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Discussion (122 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
I love the spirit behind this but it's strange advice. I consider myself lucky to have a healthy roster of adult friends, and I still think getting 16 of them to spend significant money on each other's birthday would be a big ask to pull off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanda_(informal_loan_club)
You may not have £100,000 but if you get 1000 people with £100 then you can buy a house.
Obviously the birthday system doesnt address the interest, but I'm sure your friends would be ok paying interest right?
Reinventing building societies seems very cool to me -- it's a little more nuanced than the birthday thing, but it's a system that can work with assets that generate value.
https://solarunitedneighbors.org/
https://www.brightsaver.org/
Europe has quote a bit of renewable generation currently that is curtailing or otherwise going unused, and needs all of the battery energy storage it can get (residential, commercial, utility scale) to convert curtailment into realized clean energy offsetting potential fossil energy usage (gas and coal).
Solar Power Is So Big in Europe That Electricity Is Being Wasted - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-13/europe-so... | https://archive.today/nAdiA - May 12th, 2026
> Hundreds of millions of solar panels have been installed in Europe, turning solar into the region's biggest source of power during summer months, but the system around it hasn't kept up. A record amount of electricity is being wasted because grids can't handle the surge in output, with about 40 terawatt-hours of electricity expected to go to waste in the coming months. The glut of solar power is pushing power prices deep below zero during peak solar hours, eroding returns for producers and forcing them to shut down plants, with consumers potentially paying twice for the subsidies and compensation.
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.
And, sure: I can get by very well with refrigeration, networking, computing and/or TV, and lights during a power outage. But those loads need to be segregated, or it just doesn't work. That adds more expense.
And since those segregated loads don't even come anywhere near 3kW, it isn't clear to me how I'm to be maximizing my local use of surplus power events.
There are grid-interactive battery solutions from companies like EG4 that can go betwixt the entire house and its grid connection, but this isn't it.
If things aren't segregated and the power goes off while I'm cooking, the aircon is running, the water heater is doing its thing, or whatever, then: I exceed 3kW.
3kW is the maximum that the device can supply. If load exceeds maximum, then something will (must) fail.
Hopefully it fails gracefully, but I mean: I've been married before and I understand how terrific and fantastic it can be when things go slightly wrong at home when I'm not around to address them. The less Rube Goldberg my creations are, the more peaceful my life is.
(None of this modern name-brand grid-tied stuff is any particular danger to linemen. It won't output anything on those terminals if it doesn't have an AC waveform to synchronize with.)
That duration was tough for various reasons, but fridge and freezer were not really an issue.
I was very happy when they changed to 2 hour outages (albeit twice as many), and then even happier with not having load shedding for about 2 years now.
[1] About 96 hours, major storm took down a ton of trees through the whole metro area that took days to clear.
Also, according to the article, it seems to pay itself back in 11-12 years. I'd rather pay the little extra to not have a huge lithium battery in our appartment that cannot be extinguished with a normal fire extinguisher if it decides to ignite itself.
The Stream system: Connect the device to the grid to enable it to feed power into the grid or draw power from it when solar energy is insufficient. This can be done via a standard home outlet (if permitted), or through a circuit breaker. [0]
0. https://manuals.ecoflow.com/us/product/stream-ultra?lang=en_...
There's a pretty massive middle ground between "plug in a battery" and "rewire the house.
it's the easiest, safest , most affordable and most reliable emergency solution ever available.
Running HVAC is usually more of a concern, especially in winter or peak of summer, and those aren't device that you can hot-plug, and a small battery wouldn't help there anyway.
I like the idea of whole-house batteries, but to really make it practical you're talking about thousands of dollars to the battery, install, etc. And you still don't have extensive run time, which is why I think you see most people still leaning towards permanent or portable generators way more than batteries.
But I would advocate that "zero resiliency" needs to be seen as being socially irresponsible. It is socially irresponsible that as soon as a service goes out that you are immediately in an emergency. You should not offload basic resiliency on to emergency services. Yes, if you take a direct hit from a tornado you're going to be leaning on emergency services, but the house a quarter mile from touchdown that may be out for three or four days needs to be able to deal with that. If nothing else, emergency supplies are a lot cheaper when it's not an emergency.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and especially so when perfect is so much more expensive and so much less relevant than the good.
What other option is easier or more affordable? A generator has to remain outside, so it needs panel connection ($$) , lots of extensions ( $, hassle), needs a generous fuel supply, and regular maintenance.
And plug-in solar is becoming legal in the usa. within 3 years everyone will be running these little things, and you'll come around.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Uninterruptible+power+supply+refri...
FWIW my high voltage battery pack has almost 365 cycles and is still at 100% state of health.
Usually you can buy ice, but when I had a ~36 hour outage a couple years ago, I couldn't. Most stuff was fine for that long, but 2-3 days would've meant tossing pretty much the entire contents.
(Plus, I don't have cell service where I live, so being able to power my router is pretty useful.)
This is probably a bad move if you live in a city. It makes more sense in rural areas.
Things will start to get interesting where €1600 don't buy you 5kWh but double or triple the amount.
I can imagine most people are better off either investing like I said or in insulation.
The investment point still stands, though you could argue both come with risk/reward, energy prices aren't guaranteed to be stable.
For people who don't have access to banks, they form "savings clubs" where there will be, say, 12 people who put in $100 per month, and one person takes the pot every month. The idea is that if you keep the money yourself, then you're socially pressured to spend it when there are holidays or guests, but if it's locked up in the savings club, you can't spend it, and then you get a big lump sum to spend on a large purchase that would be otherwise hard to save for.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Economics
This seems like the hardest step. The costs of "just a battery" are much lower by comparison.
If you only cycle then in the 20-80% range, they'll last much longer (at least for NMC cells, not sure how LFP works).
I guess it's very location-specific, but I haven't had a power outage longer than 1 minute in the past 5 years.
Those prices are high. You can get 2.56kWh for 270€ on Aliexpress, delivered locally from Germany.
What could possibly go wrong? The things that people do.
Personally, I'd like the company to be in the EU so that I can at least sue them if it burns down the house.
Batteries installation is not about money , average LiFePo4 battery life is around 10 years, so you will save nothing, unless you have some local generation like solar panels. In this case you could shrink payback time to 5 years instead of 10 and it makes some sense.
But the biggest problems here 2: 1. there a critical point after installing a huge amount of balance batteries the diff between day/night hours would be mitigated. And prices may down 30%. As result economical factor of installing energy storage systems would be very questionable. However cheap energy will increase energy usage by homes and industry and this may/might/probaly/i_hope. boost economy
2. The second factor riskier because when many people are installing energy storages and become independent of power grid, or even disconnects from the grid, there still exists power grid you have to support. Right now the price of grid support included in energy bill for electric company. The grid usage price is stable , it doesn't matter you support 1 person or a 1mln residents city. So the less people are using THE GRID - the higher prices for the rest people. And those high price forces rest people to disconnect from the grid. In general we may/I_hope_not to have situation with plenty energy islands and no more national grid systems
I also don't get his example calculation. He mentions that average price in Germany is 38c/kWh, but in the table it's suddenly 4c min vs 13c max (or 40 vs 133?). That doesn't compute.
I guess Europeans have more friends than Americans -- I can't think of 32 people I'd invite to a birthday party, and certainly not 32 people that I'd expect to give me a €50 gift. I haven't received a real birthday present from friends (beyond a cheap gag-gift) in decades.
Check local code before proceeding!
Many are in use all over the world in off-grid cabins and similar.
You do need to take care that they are installed correctly, and maintained properly, but that isn't much different than a natural gas connection, or even normal everyday electricity.
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.
The whole system is.. not great, but it's even cheaper to have a battery than this post makes it sound.
Gift should be ... gifts
(plug-in batteries aren’t actually legal here yet, but likely to become so next year!)
Remind me why I should buy the battery? It clearly can't be because it makes financial sense to just have the battery.
yeah sure everyone has 100€ to spend on friends, at least once a month.
What kind of reality does he live in ?
1. You have ~15 friends and you all have houses.
2. All of you can confidently allocate €1600 this year towards one major component of the upgrade, and believe you will benefit from it in the next ~15 years.
3. All the friends make enough money that they're confident anything going wrong with €1600 loans/debts won't cause pain or problems in the friendship.
How rich do you need to be for the mentality of that last one? AFAICT that's ~3% of yearly salary (pre-tax) in Germany.
Personally, I do not want my friend group to be tangled up in a financing scheme, and if I wanted a financing scheme I wouldn't do something half-assed that could explode into acrimony if anyone chooses (or is forced by circumstance) to exit having contributed without receiving or vice-versa.
I could understand friends having good-years helping out ones having bad-years ("banqueting" [0]) but what's being proposed really doesn't map to that.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
It might not actually be "buy one-another new cars" territory, it's closer to that than paying for your friend's coffee or buying an appetizer for the whole table.
You would certainly need the owner's permission, and investing in the kind of adaptations needed might not be something most renters are interested in when it's not their own place. A battery has to be integrated into the whole electrical feed, and a responsible owner might insist that this is a permanent installation and something you can just take with you when you leave. Or if you do, undoing the install will be similarly costly. And who knows if your next place will allow you to install a battery as well.
I don't think you can realistically install it in an apartment, due to fire regulations, and it needs a lot of space. Personally, I live in a 74 m2 apartment, and there's simply no room anywhere. Wiring is another matter; electricity comes through shared risers I don't control.
Now, you could use the battery as a pass through power source, but then you'd have to change all the wiring in your home.
Maybe the author is privileged and it's fine, it's not because you personally can't afford any gift that the author is disconnected, he might not just be talking to everyone on earth.
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.
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.
I suppose that future V2X systems will incorporate direct plug-in tech, but note the transfer switch used by the system in the video.
Nope.