this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Adding batteries to a device has one advantage: portability. It also has mutiple disadvantages: batteries add weight, add design complexity, and make it more difficult to fully shut off power in an emergency.
Major household appliances aren't portable, and are subject to failure modes where you really do want to cut all the power right now and make sure it stays that way. Thus, the disadvantages of adding batteries directly to an appliance outweigh the advantages.
A power wall using this new battery tech would be great, though.
A couple things, and to be clear I'm really narrowly focused on appliances/ immobile applications. I don't think these heavier batteries are quite yet ready for things like phones, drones, scooters, EV's.
I think specifically this battery technology addresses your issues directly.
Firstly, there are actual reasons why current battery technologies are not allowed to be used in specific indoor applications, and that is thermal runaway (effectively your third criticism). Generally, LiPO's are not legally allowed for use in permanently installed indoor environments. The reason why is thermal runaway.
Here is a video of an idiot puncturing a lipo cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzBFCufUDq0
Here is a video of an idiot puncturing a sodium cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ya_ls1zkA
Spot the difference? Its the fire. The only reason we don't currently have LiPO's acting as stores of power for current technology is that you DO NOT WANT lithium fires to happen indoors. A sodium battery will explode (see idiot A). But it will not catch fire and will not create a thermal runaway situation.
Secondarily, appliances are already heavy. Adding weight for something like a battery isn't an issue because you don't need to move the thing very often. The amount of additional design complexity is small, and something we've basically already solved in so many ways. We don't need the portability we would need for a vehicle or cell phone.
Thirdly, I think the complexity is trivial. Complexity hasn't stopped producers from adding what amounts to a small computer to everything from a refrigerator to a tea kettle where literally a simple switch would do.
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.
Easily rectified by adding a physical cutoff.