Review: Backup by Biolite

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.

Smart Cells

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.

Want more power? Backup’s Core unit can be daisy-chained to a Backup Extend add-on device, an identically sized (but slightly lighter) unit that doubles the power capacity to 3072 Wh.

Depending on your refrigerator, the full “Backup Complete” solution, with two cells, can provide up to 60 hours of running time if the grid goes down. If that’s not enough, additional Backup Extend devices can be added in series, with a total maximum capacity of 10.5 KWh. (Though, at that point, you may as well spring for a whole-house solution.)

DIY Time

One of the biggest selling points of Backup by BioLite is that you can install it yourself, with no electrician. I’ve got no trouble wielding a drill, so I undertook the effort to see if BioLite’s promise of a 30-minute install would pan out. I tested Backup Complete, with two Backup batteries situated side by side.

The process seems straightforward (and is enhanced by a helpful printed manual), but I quickly learned that my refrigerator’s location—tucked into an alcove—would complicate things because of the limited space in which to work. BioLite suggests having an extra pair of hands to hoist the heavy battery packs into place, but there was simply no room for my wife to squeeze into the alcove to help with any of the process. I managed on my own, but I expect this will present a challenge for some.

The batteries mount to metal brackets, and BioLite provides a template to help you position them properly and ensure they are level. It’s essential that the two batteries in a Backup Complete arrangement be located at a specific distance from one another, as the cable that connects the two is limited in length.

I dutifully chose a location for the template, ensuring that the batteries—once attached to the wall—would not block access to the electrical outlet. Since my outlet is placed 3 feet off the ground, that meant hanging the batteries high, with the tops level with my eyeline.

Photograph: Christopher Null

BioLite provides all the hardware you need to mount the units in drywall, including anchors and screws. I tried to find a stud to anchor at least one of the screws, but found none in the spots where I needed them. Oddly, I had to use my own drywall anchors for some of the screws, as BioLite’s screw-in style anchors refused to engage and drive into the wall. (I don’t blame BioLite for this but rather some peculiarity with how that section of wall was constructed.)

With holes drilled and anchors set, I carefully attached the metal brackets to the wall. Everything looked level and sturdy, at which point I heaved the first of the massive batteries into place. Or, at least, I tried to. Turns out, I’d made a massive mistake. My idea was to mount the bracket so the Core battery was flush with the right-hand wall, but unfortunately, the Backup template isn’t designed with enough buffer space on each side of the brackets. The batteries stick out well beyond the sides of the brackets and a bit beyond the template; in my case, with the template flush with the wall, the battery pushed up against the wall and was unable to properly seat atop the bracket. Even if it had, it wouldn’t have mattered: The outlets for the Core battery are on its right side, so you need another few inches to make room to plug things into it (and to scan the QR code printed there during setup).

All of that is a long way of saying that BioLite simply needs to make its template larger to account for the extra room needed on the right side of the device. It’s also a long way for me to say that I then had to disassemble the brackets and redo the entire thing, shifting everything left a few inches.

Photograph: Christopher Null

With my brackets finally repositioned, I was able to mount the batteries on them. The shape of the cells and their lack of handholds makes them a little awkward to wrestle into place—particularly after my earlier mishaps with the misplaced brackets—but once I had them hanging where they were supposed to be, secured with a single screw on the underside of the bracket, everything felt amply secure. The entire process took about 90 minutes.

With all that said, if I had to do it again, I’d strongly consider just dropping the batteries on top of the fridge instead of bothering with the wall mount, a setup fully endorsed by BioLite. This would save a lot of time and headache, and this design would make them far easier to move elsewhere in case of future emergencies.

Energized

After plugging everything in, the batteries begin charging automatically. Some status lights on the left side of each battery indicate charge level, but these were hard to see, especially after pushing the fridge back into place. (I also noted that my fridge is no longer flush with the wall, now sticking out a couple extra inches due to the added hardware behind it.)

Photograph: Christopher Null

Before replacing the fridge, I made sure I had the app setup. As noted earlier, BioLite’s Backup app requires you to scan a QR code on the side of the battery, but after that it’s a fairly quick jog through pairing the units with your phone, then bridging them to connect to your home Wi-Fi network. A firmware update then started, during which my refrigerator was without power, though this only took a few minutes.

While the Backup app is intuitive and easy to use, I was a little surprised by how simplistic it is—perhaps overly so. Front and center, you’ll see some basic stats: Battery charge level, and energy input and output levels—including whether you are drawing from the battery or the grid. If you have solar power (I don’t), this is split from grid power input so you can track usage types. If you have multiple Backup batteries, you can drill down to see the battery life remaining for each.

BioLite has done a generally great job with Backup’s emergency power features. When I cut the input power manually by tripping the circuit breaker, the battery kicked in immediately and without delay. Batteries draw down roughly equally, ensuring that over time they’ll be taxed at about the same rate. (BioLite specs that after 4,000 cycles, total capacity should remain at 80 percent of each battery’s original maximum.)

What’s missing? When the power goes out, there’s no audible alarm or other notification, except for a push notification that’s sent to your app. An alarm option would be helpful, as would a notification when power is restored. As it stands, the only way to know if the power is on is to check the app to see where output to the refrigerator is coming from. It also looks like BioLite’s estimate of my backup time (“a day”) is overly optimistic. Based on my refrigerator’s average draw of 170 watts, I expect I’d have on the order of 18 hours of reserve power, which BioLite’s app should be able to easily calculate. (That said, I have avoided running the batteries down to zero, as I wanted to preserve their longevity.)

ScreenshotBioLite Backup app via Christopher Null

ScreenshotBioLite Backup app via Christopher Null

As with all home batteries, there’s some bonus value in Backup to be found in running the battery when there’s not a power outage. That’s because you can take advantage of Time of Use (TOU) rate billing from your utility, running off of battery power during peak times when rates are high (usually the afternoon and evening), and drawing from the grid and recharging the batteries when rates are low. I had to do some research to find out if my utility provider even offered TOU billing, as I’ve had a conventional, static rate plan since we moved into this house four years ago. Turns out they did, and I promptly switched over to the new one to give this a try.

It’s easy to set up a battery schedule in the Backup app: Just set the time each day you want the battery to kick in and the time for it to switch back to grid power under the Scheduling tab. Charging can be paused during certain times of the day as well, and you can set a lower limit for how far the batteries can drain. Weekends can be excluded from all of this at your discretion.

Unfortunately, that’s it: You can’t set multiple on/off cycles during the day (my provider has two peak disconnected billing times during the winter, so this would have been nice), nor can you set different schedules for different times of year (again, my provider has three different billing schedules, depending on the month). If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on backup batteries, it would be useful to be able to really fine-tune how they’re used. I did encounter one bug when trying to save the schedule, but a quick force-quit and restart ultimately got everything working fine.

The other missing feature is a log. Power nerds like me would love to see how long the battery ran each day, how much power was used during each run, how much power it required to recharge it, and potentially how much money was saved. Unfortunately, there’s no logging system at all in the Backup app aside from a simple record of when outages happened along with any errors or updates.

It’s easy to do the rough math on how much money I’m now saving. For the fall, I am able to shift four hours (5 to 9 pm) of refrigerator running time that would normally cost 8.6 cents per kWh to the BioLite batteries, which recharge after hours at 4.3 cents per kWh. While the numbers are surely imperfect due to the vagaries of energy loss among these various components, I’m now able to move 680 Wh of usage from the higher rate to the lower rate each day. Total savings: 3 cents per day, or about a dollar a month. That’s admittedly not very impressive, but in the summer months, the peak usage rate here hits 16.2 cents per kWh, moving monthly savings up to three dollars each month.

OK, still not that impressive, but not nothing.

A Costly Life Vest

One final feature of note is that BioLite ships the unit with a power strip, complete with an optional magnetic backing that lets you slap it onto the side of your fridge. This power strip attaches to a second outlet on the Backup and can be used to connect additional devices to your battery backup system. The power strip is totally optional, but it’s a capable product, with three standard outlets, two USB-A, and two USB-C plugs. Ultimately, I didn’t use it because I didn’t have anywhere convenient to place it, and nothing to plug into it anyway, but it’s a nice-to-have feature that I’ll hold onto in case the power cuts out this winter and I want to run other devices in the dark. With 1800 watts of output, the battery is strong enough to power everything from a microwave oven to an air fryer.

That’s just a small bonus to push the value of Backup by BioLite a bit further into sanity because at $1,999 for a single battery and $3,499 for the pair, the math isn’t easy to justify. Realistically, the real benefit to the system comes almost entirely from its use in case of emergency, protecting what could be hundreds of dollars of groceries from spoiling because of a random ice storm—and making it possible to cook them, too, even if the lights in the rest of the house are out.

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