So ecoflow has come out with some crazy product that lets you offset your energy usage by using Solar. The target audience for this specific tech is apartment and rental units. (Anker is also currently working on one, but I think their product is only available in Germany at the moment)
While this can’t/isn’t designed to run your whole home, it can offset some of your energy usage, and since it utilizes a standalone backup battery you do have some small off grid redundancy.
What are the thoughts on this? Is distributing solar and batteries to potentially every appartment and environmental mistake? Or is this potentially a massive step towards a function and sustainable future grid?
If you did the math I would strongly suspect this unit could never pay for itself. In that case you’re either using it because having the backup power is worth it, or because you believe there’s some environmental benefit. On the environmental front, again, I can’t imagine it’ll ever “pay” for itself. So… Well, ok, or you get it because solar power and batteries are fun.
They don’t provide any backup, they are purely to make your grid power-meter spinn slower or sometimes even feed back into the grid (when allowed).
The cheaper versions do make economic sense in countries with high electricity costs for home consumers, but its not a “great investment”.
Yeah. It seems like a cool idea, but I can’t quite understand the ecenomics being it.
I can see it being used as a “trial run” for people considering going solar or off grid in the future, it can be a safe first step, as the parts of these kits would integrate with the whole home systems sold by these same companies.
You just hook it up and your electricity bill will be lower next month. Not sure what is so complicated about that :) I don’t think most people are considering it a trial run or plan to upgrade if they live in a small rented apartment with only a balcony.
Valid points. Plus you can bring it with you if you ever move, definitely a huge bonus.
And if the life cycle is 10 years, it will end up paying for itself terms of energy savings.
But if your expense for the power station is higher than what you will save on the electricity bill you are actually losing money. Especially if you consider batteries lifetime, you can risk throwing the whole thing away before you saved enough bill money to recover the expense. So there are cases in which simply paying the bill is cheaper. I did the math a while back for my house and I would break even in like 7 years, which gives me only 3 years of actual saving before the battery wears out.
This has been my problem, the cost vs savings doesn’t math yet. It gets a little closer every time I check though.
These systems do not have batteries. But yes, you need to carefully calculate your possible power-bill savings against the investment costs of the system. Typically they will only slowly repay their costs over some years and not actually save you much.
They do provide backup, they have batteries and an hybrid inverter.
It’s optional in this specific version, but most of these kind of systems you can buy do not include a battery.