Hasta La Ideas

Blackouts are common where I live, and some of my neighbors have “whole house backup generators.” These consist of a large propane generator that sits on a concrete pad outside your house, and is wired in to the house’s breaker panel. The yard must be dug up to accommodate a 500-gallon or 1,000-gallon propane tank, depending on your needs. To get this all set up runs $15K to $20K, plus the propane.

BioLite has come up with a far cheaper, much less invasive solution that you can install yourself, and bring with you if you move. Called Backup, it’s a wide, flat, attractive battery designed to fit atop or behind a ‘fridge, beneath a bed or mounted to a bracket on the wall.

Hooking it up is child’s play: You simple plug Backup into the wall, and plug your appliances into Backup. It provides pass-through power to your appliances. And if the power goes out, it automatically continues to power, with its stored energy, whatever’s plugged into it.

It’s not the same, convenience-wise, as a whole-house generator, as it can only run what’s plugged into it. But it is far cheaper. A single Backup unit runs $1,400 and provides 1.5 kWh of juice. Two units daisy-chained are $1,950, and provide 3 kWh, good enough to run a large 26-cubic-foot refrigerator for 30 hours while having juice leftover to charge devices and power lights.

The charts below show what a single vs. double unit will do. (Note that they refer, somewhat confusingly, to a single unit as “Core” and a double unit as “Complete.”)

For those looking to go solar, you can connect Backup directly to BioLite’s 400W solar panel.

The Backup has been successfully Kickstarted. At press time they were closing in on $500K in pledges, with 32 days left in the campaign.