The unexpected home upgrade that could save you thousands

Growing up in rural Tennessee, power outages were frequent and sometimes fun. With no TV or lights, we played boardgames by candlelight or played outside if the storm stopped. But because my family also ran a restaurant out of our house, sometimes the food in the fridges spoiled, leading to thousands of dollars worth of lost groceries. It never occurred to me so many years ago that a big battery could one day solve this problem. As extreme weather worsens due to climate change, leading millions more to experience debilitating blackouts, the home battery industry is booming. Home batteries are not like the AAA batteries that go in your TV remote control. They’re big, high-capacity lithium-ion workhorses designed to power multiple devices and appliances in the event of a power outage. The amount of energy that can be stored in residential batteries, which is measured in gigawatt hours (GWh), grew by a record 54 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to a new report on energy storage in the United States. It’s now enough to power up to 1 million homes. Growth is even bigger in Europe. Many home batteries are being used to store energy from solar panels, but there’s a burgeoning market for backup batteries that can keep essential appliances, like refrigerators, running during a power outage. Some of these batteries are also smart enough to charge up when energy is cheap and then discharge when it’s expensive to save on utility bills. We’re also starting to see appliances with built-in batteries that make them more efficient and effective. Solving the lost groceries problem is only the beginning. As more people add battery capacity to their homes, the power grid can become more resilient to spikes in energy usage and bring down costs for everyone. While the number of battery-powered houses still make up a minority of all the homes in the US, home batteries are becoming more affordable and accessible, giving the average American household the chance to take advantage of what an electrified future has to offer. One of the more interesting home batteries I’ve come across is made by BioLite, a Brooklyn, New York-based company that got its start building camp stoves that can charge your phone. Backup by BioLite is a home battery specifically designed for the dead fridge problem, or any other dead appliances. The primary unit is a slim battery pack that can fit behind your refrigerator or sit on top of it. It plugs into a standard wall outlet and doesn’t require a contractor or any rewiring to install. Just plug your fridge and any other devices into the Backup’s power strip, and it’s ready to take over in the event of an outage. One $2,000 Backup battery gets you 15 to 30 hours of power, and if you daisy-chain several batteries together, you can get a few days worth of power. “This is not meant to be a niche product for the bleeding-edge solar battery storage expert,” Erica Rosen, BioLite’s vice president of marketing told me when I visited BioLite’s headquarters in March. “This is for folks who are, like, ‘I just threw out $400 worth of groceries. I can never do this again.’” That example hit home for me. But it’s not actually what I think is most useful about the capabilities of home batteries. For people who pay attention to their power bills, Backup and other home batteries make it easier to take advantage of the time-of-use pricing some utilities offer, which makes electricity cheaper during low demand hours and higher when demand is high. Backup, for example, works with an app that lets you schedule the battery to kick in during high demand hours; BioLite is planning to eventually update the app so that this feature works automatically. Plugging solar panels into these batteries gives you even more autonomy over your energy sources. Once you’re actually generating electricity, you can fill up your home batteries without drawing from the grid at all. If there’s an outage, the panels can keep those batteries charged when the sun’s out. If your utility offers it, you can also take advantage of something called net metering, which enables you to sell some of that stored energy back to the grid during peak demand. If battery-powered living sounds appealing to you, there are now even more creative ways to ease into it. A company called Copper started selling its battery-equipped stoves this year. The $6,000 Copper Charlie is an electric induction range with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery inside that’s programmed to charge when electricity is cheapest. The range plugs into a regular wall outlet — other inductions require a 240-volt outlet that not all homes have — and the battery supplies enough power for everyday cooking. It also kicks in during power outages so that you can keep cooking if the lights go out. The battery also gives the oven a boost, so that preheating is faster. This is just the first of many battery-assisted appliances that Copper plans to make, according to Weldon Kennedy, the company’s co-founder and chief marketing officer. It’s not hard to imagine how the same basic backup features of the Charlie stove could work in a hot water heater or a washer-dryer. These kinds of appliances require a large amount of energy all at once and then sit idle for hours at a time. It makes great sense to charge them up when energy is cheap and then discharge that stored energy later. “Because you don’t have these giant spikes in energy use across the electrical grid at, say, six o’clock when everyone turns on their electric stove,” Kennedy told me. “It just makes the whole system better.” None of this comes cheap. The Copper Charlie range and Backup by BioLite are four-figure investments. There are other companies in the space, too, but they’re just as expensive. Impulse makes a battery-equipped stovetop that also costs $6,000, and Jackery sells a home backup battery for $3,500 and up. You can find even more expensive and extensive home battery systems from companies like Tesla, Anker, and Bluetti. There are some government subsidy programs available to offset those high costs, but on a federal level at least, it’s not clear if the Trump administration will keep them in place. There is, nevertheless, something unstoppable about the home battery revolution. As certain solutions get cheaper and easier to use, like Biolite’s Backup, other options are becoming more appealing. Electric vehicles, after all, are basically big batteries on wheels, and a growing number of automakers are enabling bidirectional charging, which lets your vehicle power your home or send power back to the grid. GM is even working with some utility companies to help its car owners buy the equipment necessary to turn their EVs into home batteries. Still, with the Trump administration downright hostile to clean energy, the US is lagging behind Europe and China in adopting more battery power. But the cost of battery production is falling fast, and we should expect to see batteries show up in more home appliances in the near future. After all, just one big battery could save you a fridge-full of groceries in the next power outage, and that outage is definitely coming. Climate change is making weather more extreme and unpredictable, which means it’s more essential than ever to be prepared for anything. A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

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The unexpected home upgrade that could save you thousands