this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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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.