Hatch Sleep ClockEarly Black Friday DealsBest KindlesBest Tech GiftsDeals DeliveredGift Guides The Big InterviewMagazineEventsWIRED InsiderWIRED Consulting This battery backup system is designed with your refrigerator in mind, potentially offering up to two and a half days of emergency juice. Seamless failover when power cuts out. Discreet; disappears almost completely behind your fridge.
Reasonably mobile; can conceivably be used for other needs in a pinch. Scheduling system is very basic. No logging system to speak of.
Installation is tougher than it seems. (Learn from my mistakes!) Very costly; TOU rate-shifting benefits are minimal. Every part of a power outage is always a massive nuisance, but nothing is quite as aggravating as losing power to your refrigerator and the resultant spoilage of everything inside it. Homes with a whole-house battery backup can avoid this headache, but the cost for a system like a Tesla Powerwall can easily hit $15,000 after installation.
It takes an awful lot of melted ice cream for those numbers to balance out. BioLite—known for its range of lighting and portable power solutions—is on the cusp of launching an alternative to whole-house batteries. Backup by BioLite is a modular battery system designed specifically with the fridge in mind, offering long-term emergency power at a fraction of the cost of more complex systems and which homeowners can install themselves.
I installed it in my home and found it a capable (if limited) way to get a little extra peace of mind. Backup by BioLite is hardly a difficult concept to grasp. The massive battery—offering 1526 watt-hours of power with a rated output of 1800 watts (and supporting peak surges up to 3000 watts)—mounts on the wall behind your refrigerator, or it can simply sit on top of it.
The power pack measures 29 inches high by 13 inches wide, and a single unit weighs a hefty 40 pounds. No special wiring is required. You simply plug the Backup into a standard 120-volt outlet, then plug your refrigerator into the Backup.
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