Anker’s Colossal Battery Pack Can Power Your Entire Home

Anker now makes a battery pack that can power your entire home—air-conditioning included—for a whole weekend.

We're totally used to carrying battery packs to recharge our phones and laptops, but what about powering your home? That's where oversized powerpacks like Anker's new Solix F3800 come in. They can keep you running during summer power outages caused by air-conditioners overloading the grid and smooth the intermittent supply from home solar. But they're also giant batteries, with all the environmental concerns of smaller batteries, only bigger. 

"As an electrical engineer deeply involved in green energy initiatives, I see giant battery packs as a crucial bridge toward a sustainable future. They play a pivotal role in overcoming the intermittent nature of renewable sources like solar. Rather than a gimmick, they are instrumental in ensuring a stable power supply, especially during cloudy days or nighttime," electrical engineer Stellar Jackson told Lifewire via email.

Anker Watts

The new Solix starts at $3,999. This base unit holds 3.84kWh of charge and can supply it at up to 6,000 Watts at 120 volts (or 3,000 Watts at 240v). That's enough to power your air conditioning or any other home appliance. 

You can also expand the storage capacity to 53.8kWh with Anker's expansion batteries. To give you some context for these numbers, the average US home gets through around 29.2kWh per day, so the full setup could keep you going without switching anything off. 

And that's in the US, where the typical home refrigerator uses more power in a year than is consumed by an entire human in the rest of the world. So you could probably power a typical European city apartment on a much smaller rig. 

But why bother? After all, we're almost all connected to the grid. Batteries may be a pretty inefficient way to store power, but because the energy source (the Sun) is limitless, inefficiency doesn't matter so much, and you'll never have to buy power from the grid. 

"The main problem with solar adoption isn't the cost of the panels themselves. In fact, the PV panels are considered the cheapest part of the entire system. The problem is the output intermittency, or what's called the solar power duck curve. Simply put, solar panels generate most of their electricity at midday when the energy demand is at its lowest," Kami Turky, CEO of Solar Energy Hackers, told Lifewire via email. 

"One popular way to do this is to use the excess electricity to pump water up a reservoir. When we need this energy back, this water can be released down through a turbine, and as the turbine spins, it generates electricity. Batteries are just a way to convert electrical energy to chemical energy."

Power Balance

But batteries have their problems. While it's obviously better to use renewable energy and very freeing to be independent of the grid, batteries have a high environmental impact. They use some nasty chemicals, and you know that when oil companies like Exxon start to mine the lithium needed for all those batteries, it's probably not going to end well for the Earth.

"You could use the grid lines to sell electricity from your battery to your neighbor, but that only works if your neighbor doesn't have solar," says Turky. "If we're talking about whether the batteries can help the national grid as a whole, I'd say no because batteries are still a super expensive way to store electricity. They are getting better, but [it] still doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint."

It's a tricky problem to solve, not least because we're all so used to unlimited power. Just like how giant, heavy SUVs make zero sense as electric city vehicles, we might need to rethink how we use energy. Perhaps we don't have to run the air conditioning and the heated towel rails at the same time. Maybe we could ditch the clothes dryer and hang the clothes on a clothesline. And so on. We might still need batteries for our renewable energy, but we won't need nearly as many—especially if we ditch those American fridges.

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