Anker is making a giant battery pack for your house

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.