Hello Backup Reservation Holders,
Here’s what’s going on in September:
- Product Progress: major milestone in safety testing
- Backup In Use: Climate Week Demos & Top Qs
- What’s Next: Round 2 User Testing
Product Progress: UL 1973 Testing Complete (And Passed!)
We have finished UL 1973 testing and have passed all the most challenging battery safety and temperature components of our program. We are currently awaiting the final report and certification to have in hand. This is huge!
What is UL Standard testing and why does it matter?
For the history nerds out there, UL stands for Underwriters Laboratories, an organization which traces its roots back to 1894, when electrical innovations like the incandescent light bulb were rapidly reshaping modern life but also creating new safety risks. They began by testing fire safety and electrical hazards for insurers—hence the name “Underwriters.” UL developed rigorous testing standards that quickly became trusted benchmarks and over the past century has evolved into a recognized worldwide symbol and de facto leader in safety certification across a variety of technologies and industries, providing a critical bridge between the end consumer and product manufacturer. Today, UL Testing happens all over the world through Nationally Recognized Testing Labs (NRTLs), accredited by UL to be a certifying body against the UL standard.
For Backup by BioLite (and many other products out there), the complexity of our design actually requires sort of a “nesting doll” of certification:
- The first layer happens with our build components: carefully vetted and selected sub-components that already come with previously certified UL labels. Our bill of materials has been reviewed by the lab for compliance to UL requirements.
- The second layer is battery module/pack level: this is a deep dive into our internal battery configuration and includes all of the safety protections we’ve designed. This is UL1973 → we are here, this is the testing we’ve just completed and will soon have a certification against.
- The third and final layer is to test and certify at the fully finished product level: Having just crossed the critical gate of UL1973, we are now cleared to move into this phase and certifying against the UL1778 standard. This final stage is scheduled to be complete by end of year.
A huge congrats to the team for all of their careful, detail oriented work in building a battery pack design and battery management system that has now been rigorously tested by an independent, accredited third party and passed the most difficult safety tests.
Backup at NYC Climate Week: Demos and Qs from Visitors
Backup was in full swing at NYC Climate Week, doing multi-hour demonstrations both at BioLite HQ (thank you to Kickstarter Backer, Eric, for coming!) and at That Marketplace of the Future where we set up alongside other innovative technologies to provide a glimpse into The Home Of The Future
Unintentionally, this actually became an excellent mini-field trial for Backup: our 9 hour demo was built around powering a large, side-by-side ice-making, water filtering style fridge that existed at the venue, and we were due to offer cold drinks throughout the day, powered by this (now off-grid fridge). Some surprises we didn’t anticipate:
- They unplugged the fridge prior to our setup, meaning Backup had to do extra work to cool the fridge down
- Other exhibitors asked if they could keep stuff in the fridge (ice and more beverages) requiring more items to be cooled down and maintained from an off-grid state, requiring even more energy usage
- Those same exhibitors would frequently visit to retrieve items from the fridge and replace with new room temperature items, meaning a lot of “open door time” and requiring the fridge (and Backup) to work overtime to maintain cool temperatures
- Offering lots of flavors of seltzer means people take a lot of time making their choice, again leading to more open door time :) (lesson learned!)
But here’s what was good about this:
- Backup did great!
- The App did great! And in particular, it did a great job of providing real-time feedback on the fluctuation of power consumption and how that impacted overall runtime calculations. For example, when the fridge got stuffed with a bunch of room temperature items, the fridge would really get to work, drawing upwards of 178-200W from Backup. When the fridge reached a stable temperature, that would plummet to a steady state of ~21W and stay there until someone either a) added more things to the fridge or b) opened the fridge with the doors wide open for several minutes (yes, we stayed calm). Additionally, when the wi-fi went on the fritz, the app bluetooth connection re-affirmed our ability to connect locally and stay in communication with the unit.
- We made it through extreme energy usage - and had power to spare! In fact, at the end of the night, a video interview was taking place next to us and the cameraperson’s power source died for their lighting rig. We couldn’t leave them hanging, so we plugged them into Backup and the interview was saved.
In addition to really putting Backup to the test, we fielded some excellent questions from visitors who were a mix of fellow energy professionals, engineers, students, families, and home renters and owners alike who were interested in making their spaces more resilient. One interesting observation we noticed as a team was that the question around Time of Use and saving on Energy Bills has definitely become a more frequent and mainstream topic of discussion. Folks were very happy to learn about Backup’s automatic scheduling capabilities (all done through the app).
What’s Next
As mentioned above, we’re heading into our final stage of UL certification (at the product level) and we’ll be conducting our final round of user field testing in the late fall. This will enable us to validate some additional installation locations as well as push on any final firmware tweaks we want to make to the system before mass production (and as a reminder, thanks to our Over-The-Air capabilities that were validated earlier this summer, if we uncover any tweaks in the future, you will be able to receive those updates directly to your unit).
Thanks for your support
- The BioLite Team
