That video's conclusion is misleading - he's only shifting his fridge's energy consumption. That's not actually much in the grand scheme of things - it's a well-insulated box that is already a thermal battery. In fact, he only discharged his power bank to 64% at the end of the day, so he didn't even use up his full capacity (that he paid for and is factored in his spreadsheet).
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.
> 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.
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.
It definitely does load shifting and utility rate arbitrage (and solar power charging) as a side benefit, but it’s not built to be an arbitrage machine. Its primary use case is backup, for now.
I've used gas and portable "solar/battery" backup generators and UPS systems.
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.
Absolutely true, yes. I mentioned UPSs to represent the low-end of the UPS/power station/generator spectrum, with the Anker SOLIX F3800 Plus at the higher-end (which costs only 2.6 Pikas). The video I linked to does a solid job of evaluating the pointlessness of using a more comparable $500 1.8kW Anker SOLIX C1000 for the same use case Pika is pushing, which is what prompted my skepticism.
That conclusion all depends on how much extra power the UPS uses while acting as a pass-through. I think the SOLIX doesn't directly pass through the power so it's having the inefficiencies of conversion to and from AC-DC-AC, maybe this version has a more efficient pass-through system?
What's the draw of all your software to serve the app etc? That might still might drive it to be net negative for your energy costs depending on how much higher the peak rate is than your base rate.
I bought lights-out manageable 400 lbs (lots of kWh) of rack mounted sealed lead acid batteries in the form of UPSes with expansions for less than $600.
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.
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?