Sick of Power Outages? Back Up Your Whole House with the Mesh Home Battery

Having grown up in Hurricane Alley, I’ve weathered a few storms and stayed up plenty of nights (and some subsequent days) with no power, huddled around a book and a candle.

Plus, broad swathes of the South are awful at dealing with any amount of snow more than what you’d find in a snow globe, so I spent more than a few very cold winter days in a dark, unheated home when I lived in North Carolina.

Blankets and ice chests full of milk and eggs are all well and good when you’re just trying to get by, but if you want to maintain some level of comfort once the power goes out, whether it’s from a natural disaster or just our nation’s aging, shittifying electrical grid, think about a whole-house battery backup to keep your household’s essentials running.

You don’t have to carve out a bunch of space for a generator or rewire your home for a complicated solution. Last week, Pila Energy pulled the wraps off their Mesh Home Battery, a plug-in, modular smart battery for the home. No gasoline or storage headaches required.

once the blackout hits

Generators? I’ve used them. They’re large, so if you dwell in an apartment, forget it. Then you have to stock gasoline, too. They need storage preparation when not used, and care such as fuel stabilizers and clean spark plugs.

The Mesh Home Battery obliterates the need for all of that. It keeps charged while your home has power, and when the next blackout strikes, it’ll automatically kick in to keep your plugged-in appliances, lights, and more running.

“No rewiring, no extension cords, just seamless, integrated backup power for homeowners and renters alike,” as Pila put it. The battery stores 1.6kWh with a 2.4kW continuous output (7.8kW peak output), which is enough to run a refrigerator for 32 hours, charge a smartphone 113 times, or boil 15 pots of water on the stove.

At 15″ by 26.5″ by 3.3″ and 45 pounds, the Mesh Home Battery is compact enough to be stashed away almost anywhere – like above your fridge or behind your entertainment center. It’s far easier to store than a conventional generator.

There’s an optional expansion pack that doubles the battery capacity, as well as a solar panel (sold separately) that plugs into the Mesh Home Battery to steal those sun rays for recharging on sunny days. Just mount it to a deck railing or a balcony.

Got an especially power-hungry or big building? You can connect up to 64 Mesh Home Batteries together. The built-in, dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) and cellular 4G LTE connection will coordinate to work together and optimize energy usage across the home.

These days, so many of us work from home and rely upon our home internet so that we can do our jobs. Unlike a work office, which typically a back-up power generator and an IT department, you’re on your own if you’re working from home and the power goes out.

Without Wi-Fi, you’re stuck without a pay to earn that paycheck. The Mesh Home Battery can keep your Wi-Fi router online, as well as your devices, so that you can keep working even after the power goes out.

There’s also an optional smart power strip that adds three outlets and a USB-C port for charging more devices if the Mesh Home Battery’s built-in four outlets and four USB-C ports aren’t enough. Pila doesn’t have pricing on these three add-ons yet.

Over-the-air updates will be free as they become available. It’s also compatible with the Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and MQTT smart home hubs. Pila guarantees the Mesh Home Battery with a five-year warranty, although they say the battery should last for at least 10 years.

Right now you can reserve one for $99, although the total damage once it launches on sale is $999. That’s just the “exclusive, early access price,” though. Pila doesn’t say when early access ends, but if you place an order later on, you’ll have to pay the full $1,299 price. If you get cold feet, you can cancel your reservation and receive a refund.

All you need besides $99 is patience. Lots of it, because the Mesh Home Battery will start shipping to customers “by the end of 2025.” Let’s just hope America’s energy grid can last that long.