What's on Your SOLIX Wish List?

We’ve been working fast and furiously on product announcements this quarter, and for SOLIX in particular, it’s an exciting time.

We launched the SOLIX F3800 on Kickstarter, exceeding our goal for funding it. (Mazel tov to that team – they worked so hard for their successes!)

We brought out the SOLIX F2600 … very quietly.

I’ve had a big hand in the SOLIX C1000 launch – that team is crushing it with ideas and learning. (If you’ve got a C1000 or another SOLIX, be sure to check out this contest.)

All of this makes me wonder … what’s on your SOLIX SoGen Wish List this year?

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A local powergrid partnership could be a winner from a marketing perspective.

I see the use of Wifi and Bluetooth in some of the newer appliances so these are online.

If you could:

  • let the powergrid communicate with the Solix to instruct it to drain down it’s batteries when a deficit of renewables and
  • recharge itself when a surplues of renewables
  • so it blended stored energy from periods of peak supply into periods of peak demand, it would help reduce the need for fossil fuels.

The energy companies have been thinking about this for decades but something like a Solix could form part of the smart home where it cooperates with the energy supply to even-out demand.

Tell them The Professor ™ wants a free Solix in return for the idea :wink:

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I’m convinced I’m going to buy a c1000 with additional battery next year if we have a bad winter. So far, I’ve personally not needed a generator yet but one ice storm can change that rapidly. Good looking products!

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All would be good and have nice uses.

The two bigger powerhouses would be good for short time power outage, camping, or supplementing a gas generator for extended outages.

The two smaller are also nice for light, power of different devices as well. In the past, I used the the devices like the Anker 521 to power my internet and modem when there is nothing else to do in a power outage.

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For camping, I really want to get the Anker 548 Power Bank and some of the solar panels. The panels I could use 2-fold for charging my C1000 and using it as a trickle charger for my deep cycle batteries on my camper.

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LOL. I’ll tell them, @professor:)

I think you might be referencing Time of Use … With the SOLIX F3800 you can direct the unit to discharge and charge via solar on a timer.

The SOLIX HES X1, which will be released in the US only, at least initially, is a whole house system that connects to the grid and allows you to sell excess power back to the grid. (The F3800 doesn’t provide that feature.) To get the HES X1 to market our team has done a lot of homework and I’m sure that’s involved discussions with utility regulators in the US.

What are your thoughts on that, @professor?

The Reserve would be a great addition to your camp kit. I’d really like for you to have one, too, lol. But wait until you see what’s coming soon … we’ve got new small power stations in the C-series rolling out, and I think you’ll really dig them, Erich!

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Thanks for the heads up!

I can’t wait that long lol!! I gotta know. Any ETA on the annoucement?

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Nope … we’ll announce on Jan. 9!

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I choose not to like your post lol

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It’s not smart enough. There’s no communication between energy generating and energy consumption.

Time of use is “dumb” in that it is only local rather than regional.

Two example scenarios:

  • you’re in UK southern England it’s 6pm. The UK Met Office predicts that it’s about to get windy on Scotland at night in a few hours peaking 2am. So a forecast excess of renewables. Your Anker Solix is told at 7pm to stop drawing from the grid and then at 2am begins recharging.

  • you’re in USA California. A weather front is entering northern California, the temperature is about to dip. It’s still sunny in SoCal, so your Anker Solix is told by the grid to begin fuel heating the house.

The point is the grid and the Solix and the home communicate.

I renovated our thermal solar system (Hot water) this year
After 25 years of usage a hairline showed up in the inner!!! kettle of the boiler.
No chance to repair.
It was a all in one system.
Was innovative in those times.
But now its not.
I have a separate kettle and a control system incl. the pump.
More simple, but works fine.
I could use the 25 years old panels on the roof, so it was quite easy to swap

I could install solar panels etc.
But there are no more subsidies from the government here .
(Germany got absolutely bankrupt due government “skills”)
I will not do.
In the winter there is no input from those panels and the price guaranteed for the supply in the
public net can be altered easily.

And I can not use such “green modern heat pumps”
(no floor heating)
I am old and the house is old.
So any investment doesn’t make sense.

NO MORE CHANGES.:grin:

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That’s interesting. I thought of it this way: My utility company, Xcel, increases charges more per kWh from 10 a.m.-7 p.m. every day except weekends. I’ll pay more for the power use during those hours.

If I set up my SOLIX F3800 to charge during the overnight hours when rates are less, I can use the stored electricity from 10 a.m.-7 p.m. and pay less overall.

I think we’re talking about two different definitions of TOU, so I wonder if any organization has come up with “smart TOU.” That’s truly needed in many parts of the world.

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Would love to see max & min charge settings as per Ecoflow & Bluetti devices, ie charge from 20% and shut off charging at 80%

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Agreed! This would be great for using the UPS function, where the unit is plugged into AC power continuously.

I almost went with EcoFlow because they have the min/max charge setting when unit is plugged into AC power continuously, or at least most of the time. But Anker is just better, and has faster switching time. My main use for my Anker power station will be to protect some expensive sensitive network and security gear with PoE all over the place. So it will be in UPS mode most of the time.

I hope Anker adds the “battery protection” feature - maybe with a firmware update - so that max charge can be set to 80% to protect the batteries from being at 100% charge continuously.

I’d also like to see some statistics of power usage by each port. Clicking on the port in the app revealing a graph of energy consumption over time would be great. Would certainly help manage which devices you plug in and help plan your device usage when camping off grid. I work in the IoT space with remote monitoring of assets and their controllers and channels, assets such as refrigeration systems, HVAC, Lighting etc and understand how big data and telemetry is invaluable in driving decisions on energy management. I just feel a little underwhelmed by the historic data available in the Anker app.

Just bought an F2600. I perhaps naively assumed that there would be a Home Assistant integration for it, especially since it has wifi, but it turns out there is not (only for the European Solix E1600 unit). So, my wish list is for some sort of interface through which we can retrieve data about our Solix units. Anker doesn’t need to write the Home Assistant integration, just provide some minimum documentation on accessing the data via our Anker account, like the Anker app does. The Home Assistant community will do the rest.

Setup here: solarbank 2 pro, anker smart meter, solar panels

features:

  • how about an api to ready only query the devices, I’d like to incorporate it in my domotica
  • integration with shelly em3 pro (that can be queried and incorporated)
  • a 3 phase design like the solarbank 2 pro, 16/25A 3 phase/380v limited instead of ~3.5 A @ 230v
  • a scale design: how to start with A, extend to, increase to… etc. It looks like stuff can be integrated, but how ?
  • a localized functionality, not somewhere in the cloud, how about a docker image to run one’s ecosystem ?
  • solid state batteries !!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AZRPItAsfA