Whole-home backup with residential energy management and battery storage can be challenging when a household relies on multiple energy-hungry appliances, such as central air conditioning, electric stove, heat pumps, water heaters, and EV chargers. Homeowners often have to choose between adding more battery capacity that increases costs, or limiting appliance use during an outage.
The FranklinWH System offers a cost-effective approach to enable whole-home backup with a single aPower battery. Through intelligent load management, it can keep essential loads powered while controlling heavy-duty ones.
Whether for a typical household or a large home with greater energy demands, FranklinWH provides flexible, scalable backup solutions for different needs. This article explores innovative backup solutions FranklinWH offers, helping you choose the one that best fits your circumstances.
Whole-Home Backup with Intelligent Load Control
For homeowners who want to keep more of their home running without simply adding more batteries, whole-home backup with intelligent load control provides a more flexible approach of tiered load management. Instead of permanently excluding high-demand appliances from backup, these loads can be connected to controllable circuits and managed according to priority and available battery energy. Lower-priority loads can be gradually shed as battery capacity declines, preserving power for higher-priority appliances and extending overall backup duration.
With the aGate Smart Circuits Module, the FranklinWH System can be configured for two 240 V circuits, or for one 240 V circuit plus two 120 V circuits, allowing homeowners to manage several major household loads with a single battery. Scheduling and remote control is managed through the FranklinWH App For homes with a wider range of energy-intensive appliances that need more granular control, adding an aHub expands intelligent load management with up to four programmable 240 V circuits, which can be split to eight 120 V circuits, managed in the app alongside the aGate circuits.
This solution is best suited for homeowners who want affordable whole-home backup while maintaining access to selected high-power appliances during outages.
Advanced Whole-Home Backup with Complete Coverage
For homeowners who want the highest level of backup coverage, advanced whole-home backup with complete coverage places both essential and high-demand household loads on the backup side. Instead of deciding which appliances should be turned off during an outage, the system is sized to power the home as a whole.
The FranklinWH System with a single aPower provides 15 kWh of capacity and 10 kW of continuous output, sufficient for whole-home backup depending on the energy consumption profile. For larger homes or households with unusually high energy demand, more aPower batteries may need to be added to increase available storage and backup capability. The FranklinWH System is highly scalable, supporting up to 15 aPower batteries per aGate for a total of 225 kWh of storage.
This solution is best suited for large families with exceptionally advanced energy demands, expecting to maintain normal household comfort during an outage without routinely restricting any appliances they use.
The FranklinWH System is built to adapt as household energy needs grow, without requiring homeowners to fully build out the entire system at the time of installation. Homeowners can start with a more affordable configuration and expand as their backup needs, appliance loads, or budget evolve. Over time, they canintegrate additional energy sources such as generators (agnostic to all models) and vehicle-to-load (V2L), and use the aHub to further expand load control and energy-source management.
FranklinWH aPower S: The New Paradigm of Home Battery Backup
The FranklinWH aPower S is an advanced battery storage solution built for new solar and storage installations, bringing solar generation and battery storage into a more integrated architecture. With a built-in hybrid inverter, it enables direct connection to solar panels, eliminating the need for a separate solar inverter and helping reduce external hardware and simplify installation.
- Integrated solar and storage: The built-in four MPPT inputs and hybrid inverter allow the aPower S to accept up to 20 kW of solar per unit to meet high energy demand, while multiple solar inputs provide greater flexibility for panels installed across different roof planes or other complex layouts.
- Global MPPT algorithm: The proprietary Global MPPT technology is designed to adjust to changing light conditions and improve solar energy harvest, particularly when arrays experience variable irradiance or partial shading.
- Scalable capacity: Each aPower S provides 15 kWh of storage and can be combined with additional aPower S or aPower 2 units. The FranklinWH System can scale up to 15 batteries per aGate controller, or 225 kWh, providing room for backup capacity to grow with household energy demand.
- Long-term reliability: The aPower S uses LFP battery chemistry, delivers industry-highest 90.5% round-trip efficiency, and offers a 15-year/60 MWh throughput warranty (with no cycle limit), enabling efficient, long-term operation and greater peace of mind.
As part of the FranklinWH System, the aPower S helps homeowners significantly strengthen home energy resiliency by working in concert with solar, the grid, generators, and other power sources.
Conclusion
With the FranklinWH System, whole-home backup does not have to follow a fixed configuration. Homeowners can start with essential-load backup, or even achieve practical whole-home backup with a single battery, depending on their energy consumption, and then add intelligent load control for greater comfort and scale battery capacity as energy demands increase. This flexibility allows homeowners to balance backup duration, comfort, performance, and budget while reinforcing overall home energy resiliency.