I like to keep my home at a cool and comfortable 68 degrees year-round. This preference would be fine if I lived near the Pacific Ocean, or in a small home, or in a newer home that’s insulated with modern mineral wool instead of tissue paper and horsehair.
I, however, live in a 2,000-plus-square-foot home built in 1906. It’s in Kansas City, which has a brutal, humid continental climate. Missouri winters are frigidly cold with ice storms that frequently cripple the city’s roads and burst pipes all over town. Summers are famously hot and humid with near-daily thunderstorms, as fronts crossing the continent collide in its pancake-flat center. Spring and fall are nice, but they last six to eight weeks combined, meaning we get a solid 20 days of open-window weather.
I moved into this house last August. It’s twice the size and 40 years older than my previous home. I knew my power bills would likely go up significantly. In September, my first full month in my new place, I decided to throw caution to the wind and set the thermostat to my preferred temperature to see what would happen. I ended up with a $372 electric bill. After considering the sale of some of my excess plasma, I spent the cooler winter months finding ways to avoid a hot and sticky summer.
The solution to my power problem, and one that I expect many will embrace in the near future, is a smart whole-home battery backup.
Whole-home battery backups might seem like something reserved for hardcore preppers, people with large solar arrays or essential medical equipment, or very particular type-A people. But I’m increasingly convinced that in the near future the whole-home battery could become an essential home appliance for anyone who can afford to invest in one, and not just because it’s nice not to have to toss out everything in your refrigerator when a tree falls on your power lines.
The Anker Solid E10 system with two batteries and a power dock that was installed in my house would cost $7,200. There are a lot of moving pieces to this calculation, but my best napkin math suggests it would pay for itself in about five years of my typical use. It’s definitely cheaper than the next-best solution I came up with, which is moving to San Diego. (That path would also result in better burritos, however.)
Photograph: Martin Cizmar
Company Time
While the climate in Kansas City offers as few comfortable days as pretty much anywhere in the United States, one thing the city does have going for it is a power company that has an extremely aggressive time-of-use billing option. This is becoming more common, as utilities try to incentivize time-shifting to prevent stress on their grid and generate funds to build out their infrastructure to offer favorable rates to preferred industrial customers and power-hungry data centers.
Along with Missouri’s two major metro areas, cities like Denver, Phoenix, and those across California also offer aggressive time-of-use discounts.
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