this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
335 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
68131 readers
3293 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.