I’m curious what’s the rank sort of items a typical apartment dweller would want to keep on backup - for me it would be WiFi router, phone charger, microwave, kettle and a couple kitchen lights. Any power restrictions that would preclude running microwave or kettle?
Very cool. You mention powering connected devices - is it feasible to push power back through the outlet to power parts of the home? Euro solar panels are doing this I believe.
Yeah great question. The hardware is capable of bidirectional power, and electrical codes and standards in the U.S. are now catching up with Europe. “Balcony Solar” has taken off there, especially in Germany. Utah just passed H.B. 340 which allows up to 1200W of plug-in solar backfeed. It wasn’t so long ago that grid-tied batteries like Powerwall were working through the same kind of standards updating process to participate on the grid, so I’m encouraged
Are the grid isolation and backfeed capabilities mutually exclusive? Isolation would have to happen at the panel if you are backfeeding into an outlet, right?
But 'when the grid is up' isn't the time you'd want to feed power from one outlet into the others. It's when the grid is down you'd want to do this, no?
I guess you could flip the trip switch to isolate the circuit?
Yes & no, there are two reasons to push power back:
1- to save money on energy, charge when cheap discharge when expensive. Pila can do this.
2- to backup. Pila can’t do this. It can only backup appliances plugged into it.
You're right, heat pumps have been around for a while, but they're only at 15% market share across the whole US. The Southeast, for a few different reasons, has the highest market share. (1) It doesn't get that cold, and magnitude of heating/cooling loads are close enough that single stage equipment provides an OK experience. (2) There's very little natural gas infrastructure.
Cold weather heat pumps have recently become popular and enable increased adoption in the northeast, and the fact they're so efficient means they're competitive even in areas with a lot of natural gas infrastructure.
The Electric Air system can provide a lot of dehumidification. For your specific situation dedicated dehumidifiers are probably the right solution, unless you need a fair amount of cooling in addition to the dehumidification. This is because for purely dehumidification you need some reheat after chilling the air to condenser water out. With a dedicated dehumidifier you get this for free from the condenser on the other side of your refrigeration cycle. In the Electric Air system the backup strip heaters provide the reheat in the air handler, but using them a lot is expensive.
My main worry for you would be clearance in front of the condenser. These are side discharging units and require 4ft clearance in front for the air exhaust stream. Rough foot print of the condenser - 36" x 15".
You're right - hardware is tough, and the scope is large. But this is an important area to build better products, there are a lot of people passionate about this/want to work on this and the hardware doesn't have to be designed from scratch. As for trust, the deposit is pretty low stakes, $100, fully refundable, reserves your place in line for a system. For those of you that placed a deposit, thank you, it means a lot!
Yeah, its a good question. I think 'direct to homeowners' has generated some confusion that this is a DIY product. After a purchase we have one of our contractor partners perform the install, they also bring the unit with them, we don't ship the unit to you and expect you to find your own installer or DIY.
no confusion here. i was asking why it's triple the price for same functionality (before installation) ?
with regards to total price including install: it pretty much same price as any central ducted heatpump that offered by lenox/trane/etc. what's the innovation here ?
