Home batteries are being designed wrong
Picture an aeroplane
You’ve probably seen thousands or aeroplanes in your life - flying high overhead, parked up at an airport, or maybe even on the news dumping water over a raging forest fire.
I’m guessing when asked to picture an aeroplane you might have pictured a narrow-body, twin-engine jet airliner, like the one that took you on holiday over summer?
But aeroplanes come in all different shapes and sizes. Below is an example of two of them.
Someone going aeroplane shopping isn’t going to be choosing between these two. They’re both aeroplanes, but they’re designed for completely different things and would be useless at doing each other’s jobs.
Picture a home battery
You probably don’t think about home batteries every day like we do, but if I asked you to picture a home battery, what would it look like?
Your first thought might go to the drawer in your home where batteries like this languish.
But if you imagine a home battery system in the context of an environmentally-friendly home, maybe you’ll think of this kind of thing?
These batteries are great at what they do. Typically their purpose is to store excess electricity generated by the solar panels on your roof.
However, statistically speaking, it’s very unlikely that you live in a house with solar panels on your roof. Only around 5% of UK homes have them.¹
So why are all batteries designed for people in these type of homes?
The Windfall Battery
There are many reasons why solar panel adoption is still rather limited. Although prices have come down over the years, solar panels are still expensive to buy and install. So you need to be able to afford them in the first place and then wait for the payback which can take ten years or more.
Another overlooked reason people don’t have solar panels is that they simply can’t - they don’t own a roof.
For people in this situation (like me and my co-founder, Ashley who both live in flats), bills are going up and we’re powerless to do anything about it.
That’s why we came up with the Windfall Battery. It’s still a home battery, but it’s a completely different product, designed differently, and for a totally different group of users.
We’ve discussed before why existing batteries, like a Tesla Powerwall for example, simply aren’t designed for flats.
To get to the Windfall Battery, we started with a clean sheet of paper. We wanted to create a home battery for all the people who don’t have the luxury of a roof, and a garage or a basement to hide away a big ugly box bristling with cables and extra boxes.
Not only is the Windfall Battery technically optimised for a small home, it’s designed to be something you’d actually want in your home.
Imagine if the only aeroplanes available were Airbus A380s. That's what the home battery market looks like today. Clean home energy products shouldn’t just be for the 5%. So next time you picture a green home, it doesn’t have to be a big house in the country.
Ready to start saving on energy bills without installing a single solar panel? Learn more about the Windfall Battery and sign up to the waitlist here.
¹ https://www.gov.uk/government/news/homeowners-could-save-hundreds-on-energy-bills-from-solar-drive
