What an installed home battery costs
The average installed price of a 13.5 kilowatt hour home battery was 15,647 dollars in the first half of 2026, according to EnergySage, a marketplace that collects installer quotes. That is the whole job, battery, wiring, permits and labour. Between 50% and 60% of it is equipment, so roughly 4 dollars in every 10 buys something other than the battery. Where you live matters as much as what you buy. The state average runs from 761 dollars per kilowatt hour in Arkansas to 1,586 in Louisiana. Read those numbers knowing the company publishing them makes its money from installers.
The cheap tier, portable power stations
A portable power station is a box with a battery, a socket and a handle. You plug appliances into it rather than wiring it into the house. A Jackery Explorer 300 holds 293 watt hours and costs 279 dollars. An EcoFlow Delta 2 Max holds 2,048 watt hours for 949 dollars. A Delta Pro Ultra holds 6,000 watt hours for 3,999.
A startup called Pila is selling something in between. Its 1.6 kilowatt hour unit is the size of a briefcase, plugs into an ordinary wall socket, and will run a typical fridge for 32 hours, or 64 with an expansion pack. It costs 1,299 dollars and is aimed at renters and flats, where nobody is allowed to open a breaker panel. Its chief executive used to engineer the Tesla Powerwall.
If you want to keep your critical appliances available — not resetting clocks, not having food waste, not having your internet die — that's hugely valuable.
Mackey Saturday, of R7 Partners, an investor in the company making the plug in battery. Source 5.
What you give up
Running a heat pump, a fridge, a laptop and a router for a day takes about 14 kilowatt hours. The Pila figure comes from source 5.
Show the numbers
| Jackery 300 | 0.29 |
| Pila | 1.6 |
| EcoFlow Delta 2 Max | 2.05 |
| Tesla Powerwall 3 | 13.5 |
Running a heat pump, a fridge, a laptop and a router for a single day takes about 14 kilowatt hours. Only the installed battery holds that much, and only just. The cheap units are not small versions of a home battery. They are a different thing, sized to keep a fridge cold and a phone alive rather than to run a house.
The Pila figure is a division I did, 1,299 dollars divided by 1.6 kilowatt hours. The other 2 are published. A portable price is a sticker price. An installed price includes labour and permits, so these are not the same kind of number.
Show the numbers
| EcoFlow Delta 2 Max | 463 |
| Pila, plug in | 812 |
| Tesla Powerwall 3, installed | 1,111 |
Per kilowatt hour the gap is real but smaller than the sticker prices suggest, and part of it is not the battery at all. It is the electrician, the permit and the switch that lets a wall mounted battery power your circuits while the street is dark.
The tax credit rule nobody mentions
Federal law used to pay 30% of a home battery through the residential clean energy credit. A battery qualified only if it had, in the words of the law, "a capacity of not less than 3 kilowatt hours". The Jackery, the Delta 2 Max and the Pila are all smaller than that, so the cheap tier never qualified for a cent of it. Only the largest portable unit here would have cleared it.
The same statute says the credit does not apply to expenditures made after December 31, 2025, and an expenditure counts when the installation is finished, not when you paid. A home battery switched on in 2026 gets nothing, at any size.