Buy Your Friends Batteries

toomuchtodo

Great piece and post, love the concept!

Retr0id

> Create a battery birthday club. Buy each friend a battery on their birthday until everyone has one. At that point, wouldn't it be easier if everyone just bought their own? And then whoever has the latest birthday doesn't have to wait a year to get theirs.

Apreche

Anyone who can afford to own a home can afford their batteries and doesn’t need gifts. Renters are not allowed to modify their home in such a way.

well_ackshually

>sixteen people contribute €100 each; yeah sure everyone has 100€ to spend on friends, at least once a month. What kind of reality does he live in ?

isoprophlex

> You are also safer during a power outage. The STREAM 5000 provides up to 3 kW of off-grid output. Keep essential devices on its backup output and reserve some battery capacity, and your refrigerator, lights, router, and laptop can keep running when the grid goes down. An ordinary grid connection does not back up the whole house automatically; the backup output must be configured correctly. Being able to cut over your entire house from grid power to a battery requires an invasive, expensive change to most connections. I wish people would stop breathlessly promoting batteries (which are good! we need decentralized storage!) because "you can use them to run your fridge, router, etc". Yes you can, but for almost all consumers it's an order of magnitude more effort and cash compared to just buying and plugging in a battery.

or_am_i

How does 12 years required for this scheme to pay for itself stack up against the typical house battery's lifetime?

jerlam

> 2. Confirm that their home, meter, and electricity contract are compatible. This seems like the hardest step. The costs of "just a battery" are much lower by comparison.

archydeb

And if you’re in the UK, wire them up to Axle Energy (plug-in batteries aren’t actually legal here yet, but likely to become so next year!)

mindslight

Call me old fashioned, but I just bring a can of gasoline and a pile of super soakers. While I do like the idea in theory, I don't love the inherent nudge towards off the shelf productized energy storage that will be placed somewhere without much of a plan, and then basically invites rewiring with extension cords. I get how those things are appealing for camping or determined apartment DIYers at the like, but moving them from a seek-them-out "pull" dynamic to a here-you-go "push" dynamic seems like asking for problems from people not thinking too much about storing 5kWh.

Tepix

> €1,600 for 5 kWh Those prices are high. You can get 2.56kWh for 270€ on Aliexpress, delivered locally from Germany.

thraway3837

You don't really need this, if you have an EV with V2X technology. There's already charging products that work seamlessly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0WGl_U5azs and you have 100kWh of capacity, so you could sit out an outage for a long time. You can also configure the % cut off for the EV, so you still have enough left to drive if you need to leave. EV battery degradation from this use case is irrelevant. EVs are consistently hitting 300,000 miles with 90% capacity, so let's not belabor this point.

ortusdux

This is what government subsidies/rebates are for - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49298910 Gift should be ... gifts

sailfast

The 12 year payoff IF you manage the arbitrage properly really made me wonder why on earth you would buy one of these. I want one, yes. But it sure as hell wouldn't be to save money. It'd be to have something if and when the grid falls over due to negligence.

balderdash

11-13yr payback on something that is going to degrade ~3-4%/yr for 10 years (and limited terminal value) doesn't seem like the greatest investment unless you think the arb is going to widen a ton.

scaredreally

At my mother's workplace, there was a group of coworkers who each donated an amount of money per paycheck. Each paycheck, one coworker would get the lump sum that was collected for that paycheck. Similar concept to the one described here. They called it "susu" or something to that effect. If I remember correctly, it got messy when people would leave the workplace or when, occasionally, someone would get robbed on the way home.

kortzeus

The only downside is that the battery won't last 11 years with daily usage

hypfer

A Marstek Venus A 2.12kWh expansion module currently costs 180€ with a bunch of special aliexpress discounts. The whole system is.. not great, but it's even cheaper to have a battery than this post makes it sound.

tristor

This is interesting, but is 3kW enough to be useful? What is the latest when it comes to home batteries? Has management gotten better to be smarter?

SubiculumCode

People don't tend to buy people large furniture because it's rude to assume that theyll want to keep something large and relatively permanent, much less something that requires an electrician to install.