Pila, in familiar terms

I’m a product person. I think in analogies.

After explaining Pila thousands of times – to investors, engineers, utilities, and whoever makes the mistake of asking what I do at a dinner party – I’ve collected a few that tend to stick.

Pila is a plug-in home battery system. You put these battery nodes near the appliances you care about, and they coordinate as a meshed network: keeping things running during outages, managing energy through the day, and helping you understand what’s happening in your home.

That description is accurate. But if you’ve never lived with something like it (and today, only ~1% of US households own a home battery) a familiar comparison helps.

These analogies each explain a piece of what we’re building. They also undersell it a little. We’re building infrastructure that people and the grid can depend on for years. But that infrastructure lives in your kitchen and home office, so it needs to make sense there too.

Sonos, with a Bluetooth speaker for on-the-go

Think about a beautiful, professionally installed home audio system: speakers in the walls, cables routed through the house, an amplifier in a closet. An incredible experience, especially when you can plan it into a renovation or new build.

That’s how I think about Powerwall and other professionally-installed home batteries. I helped build products in that category, and I love what they can do. They’re also a project: someone needs to design the system, work on your electrical infrastructure, and install it.

Sonos offered another way to get music throughout a home. Start with one speaker. Add another room when you’re ready. Take the system with you when you move. The software makes separate pieces feel like one product.

That’s much closer to the experience we’re creating with Pila.

Now, a Sonos owner might also have a JBL Bluetooth speaker for the beach. It serves a different purpose. You toss it in a bag, take it camping, and charge it when needed.

But putting seven portable speakers around your house and manually connecting to each one isn’t the home audio experience most people want.

Portable power stations have a similar role. Many are great for camping, a job site, or occasional backup. Pila starts with a different question: what should a battery system feel like when you live with it every day?

That means automatic charging, coordinated behavior, useful software, and hardware you want to leave in the room. The experience between the batteries matters as much as the batteries themselves.

What Powerwall did for lead-acid battery banks, Pila is doing for the UPS

Powerwall didn’t invent the home battery.

Long before it, people assembled systems from lead-acid battery banks, 48V inverters, charge controllers, solar MPPT modules, and a healthy amount of expertise. Those systems could do serious work. They also required someone who understood how all the parts fit together to install and maintain it.

Across successive generations, Powerwall turned more of that integration work into a product: a high-capacity lithium battery, advanced power electronics, controls, and software designed to optimize energy across the home. It became something a solar contractor could deploy repeatedly, with a customer experience that included solar storage, energy visibility, and rate optimization – not just backup power.

I wrote about that evolution and what we learned: One Tactical Unlock at a Time: How Tesla Built Powerwall.

We saw a similar opportunity with the familiar old-school lead-acid UPS – the uninterruptible power supply under your desk. The basic consumer UPS keeps your computer or router alive for a short interruption. It generally doesn’t have the power to start larger appliances like a fridge, sump pump, or window A/C, or the battery capacity to keep them running through a meaningful outage. You mostly remember it exists when it beeps in the middle of the night because it needs a replacement battery.

And backup is usually where its job ends. Out of the box, it doesn’t manage energy around solar or utility rates, or put your appliances’ energy usage in context.

You can add monitoring and control with smart outlets, sensors, and your own Home Assistant setup. Plenty of our customers enjoy that project. (We’re that kind of energy nerd ourselves!)

Pila brings the battery, outlet controls, and energy software together in one device – with the power and capacity for those larger appliances. It manages charging around energy prices and available solar, coordinates with other batteries, and puts energy usage in context. And hey, if you want to build your own automations our Home Assistant integration gives you super rich battery and outlet telemetry to work with.

The shift is from something you occasionally remember to something useful every day. Our “Why Pila?” page gets into the practical differences.

Mesh Wi-Fi, for power

Getting reliable internet throughout a home once often meant running Ethernet to the rooms that needed it. Later, a single Wi-Fi router worked well in some homes and left a stubborn dead zone in others.

Mesh Wi-Fi made expanding coverage much more approachable. Put a node where you need it. Add another as your needs change. Let the system handle the coordination.

Pila brings that pattern to home energy. A battery by the fridge. Another in the office. Another near a sump pump. You can protect more of what matters without redesigning the entire installation each time.

Each battery powers the devices connected to it; the mesh shares information and coordinates decisions. It doesn’t send electricity wirelessly between rooms.

The larger idea is an architecture that adapts to the building. A Brooklyn studio and a small business with several refrigerators need different configurations, but they can share a platform.

For infrastructure, that flexibility changes how quickly you can deploy, how easily you can expand, and who can participate in the first place.

Roku, for the fridge and appliances you already own

Streaming boxes like Roku and Apple TV gave people a new television experience without asking them to replace their television.

That is a very useful pattern when you’re building for the installed world.

We could’ve started by designing a refrigerator with a battery inside it. But fridges come in so many shapes, sizes, and finishes that we’d need an entire appliance lineup to serve a broad range of homes. And people would still have to replace a fridge that might work perfectly well.

With a standalone Pila, we can work with the compatible fridge they already own. One product can serve many different kitchens and get people protected much sooner. If the goal is to reach many homes and deliver meaningful impact, it’s a much more practical place to start.

Fun connection: Bould Design, our industrial design partner, also helped shape generations of Roku products.

Over time, streaming became built into many televisions. Home energy may evolve similarly: batteries integrated alongside or inside some appliances, standalone batteries serving others, and different configurations for different buildings.

We’re focused on the platform that makes those devices work together: local coordination, secure control, and a consistent experience as the hardware evolves and diversifies.

Speed matters here. Every home we can serve today is a home that doesn’t have to wait for its appliances to be replaced. It also gives us another opportunity to learn quickly as we build towards our next generation of products and services.

An Apple Watch for your fridge

An Apple Watch, WHOOP band, or Oura ring takes measurements to help you understand patterns, and tell you useful insights about your health.

Putting persistent sensing at the outlet gives us a similarly close view of appliances’ health. Measuring a home’s energy usage at the whole-home meter level means observing many loads grouped together and trying to infer which appliance did what. At the outlet, we can measure the connected loads directly without guesswork.

Add our fridge and freezer sensors and we get more context about what’s happening inside, too – temperature, humidity, and light.

That creates more opportunity to answer questions people actually care about:

• Is my fridge staying cold enough?
• Did someone leave the door open?
• Why is it running so much more than usual?
• Is it wasting energy?
• Are there signs that something needs attention?

Some of this is straightforward sensing and alerts. Some is personalized appliance intelligence as Pila learns your specific appliances’ unique rhythms.

Either way, “your freezer is warming up” is a lot more useful than another abstract kilowatt-hour chart.

Going a step further: By understanding each appliance’s behavior and energy profile, we can help to make better decisions about when the battery charges, what to power when, how to use a limited backup reserve, and how to maximize energy savings at the home level without impacting comfort or convenience.

A little broadband thinking for the power grid

Now, let’s zoom out from the kitchen.

When you stream a video, the broadband network doesn’t need to deliver each frame at the exact instant you watch it. Your device buffers data, creating some flexibility between delivery and consumption.

Historically, the power grid has had much less of that flexibility. Generation and demand have to stay balanced in real-time, and we’ve built enormous amounts of infrastructure around serving inflexible peak loads.

Energy storage like batteries allows us to separate when electricity arrives from when an appliance uses it. Charge when energy is abundant or demand is lower. Supply the connected appliance from the battery when the grid is under strain. The fridge stays cold while drawing less from the grid at that moment.

Electricity has physical constraints that data doesn’t. But the useful parallel is buffering: storage gives the system more room to manage timing.

Coordinate that across enough homes and businesses, and it becomes meaningful infrastructure that reduces the cost borne by all ratepayers. The challenge is getting batteries deployed, keeping them reliably connected, and knowing how to control them without compromising what people need.

This time-shifting ability of energy storage is why batteries will define the next 100 years of the power grid.

The familiar experience is part of the infrastructure

In all of these comparisons, there’s one common ambition: Make sophisticated energy technology accessible to ordinary households.

A battery that you can simply plug in today gets deployed sooner, with less headache. A system designed to expand easily reaches more appliances. Useful daily insights give people a reason to get engaged. Local control lets essential functions keep working when connectivity (or the grid) fails.

The person buying Pila may simply want the fridge to stay cold and home Wi-Fi to keep working through a storm. Our job is not to make them energy experts who track every kWh. The experience can be simple and delightful, while packing in serious infrastructure to keep the invisible world of power running more reliably at lower cost, so we can all focus on the things that matter more to us.

This post first ran on my Substack: Pila, in familiar terms. If you want more of this kind of writing on home energy and building Pila, you can subscribe there.