Depending on where you live in the US, electrical outages can be anything from a rare occurrence to near certainty. While some only last a few minutes or hours, longer ones can end up spoiling everything in your fridge and lead to an uncomfortable day or two with no air-conditioning or fans. Backup by BioLite is a new home backup battery launched by electronics company BioLite that makes it easy to install your own redundancy before the next storm or power outage.
The solution provides up to a claimed 60 hours of backup and is meant to power a homeowner’s most important devices (like a refrigerator, fans, computers, etc.) instead of backing up the entire house.
The concept works like a modern take on a UPS, or uninterrupted power supply. To put it simply, it’s a big LiFePO4 battery in a sleek-looking shell that charges itself from the grid in your home and then feeds that power back out to your most important devices when it senses that the power has gone out.
There are multiple versions of the product that offer different capacities. The 3 kWh Backup Complete is the full monty, and it includes both the main 1.5 kWh Core unit and a 1.5 kWh Extend panel to add even more energy storage. Alternatively, a 1.5 kWh Core unit can be run independently or connected to up to five more Extend panels for the largest energy storage capacity.
The system can output 1,800W continuously and surges up to 3,000W peak.
You can get a better idea of how it works in the overview video below.
One of the main advantages of the system isn’t just its lower cost, but also the ability to be installed by the homeowner instead of needing an electrician to wire it into the house. The device simply plugs into a wall outlet and runs independently of the house, meaning it doesn’t need to be tied into the home’s grid.
“Traditional home backup power typically costs upwards of $15,000 and can take months of coordination with contractors and electricians to install,” shares CEO and Co-Founder, Jonathan Cedar. He continues, “Backup by BioLite offers homeowners and renters alike a more affordable alternative that they can install themselves in under an hour and build resiliency back into their home.”
Compared to more expensive systems, the promotional pre-order prices for BioLite’s 1.5 kWh and 3 kWh systems start at US $1,299 and $1,999, respectively.
The backup system has now launched for pre-order on Kickstarter. Yep, Kickstarter.
Electrek’s Take
First, to address the Kickstarter-shaped elephant in the room. My regular readers will know that I rarely cover Kickstarters or other crowdfunding campaigns, and only make an exception under one of two cases. Either I’ve been able to test the product myself in advance, or it’s coming from a well-established company with a good standing record for delivering products. In this case, it’s the second. I’ve tested several products from BioLite before, and the company has a long reputation in the energy storage and electronics industry. This is also the company’s fifth Kickstarter campaign, with the last four all going quite well.
Top comment by Pete Za
For the cheapskate DIYers like me in the audience, where style isn't your number one priority, I recommend finding an old UPS that someone is throwing away because the battery died and swapping in a 12.8V LiFePO4 battery. More often than not, the UPS circuitry is perfectly functional, it's the junk 12V SLA battery that is causing the whole unit to become landfill material. They make 12.8V LiFePO4 batteries that fit in the normal desktop style UPS form factor for pretty cheap, and are designed to be drop in replacements for sealed lead acids. I've replaced the batteries in a couple of UPSes as well as my garage door opener that has battery backup built in, and they are all going strong 2-3 years later.
But to take it one step further, it's not difficult to extend the battery connection wires out of the small UPS case and connect them to a bigger LiFePO4 battery. A single $150-$200 12.8V 100AH battery + free/used UPS will run a fridge, fan, CPAP machine, etc. for quite a while when the power is out. And when the power comes back online, the device will just charge the battery back up. For less than $500, you could build something roughly equivalent in functionality to this product, but of course it's going to be less stylish. 🙂
This isn’t some fly-by-night startup trying to raise the cash to make their oddball idea a reality; this is a company that knows how to build electronics and has been doing it for a while.
That being said, crowdfunding inherently always comes with risks (even when it’s being leveraged largely for marketing purposes), and there’s no guarantee these things will ever get delivered, so proceed accordingly.
Even so, I can absolutely see the need for a product like this. Whole-home backup systems are great, but most people don’t need everything in their home to be powered. In the case of a sudden storm or other outages that last for a day or two, just being able to prevent all the things in your fridge from spoiling is a nice benefit, as well as being able to charge up your phones or run some cooling fans. So I can definitely see the benefit of a simple, easy-to-install system like this.
Sure, it’s largely a modern repacking of a conventional UPS, but it’s a pretty slickly done repackaging that looks like it benefits from BioLite’s experience and brand reputation.
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