Anker is synonymous with battery packs for your phone, which help you to eke out a little more life from your device between power socket charges. And now it’s set to make its biggest one yet, but the battery is not for a handheld gadget – it’s for your whole house.
For people looking to live off the grid or rely on more environmentally-friendly electricity sources, solar power can be a great boon, but being reliant on the sun has its faults. In the evening and overnight you won’t be generating any electricity, and during the day you’ll likely produce more than you can use. This is where batteries like Anker’s newly announced Solix battery can come in.
Excess electricity produced by your panels can be stored in these battery packs for your home, and then – when the sun goes down – you can draw from them to keep your tech powered up. The largest Solix battery is roughly the size of a refrigerator, and depending on your needs you can get an array that offers 5kWh up to 180kWh.
Beyond giving you somewhere to store the excess electricity you’re generating, Anker says its Solix batteries will be handy in a blackout. Its largest capacity 180kWh array can apparently keep the lights on in a typical house for a whole week, which could come in handy if your local grid is impacted by extreme weather or experiences outages for other reasons.
According to Anker, its new Solix batteries are designed to be backwards compatible with your existing solar panel system as well as any new panels you’ll install. What’s more, it has plans to make the batteries capable of charging electric vehicles.
Anker hasn’t said when the new Solid batteries will launch, nor how much they will cost – just don’t expect the larger storage capacities to be cheap. Anker currently offers a 2kWh portable battery at $1,999 / £2,199 / AU$3,700 (the Anker SOLIX F2000, formerly the PowerHouse 767) so be prepared for the 180kWh battery to be very, very pricey.
For your house, and your tent
Alongside these massive batteries, Anker has also unveiled a smaller 192Wh Anker 548 power bank for $170 / £200 (around AU$250) that’s available in the US and UK right now. This stout battery is designed to be taken camping so you can charge gadgets like your phone or laptop even when you don’t have easy access to mains power.
According to the Anker website, this battery can charge an iPhone 14 ten times on a single charge, or keep its 3W light illuminated for 42 hours and 18 minutes.
In addition to this, the battery has a lantern you can pop in and out to illuminate your tent when it gets dark. It also has a screen on the front to show you how much power is left before the battery runs dry and needs to be recharged.
Looking for a more handheld battery pack? Check out our picks for the best power banks out there.