Pila (https://pila.energy/) is a home battery that plugs into a standard wall outlet, provides smart backup power, energy shifting, and grid services. It’s more than a power bank—it’s a distributed energy system that can scale across multiple rooms, entire buildings, and work together in real time as a coordinated system. We built Pila to be local first with an open API to allow developers to build use cases on top of our hardware (Home Assistant, etc).
Big batteries like Tesla Powerwall and Enphase are great if you own a home and can afford a $10K+ electrical project, but they require permanent installation, electricians, and panel upgrades—which makes them inaccessible for renters, apartments, and cost-conscious homeowners. Over 50% of the cost of installing a Powerwall isn’t even the battery itself—it’s soft costs: labor, permitting, etc. We wanted to create an entry point for more people to access energy security at home.
How does it work?
Plug Pila into any 120V wall outlet, and power passes through to connected devices and appliances. The inverter, LFP battery, BMS, grid disconnection, controller, and wireless connectivity are all built in. (details at https://pila.energy/tech-specs)
When an outage happens, the onboard inverter detects the power loss within 20ms and automatically disconnects from the grid (islanding). Whether you’re home or away, backup kicks in instantly. A built-in cellular radio ensures you get a notification even if your home WiFi is out. Pila is 1.6kWh. That will backup a standard fridge for over a day.
One key challenge we faced with a distributed architecture was coordination between batteries, for things like solar-following and managing real-time draw from your utility connection. Unlike large garage systems, where you can run a wired CAN bus, our batteries are spread across the home. We’re solving this with a sub-GHz wireless mesh network—self-healing, coordinator-less, and designed to make setup and expansion as simple as plugging in another unit.
Long-term, we’d love to open up this protocol to provide a more reliable communication layer for energy products in noisy built environments—reducing reliance on consumer Wi-Fi.
We want to deliver the value you’d expect from a whole-home battery like Powerwall, in a plug-in format. That means going beyond a basic lead acid UPS with real home energy management, useful insights about power use, power larger loads like sump pumps, and even deliver grid services.
Most portable batteries are missing the functionality that makes a home battery useful: no bidirectional power, no integration with solar or smart home systems, and no ability to manage home energy dynamically. They tend to be boxy, ruggedized, meant to be moved around, not seamlessly integrated into your living space. On top of that, many use e-mobility battery chemistries, which are great for delivering high power on demand but wear out faster when cycled daily for home energy use.
As a renter myself, I started Pila because these awesome energy products aren’t accessible enough. And frankly, generators are loud, expensive, and a pain to deal with. Even many Powerwall owners I’ve talked to say they really care about keeping the fridge, WiFi, and a sump pump running—so why does energy resilience have to be so complicated and expensive?
As the grid struggles to keep up with demand, we believe modular, renter-friendly batteries can make home energy resilience more accessible.
What's been your experience with home batteries? What recent power outages have you had, and how were you affected?
That said, I like this idea -- a modern coordinated UPS. I live in an area where people have 3-10 days a year of no power; being able to pick and choose what power they'd use during an outage would be a significant benefit to them.
Good luck!
This is not a new product, though. Battery power inverters with AC and solar input are a popular class of products.
You can buy similar products with higher capacity and better solar input at Costco or Best Buy.
I think people are confused by the "Show HN" tag and the misleading way it's being compared to a Powerwall, despite not being a comparable product.
My problem with this post is that it's a "Show HN" from an account that registered 2 months ago. Their only activity is this post. It's pushing a product with misleading marketing comparisons (It's not comparable to a Powerwall) instead of similar products on the market. The poster is also making claims in this thread that contradict their own marketing on the website. Their website says it will run a fridge for 1.3 days, but one of their employees is in this thread making claims of 2-3 days in some places and 3-4 days in other places.
The negativity is because this is a misleading marketing piece and a lot of people are getting tricked into thinking this is a new type of product.
Some examples of competing products with better specs and lower prices:
https://www.bluettipower.com/collections/power-stations
https://us.ecoflow.com/collections/delta-series
EDIT: This thread is being astroturfed. Someone affiliated with Pila is alternating between talking about developing Pila and pretending to ask questions about Pila. See this comment pretending to ask if it qualifies for the Investment Tax Credit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339416 . It took me 10 seconds to find his LinkedIn page where he's clearly associated with Pila: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chadconway_pila-energy-is-8-o...
EDIT 2: Here's another comment where 'chadconway' pretends to ask a question and 'coleashman' answers it: https://archive.is/ws9bp . Both accounts are associated with Pila. This is a clear attempt at astroturfing.
100% this. I had to read a whole wall of text to get to "it's a really fancy UPS". Definitely places that will be useful, but I think a lot of people here are far more excited by the possibilities of products like Powerwall which move us towards a greener future than by large, stylish batteries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Interestingly, the guidelines only refer to "insinuations" not unequivical accusations supported by evidence.
IMO, the later has value.
Often "totally new product" == bad (or more accurately, "first mover" == bad)
I think there is a misconception that totally new products make the money. But the second (or later) mover is often in a better position [1].
Dropbox was not new. File sharing existed prior. AirBnB was not new. Vrbo existed prior. Ethereum was definitely not the first crypto.
The iPod was not new. MP3 players were popular enough to be found at most electronics stores.
My rule of thumb is I want competitors. I want a product category to have some existing popularity (so I know there is money to be made), but not universal.
I think we're far from battery storage being universal in homes and world-wide.
So, if someone can become the iPod or Dropbox of battery storage, that might be a $100+ billion company.
I don't know if Pila is it. But the idea of a battery mesh, instead of the all-or-nothing powerwall sounds interesting.
I would love to be able to build up my home battery storage 1-kwh at a time instead of financing a giant battery all at once.
I can especially see that having value in middle-income countries.
Edit: Adjusted my 10-kwh statement to 1-kwh to make the example make more sense.
[1]: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/the_second_...
I've already got multiple APC SmartUPSes in the house. They don't need to be networked together. And they've got multiple output sockets, not just two.
At 2.4kW max output, and 1.6kWh storage, you can't even run this thing at full power for an hour. I can do better with both APC and CyberPower.
And APC has slimline models that use lithium technology to come in around the same physical size, albeit at a higher price point.
It's pretty. It's networked, albeit via a proprietary wireless protocol. But I've never needed either of those things for any of my "point defense" UPSes.
I really don't think there's anything here that is worth spending any time or effort on.
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Here we are, rightfully thrashing a product because of disinformation, while we have a president product doing this on a global scale. Not a peep. It's always the little guy (with the exception of Google at HN) who get gets the flack when they do something wrong.
Misdirection is the most powerful political weapon, and we currently have a criminal making sure only he can wield it, with a fan base that loves the exercise of power, loves to see destruction, all in the name of (power to) Christianity. Christianity was losing so it got on board with a loser. No more "by faith" and "Jesus is the Lord". Now they cheer on the hole the USA is digging for others, only to fall in it themselves. Then "Elon" can save it and establish himself as the emperor of the world. The USA is just a pawn being played right now.
All this while we get upset with a small competitor and by the same rules we can't put our eyes on the big players. Dang, because we can only talk about tech. Well, dang, just make a section where we can go to make X-rated, tangential, comments. Because we sure don't want to go to X.
Most (vocal) participants on HN that comment on product launches have almost no understanding of what will make a successful product / company.
I’ll put my money where my mouth is - check my comments on the ethereum launch thread.
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Don't buy things you cannot afford and won't have to live paycheck to paycheck.
OP answered in one of the comments that it will run a single fridge for 32 hours.
I understand the benefits of a UPS that will run your desktop computer during a brief power outage of a couple of hours. And I understand a generator that will keep your house running for 10 days after a natural disaster. And I understand a Powerwall that can suck up electricity at night when it's cheap to use it during the day.
But this doesn't fit any of those categories. It's way too expensive to run a desktop computer, doesn't last anywhere near long enough for power outages from natural disasters, and isn't going to make a meaningful difference in your energy bill if a single device can only handle 5% of your home's daily energy needs.
And you don't even need it for a fridge/freezer -- it'll stay cold enough on its own for a day without power as long as you don't open it much.
I applaud the creativity, but I genuinely don't understand who the market is supposed to be?
It’s basically a huge, 21st century UPS.
It can also do arbitrage and charge when it’s cheap and deploy the power when it’s expensive.
The main problem with a powerwall is it doesn’t work for renters, and costs 20,000+ (and permits, etc) if you do own your home.
A pull-sting generator (gas) is great - and a push-button one is around 1K also btw- but it doesn’t go on automatically if you’re out, and be noisy, can only be started after the hurricane, etc
Finally, local-first is super important to us for outage or otherwise - we integrate with Home Assistant and have public MQTT topics you can directly hook into no matter what happens to Pila the company, as long as your hardware lasts (predicted 10 years).
Idk - that’s where we feel like the position and gap in this market is? But we may be wrong :)
Apparently a company in San Francisco put together 110V electric stoves with induction cooktops and integrated batteries --- they then sold them to folks applying for tax rebates to replace gas stoves in kitchens which weren't wired for 220V.
One notable appliance you don't mention on your website is electric water pumps for wells in rural areas....
Similarly, are your devices able to provide sine wave power to run small electric tool motors? Folks with CNC machines might be interested, or perhaps they could run tools on jobsites? How many small tool batteries could be charged from one? Would it fit in a Systainer? Might make a nice fit for folks w/ Festools.
$1,000 buys a lot of groceries. It's cheaper to to have a small supply of shelf stable food for outages.
> It can also do arbitrage and charge when it’s cheap and deploy the power when it’s expensive.
This has the same problem. It takes a long time to make back the $1000.
Your own marketing page claims 32 hours (a little over 1 day).
It's the very first icon in the table.
EDIT: And your other comment now says 3-4 days for a fridge ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43338397 ). Getting hard to believe all of these different numbers.
Being able to plug it into a NA standard plug into a more capable generator (or other outlet) to recharge is useful.
Without knowing the price point... van life folks have solar batteries and the published power specs seem to be competitive and useful for powering higher-draw appliances and devices.
The payback period to make arbitrage useful would be very specific to the user and how much electricity costs in their locale, but this calculation should take into account the delivery costs component of a utility bill that can be the same or higher than the cost of the actual electricity.
My sump pumps are literally one of my biggest home ownership worries.
The Pila is a beautiful device, but that beauty comes at a price - it's a lot more expensive than, say, Bluetti's range of portable power stations and others too. They are also expandable, connect to solar panels and so on, and apparently the German market has embraced batteries like this with solar panels to give your home a degree of independence very easily.
(1) https://www.bluettipower.com/collections/power-stations
These are everywhere. You can even pick them up at Costco, Best Buy, and other retail electronics distributors. They're a lot cheaper than the linked product, too.
I think people are getting misled by the Powerwall comparison. This isn't a powerwall competitor. It competes with all of the other battery power stations on the market, of which there are many.
Food in an unpowered fridge will be unsafe within 4 hours: https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-safety-charts/food-safety-du...
This is not realistic, this is perhaps an "absolutely 100% guaranteed still safe for your baby while it is sick" value, which I guess makes sense for a government agency but they could communicate whom this advice is for
Edit: scrolling further down the table, also cooked pasta, rice, potatoes, vegetables, and sauce should be discarded. These products cooked, so they cooled down through optimal breeding temperatures while you had dinner for an hour, before they even started their journey from room down to fridge temperature. They should be discarded according to this table and never consumed in the first place (explicitly: don't even taste to see if it's still good). Not to mention what spoiled while it was on your plate
That is absolute BS - food is considered unsafe after the food itself spends 4 hours above 40*f, so the website you’re linking to assumes a fridge and everything in it immediately warms to 41+* upon losing power? Physics doesn’t work that way….
My current setup is a 2.8Kv generator I haul our of the shed, run a few extension cords to core things like fridge/freezer, internet, office etc.
This is a nice fit between a generator and a Powerwall. Generator is a pain if you have to setup + if not home the fridge stays off or my wife will leave to me unless its urgent. A Powerwall (or similar) is a significant investment.
This product covers people like me with occasional outages but it doesn't have the setup or out of home hassle, and its a more financially accessible solution than a Powerwall. I could def see people interested in this.
Regarding cost, looks like this is $1k for a 1.6kWh battery. The Powerwall 3 is $9874 (plus installation costs) for a 13.5kWh battery. So Plia costs $625/kWh, while Powerwall 3 will run you $731.41/kWh. So it does seem the Plia is price-competitive, assuming my paragraph above is correct. And Powerwall will cost you even more than that per kWh since Plia is a self-install, while Powerwall is not.
Granted, there are cheaper options than Powerwall.
Plia certainly has its downsides: if you want it to power everything in your home, you have to put one (or more) in each room and plug everything into it (that's 8 or 9 Plias per Powerwall-equivalent). Presumably a whole-home battery can charge faster than a Plia, since you're probably plugging it into a 15A outlet where it'll be pulling less than 1800W.
Yeah that is a cool feature, but at least where I live there is only a few cents / kwh difference between peak and non-peak, which means this 1.6kwh battery system would save at most a nickel a day (~$20/year).
meanwhile, i can find battery solutions that output 120v on aliexpress, for $700 for a 1.8kwh battery
anyways this show hn post is clearly an ad for a not particularly novel product. sorry plia!
I think it depends on what your electric outages look like. Short outages, a desktop ups probably makes sense. But if you regularly get 12-36 hour outages, this might be a reasonable product for you. Personally, I expect two nines of utility power, so something like this could possibly work (but I already have a 35kW propane fired standby generator)
"Don't open the fridge so everything stays cold" is a lot more difficult with three teenagers.
What I really want is my milk not to spoil (keep my family fed, not opening the fridge is defeating the purpose) and to charge devices if the outage will last more than half a day. Pila is WAY cheaper and more targeted.
I considered buying a Jackery Explorer 1000 and pushing my refrigerator out to plug it in during and outage but that seemed ridiculous.
https://www.jackery.com/products/explorer-1000-portable-powe...
EDIT: Other people are mentioning arbitrage, which is also pointless for me. My Powerwall 3 will save me a few hundred dollars a year if I set it send power to the grid AND during that time I lose backup protection.
if it was recent, such as living in certain parts of texas, you should be keeping large amounts of stable water for each person for at least a week (gallon jugs + water filter pens), fuel/burner/pot, rice/beans/etc in a water sealed emergency kit
if it was a long time ago, you should be keeping enough water, vitamins, and high density calorie bricks for 96 hours
it'd be nice to have fresh food, but it's way more practical and reliable to have sustenance stored in a closet somewhere
for a family of four, premade emergency kits for 7 days will run you about $150, and youll need about 25 gallons of water - <$25
$175 or a $1000 battery + $25 for water. idk choice is easy
You could probably run a dorm-style mini-fridge for a lot longer than a 25-cubic-foot side-by-side, and it would be perfect for that case.
Hell, buy the guts of a $79 dorm fridge, bolt the Pila product inside the chassis, and sell it as a "medical supply" for 10 times its cost-of-goods.
That being said 1.6 kw/h for $1000 is WAY overpriced. Lithium Iron Phosphate battery prices are dropping like a stone. This should be a third of the price and eventually that's exactly what someone will sell it for.
People who are willing to buy several individual UPS devices for appliances but aren't willing to pay an electrician to install a grid cut off switch so they can power their whole house with a slightly bigger UPS.
Honestly, I could see someone buying one or two of these for their fridge and another for their home office or similar, but they are competing with existing companies that sell a similar product without the UPS feature, like you see nearly every youtuber advertise.
> The foreign equivalent of a merely descriptive English word is no more registrable than the English word itself. "[A] word taken from a well-known foreign modern language, which is, itself, descriptive of a product, will be so considered when it is attempted to be registered as a trade-mark in the United States for the same product."
Worse yet, it might happen that the USPTO does mistakenly approve the trademark, but then revokes it when it's challenged.
Because Spanish is the second most spoken language in every US state, I'm pretty sure that in any city in the US there is a store where you can walk in today, ask for a "pila", and walk out with a battery. At least here in Argentina that's the term we normally use for single-cell batteries like a AA, while a car battery is a "batería".
lol not the same in Brazilian, but interesting :)
Seems like you need to compare it to a UPS too, because that's what it really, really is.
"Reserve now ... Orders are expected start shipping by the end of 2025."
Can't get funding? Or just testing demand without a real product? Nobody does Kickstarters for a me-too product.
It has an "app" user interface, requiring both a cellular connection and the service remaining in business. Plus it wants WiFi so it can receive "software updates". What could possibly go wrong?
That is the true purpose of the entire operation - all other functionality is a distraction (and can be taken away at any time by a software update despite any promises).
As per their FAQ (https://pilaenergy.com/tech-specs#faq):
> As balcony solar and plug-and-power products gain momentum, we welcome collaboration with AHJs and utilities to help responsibly shape the future of home energy. If you're interested in partnering with Pila, reach out!
The plan is to find enough people to buy these so they have enough aggregate storage capacity to solicit "collaboration" and "partnerships" (https://pilaenergy.com/press) with utilities and make profit (I'm fairly confident the device is currently sold at a loss), with the buyers getting scraps in the best case scenario, and nothing in the worst/expected case.
I guess the buyers of the batteries will at least be satisfied with the knowledge that they have paid to "responsibly shape the future of home energy".
Do not be so dismissive so fast without reading. The FAQs and the website says that they have a local interface and requires no internet for controlling it. E.g from https://pilaenergy.com/tech-specs
"While we think you’ll love the Pila App, you’re welcome to connect your own monitoring platform with our free local APIs. We embrace and actively support open standards like Home Assistant, Matter, and Thread for local data streaming from Pila Batteries — Because your data should always stay yours. Local API documentation coming soon. "
"Pila does not require internet to provide backup power, monitoring, or smart energy management features. The Pila Battery Mesh Network keeps all batteries working together, even when your home Internet goes out. The Pila App includes a Local Connection Mode for reliable battery control and monitoring without internet.
For reliable Remote Monitoring, all Pila batteries are equipped with a cellular 4G LTE radio for backup communication when home Wi-Fi fails.
However, we highly recommend keeping Pila batteries connected to Wi-Fi to receive the latest software updates and unlock new features, enhancements, and performance improvements—ensuring your system gets smarter and more capable over time."
We know we're not the first people to think of automatic plug in backup :) Aspirationally, we aim to do to the UPS what the Powerwall did to the lead acid battery bank -- Bring it into the 21st century, level up to better technology, add software intelligence so it's not sitting idle 99% of the time, and improve the design and usability to make it a more exciting and valuable product for more homes
Its a battery backup, how would it not be sitting idle 99% of the time?
Half the problem with home-generation is a cutoff/sync device that synchronizes the frequency of your local generation with the grid, and kills power going back into the grid from your home generator when there is an outage, so line workers can do their jobs safely. And unless there is a more expensive/complicated device that can 'smear' the frequencys between the two systems slowly so they match after a disconnect/reconnect, most of these systems will shutdown local generation if there is no reference frequency from the main power feed.
Yes, exactly.
> is that what the tesla "Wall" is?
You mean the Powerwall. It's more like a standby generator than a UPS, because they either backup the whole house, or a subpanel. There is an automatic transfer switch, just like a standby generator.
---
The big differences between a Powerwall and a standby generator are:
The Powerwall needs no maintenance. (Standby generators need annual maintenance, oil changes, new spark plugs...)
The Powerwall needs no external fuel source. (No tank of diesel or propane, no need to have a natural gas service to the house.)
The Powerwall can be configured to only charge from solar. This allows owners to take advantage of renewable energy incentives.
The Powerwall can join Tesla's virtual power plant, and feed back into the grid, thus generating revenue. (Basically, charge from solar when demand for electricity is low, and feed back into the grid when demand for electricity is high.) Tesla paid me over $1000 for 2024.
---
(In case you didn't know, a standby generator is the kind that automatically starts and powers your house in a blackout. A portable generator is, well, portable. If you have one, you have to manually start it, and either trip over extension cords, or wire in a manual transfer switch to your house.)
Yes, plus an auto-transfer-switch
I couldn't find a price on the website (the $99 is just for a reservation) but from this thread it looks like it's priced at $1k [1].
For context, in the USA, 30 KWh is a rough estimate for average daily home usage [2].
[0] https://pilaenergy.com/tech-specs#faq
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43333996
[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
Also, spot on that the average home draws about 30kWh, and with an EV driven average daily ranges that'll jump to about 60kWh.
Before starting to apply voltage to a home electric gird, I guess you need to disconnect it from the central grid - how do you do that? Or do you detect when the grid goes down and comes back up?
This is meant as a more precise, room-by-room backup solution!
Maybe I’m wrong though, just wanted to position.
The pre-order page says it will be $1300 after the pre-order period.
This makes the LCD displays on the front page of the website listing "5 days 6 h ours" and similar on a single unit very misleading. That amount of backup would cost $128,000.
The places that can afford this rarely have power outages, so having an dedicated appliance sitting in your living room or kitchen for those 1-2 times a year doesn't make sense. The capacity is barely enough to run your fridge for a day, I'd rather have a higher capacity unit that just sits in my garage that I can actually charge on solar (that costs the same price).
For the places that really need backup power, this is way too expensive.
This could still have been useful if we weren't home, but as you said these things happen so rarely here that I cannot see myself getting something like this, especially for the fridge since ice just works.
To be fair though, it did mean we could not open the fridge willy-nilly, maybe that helped me lose some weight...
Pila is meant more as a set-and-forget solution if you want something seamless and connected.
That’s the part of the market we’re trying to simplify things for :)
Your marketing page says 32 hours for a fridge (1.3 days, first icon in the table)
Your other comment said 2-3 days for a fridge.
This comment says 3-4 days for a fridge.
They support up to 1200W of solar with the expansion pack. Running a cable out a window during a prolonged outage doesn't seem like a huge deal, but I'd guess most of the use case is shorter outages < 48 hours.
The solution is far cheaper than something like the Tesla powerwall (which I have and adore, but it's definitely a bigger investment).
That's like saying a $120K luxury pickup truck is a good deal because it's far cheaper than buying an entire semi-truck.
This is a UPS. Comparing it to the Powerwall is a marketing trick to distract people from the high price.
A Ecoflow Delta 2 Max is $1100, gives you 2kWh capacity and 1000W of solar input. if you have a power outage, you can actually keep it topped off w/ solar while keeping your fridge, gas furnace, etc running.
If you're gonna hang a wire out the window, why pay the premium for the pretty enclosure and screen?
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Based on experiments like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtNq-0kV8YM, I'm extremely skeptical. Can you back this claim?
Also, why are people going to spend $1,300 on this when a good UPS is a fraction of the price, and (for example) an Anker SOLIX F3800 Plus is $3,200?
Batteries can provide significant savings but for that you need to actually use them fully, either by load-shifting significant loads (if you have enough to fully consume the battery capacity), or just charging/discharging the battery directly into the grid (essentially acting like a grid storage system - charging the battery to full when energy is the cheapest, and dumping it back when it's the most profitable). Even better when you have solar - instead of selling that energy at low feed-in prices, save it in batteries and use it once the sun goes down so (if you have enough battery capacity) you never ever need to actually "buy" any energy from the grid.
I believe the Pila can technically do the above, although its battery capacity is probably too small to ever recoup its purchase price on this type of arbitrage. However, the underlying concept is absolutely workable and profitable with the right equipment.
That's my point, thank you for putting it so succinctly. The front page opens showing the Pila being used for a refrigerator — presumably doing load shifting, given the front page marketing copy I quoted — so I think asking for data showing that this is a legitimate use case is fair.
The win for me is the form factor. It can slot right next to any appliance or utility room shelf. The cost is not bad by comparison to portable battery systems, but portable battery systems fall into two form factors:
1. Garage / basement stacks that have to connect to a generator hook-up: which itself costs kilo-dollars. And what if my garage / utility panel isn't heated? Extreme temp swings can degrade these I'd imagine.
2) carry or roll-away. Which is great for camping or pulling out of the closet during an outage, but that's not convenient and not what I'm looking for
And finally, the UPS-like standby power beats both options as well. The solar generator types don't do passthrough power well (they warn against it) and the garage/basement stacks have to be connected to a cutover switch anyway.
Correct me if I'm wrong nowadays but this product beats both those for these reasons.
The other thing is that rewiring a main panel for generator and/or solar to provide emergency power to a subset of circuits is preferred to simply trying to power everything with a tiny battery pack. This usually means adding a subpanel and an automatic transfer switch, which is a heck of a lot simpler than running extension cords through the house and much more fine-grained than powering everything with backfeed.
I love my Powerwall, but it's not powerful enough to power my HVAC. (Heat pump in a northern climate.) I wish I spent more money on a more powerful one.
The payout I got last year for the virtual power plant was phenomenal. If they continue for a decade or so, the Powerwall will come close to paying for itself.
That being said, when I was a renter, I once went looking for a UPS for my CPAP. I never experienced long outages. (Just the one where the Tesla exec flew into a powerline and died.) I don't think I'd spend $1000 on one of these. Even if I hacked together a solar panel onto one, apartments are so small that it seems like it's overkill.
When was this?
https://www.wired.com/2010/02/plane-crash-kills-tesla-employ...