A big home backup battery costs thousands of dollars — and thousands more to install. A new entrant in the space seeks to bring a smart-home approach without requiring the upfront electrical work of similarly high-tech batteries.
Pila Energy, founded by former engineers for home battery leader Tesla and smart electrical panel manufacturer SPAN, unveiled its Pila Mesh Home Battery Friday at South by Southwest.
The battery is designed to be installed next to the appliances you intend to back up, such as your refrigerator, TV and computer. Each battery can store 1.6kWh to 3.2kWh of electricity and it uses safe lithium iron phosphate chemistry.
“We built Pila at a price point that won’t break the bank while ensuring it has the intelligence to integrate with home energy systems and the power grid,” founder Cole Ashman said in a statement.
Pila Energy said the batteries will be available starting at $999 through early access reservations. The batteries are expected to ship by the end of the year and come with a five-year warranty.
No electrician needed
Like the BioLite batteries I saw at CES 2025, the Pila Energy batteries are intended for home backup but don’t actually wire into your home’s electrical system. That saves money on installation — these are essentially plug-and-play — but that also means they don’t feed power back to the grid the way a traditional home battery system does.
Customers can start with one battery and add more to expand their backup capacity, either linking multiple together to provide longer-term power for one appliance, such as a refrigerator, or spreading them throughout the home to back up multiple appliances.
A portable solar panel can recharge batteries even during an outage. These batteries function essentially as portable power stations. The battery, which has an expected lifespan of 10 years, includes standard AC power outlets and USB ports.
Smart battery storage
Pila Energy touted its software, which can connect and coordinate multiple batteries into a mesh system to store power and optimize it for outage protection and more. Pila compares it to a mesh Wi-Fi system, where multiple modular batteries work together to optimize energy use.
“More,” in this case, generally means adjusting your energy use to offset the higher costs of time-of-use energy rates. If your electricity costs more during some parts of the day than during other parts of the day, the battery can charge itself when power is cheap and run your appliances off of stored energy when it’s expensive.
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