Whether you want to buy cheaper electricity, store solar energy, or guard against outages, EcoFlow’s home battery might be just what you need.
Most days the battery lasts until between 4 and 6 pm. If everyone is at home or if I happen to be running a lot of power-hungry devices (electric shower, washing machine, dishwasher, oven, induction hob), the battery runs out in the early afternoon. I’d probably need an extra two batteries to make it through a full day without drawing from the grid.
It came with the EcoFlow PowerInsight, a 10-inch tablet for power monitoring and control, but I haven’t touched it since the first week. All of the functionality is accessible in the smartphone app, and the tablet itself is slow. My setup doesn’t require much tinkering, but the app shows me the discharge rate in real time and features various graphs showing our power usage. We are consistently getting around the stated 10 kWh—sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. There are settings to manage solar and export to the grid, but I’m not using them yet.
Aside from that, the operation has been plain sailing. It’s unobtrusive, very quiet (around 30 decibels), and has recovered just fine when turned off and on again for other electrical work and after a brief power cut.
Photograph: Simon Hill
When it comes to working out how much money the battery is saving me, I have a few complicating factors. I’ve only had the battery for two months, and I haven’t lived in this house long enough to do a direct comparison with the same month last year. I also had a new air-source heat pump installed a month ago, replacing a gas boiler for heating and hot water.
Just comparing the first month of the battery with the previous month, it cut my electricity bill in half. At that rate, it will take around six years to pay for itself. If you use an agile tariff, you can potentially have the app automatically charge up when electricity is at its lowest price, so there’s room to squeeze even more value from it. If you have solar panels and export to the grid, you can store and buy electricity when the price is low and sell high.
