You Don't Need an Electrician to Install This Smart Home Battery

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The former Tesla engineers who founded Pila Energy say their battery can make it easier and more affordable for consumers to weather power outages.

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 up-front 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 on 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, with an expandable backup unit that can take it to 3.2kWh of electricity. 

Pila Energy’s founders said the goal was to provide a lower-cost, easier way to back up key home appliances while also offering smart-home-style insights.

“It’s 2025, there are better ways to get people power that don’t require plugging in extension cords in the rain and starting up pull-start generators and that also don’t need to break the bank and cost you $30,000,” founder Cole Ashman told me at SXSW.

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. While one battery won’t qualify for the 30% federal tax credit, two or more would — because the total capacity would exceed the credit’s 3kWh minimum.

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.

Co-founder Chad Conway said homeowners who simply want to back up a few things can get a reliable backup system without paying tens of thousands of dollars to install a home battery. “Apartment-dwellers, too — everybody needs a solution. Across different income brackets, everybody needs something, and this is really the everybody battery,” he said.

Customers can start with one battery and add more to expand their backup capacity, either linking multiple batteries 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. The standard unit can recharge from a 100-watt portable solar panel. The extra backup unit, which increases the capacity to 3.2kWh, can charge from even more solar, up to 1,200 watts.

These batteries function essentially as portable power stations. Each battery includes four standard AC power outlets and three USB-C ports. They come with five-year warranties, and Pila Energy says they should last 10 years.

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. 

The batteries include customizable displays, with features like clocks and graphics showing their energy output. 

Beyond providing backup power to the refrigerator, the battery can help ensure your fridge is running properly. With a Bluetooth-connected temperature sensor, it can keep an eye on how cold the fridge is, letting you know if you need to consider maintenance or a replacement, or just if you left the door open.

The battery is built to work with other smart home ecosystems, such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home — although you can also use Pila Energy’s app. “Of course, we have a cloud (infrastructure), and we have an app, and we bring a lot of value, we think, but we’re not forcing people to use it,” Ashman said.