuit in my case.
- danmaz74 3mo agoThe plug in "balcony panels" are usually limited to 800W here in Europe, so having them without a battery can make sense because you're probably going to use that power on the spot most of the time.
- apexalpha 3mo agoWe've had these for years? My brother has two solar panels on his balcony and plugged into a normal socket.
- benj111 3mo agoI think the move to allow plug in solar is good, but its just a sticking plaster over the issue. And that is rental houses not having solar, or much of anything. In the 60s many houses only got indoor toilets because the government forced the issue. Maybe we should be doing the same for insulation, energy efficiency and solar panels. This goes double for social housing. Poor people can't borrow money as cheaply as the government, so we're left giving money to people to pay their electricity bill. Why not put solar power on their rooves instead. This can be counterbalanced if needed by taking money from the benefits, so it pays for itself.
- ghusto 3mo agoWe already have several plug-in batteries? Simple search: https://www.ecohome.net/en/guides/4189/best-plug-and-play-home-battery-backup-systems-for-2026/ https://www.ecohome.net/en/guides/4189/best-plug-and-play-ho...