At first glance this looks amazing. An entire solar kit in a box that can plug into your electrical grid and save you thousands!!

Wrong.

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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/craftstrom/plugandplay-smart-solar-home-battery-modular-and-affordable/description

First lets see what you're getting.

22 AH Battery
They're spec'ing 1056 watt hours so to get 22AH they are running it at 48 volts. This makes sense because residential power is 48 v.

But when you are off grid charging your shit, you're going to be using 12v.

At 12v you get 88 amp hours, which is less capacity than a standard car battery. To put this into perspective, we run our rig on (6) 6V batteries for a total of 768 amp hours at 12v.

Their battery can recharge laptops, drones, a few times, but it won't last a day.

To recharge this they're giving you a 300 watt solar panel. The panel alone is $799, which comes down to about $2.66 per watt. The average price for normal panels are $1 a watt, and our previous system on our rig, I got those panels for $0.60 a watt.

The panels we have on our rig now are very pricey at $3.70 a watt, so $2.66 a watt isn't unheard of.

I can't seem to find any specs on the controller but I'm going to assume inferior PWM vs an MPPT based solar controller.

The battery has a built in inverter with a 500 watt cap; this is limited to electronic devices. Don't count on running coffee pots, insta-pots, or microwaves off of this.

So what about cost? That's what's rather insane about this; $1800!!

$1800 for this is a complete rip off. You would be get a lot more bang for your buck by getting something from Jackery or GoalZero.

But this can plug into your grid!

Sorry, but a 300 watt panel isn't going to do anything more than charge your tiny electronic devices.

And this kickstarter campaign is sold out already because people want to be green! They want to help by using less of the grid, and companies like this are banking on that.

Verdict: Hard pass on this. Save your money for something better from established companies.

P.S - If you ever need or want advice on powering your lives with solar please reach out at any time!