Appliances have potentially serious failure modes that don’t involve battery fires. (We had one here a couple of weeks ago, which would have flooded out our basement if I hadn’t been able to cut power to the pump involved.) Being able to cut the power completely and instantly is not negotiable for a lot of appliances. I wasn’t even taking battery fires into consideration when I wrote about failure modes—I was talking about things that already happen to plug-in appliances right now.
Yes, the added weight and complexity are likely not all that significant here, but they’re sufficient that, even without the power-cutting issues, they outweigh any benefit of attaching a battery to the appliance directly. It’s just not a particularly useful idea when you get pretty much the same benefits with none of the downsides by incorporating the batteries into the building’s power system separately.
I think there is more to structure level battery support that you might consider which highlights why appliances with batteries could catch on faster.
I don’t need a permit to get an ac that has it’s own battery pack. The overhead and total investment (let’s say 500 for a basic AC and 1k for one with batteries) is far far lower.
You aren’t wrong at all with your current critisism. I’m just at saying that I think the benefits to end users are sufficiently high and the barriers low enough well see wide scale adoption of in appliance batteries fairly soon
l.
Appliances have potentially serious failure modes that don’t involve battery fires. (We had one here a couple of weeks ago, which would have flooded out our basement if I hadn’t been able to cut power to the pump involved.) Being able to cut the power completely and instantly is not negotiable for a lot of appliances. I wasn’t even taking battery fires into consideration when I wrote about failure modes—I was talking about things that already happen to plug-in appliances right now.
Yes, the added weight and complexity are likely not all that significant here, but they’re sufficient that, even without the power-cutting issues, they outweigh any benefit of attaching a battery to the appliance directly. It’s just not a particularly useful idea when you get pretty much the same benefits with none of the downsides by incorporating the batteries into the building’s power system separately.
I think there is more to structure level battery support that you might consider which highlights why appliances with batteries could catch on faster.
I don’t need a permit to get an ac that has it’s own battery pack. The overhead and total investment (let’s say 500 for a basic AC and 1k for one with batteries) is far far lower.
You aren’t wrong at all with your current critisism. I’m just at saying that I think the benefits to end users are sufficiently high and the barriers low enough well see wide scale adoption of in appliance batteries fairly soon l.