This guide follows Whole Home Backup Power Setup | Anker SOLIX E10 Complete Installation from Steve DOES, published about seven months ago and sitting at roughly 183,000 views. It is one of the few whole-home battery videos online where the installer actually stands next to the camera and explains what he did to the panel, which makes it more useful than the usual spec-sheet tour. Steve's own setup is a partial backup: twelve circuits moved into a dedicated combiner panel, three batteries on the wall, one inverter on top, no solar yet. Everything below is drawn from what he and Cory from Deans Electric say on camera, with our own notes where the numbers need translating.
What the E10 system physically is
Strip the marketing away and the system is three parts: a wall-mounted inverter, a stack of 6 kWh battery modules underneath it, and a transfer panel that sits between your utility service and the circuits you want to keep alive. In Steve's install there are three batteries, one inverter, and a combiner panel holding twelve branch breakers. He calls that a partial backup, and he is right — the air conditioner, the whole-house fan and a handful of other circuits came over, but not the entire service.
The panel is where the intelligence lives. Inside it you get the twelve branch circuits, four inlets, a smart switch at the bottom, and a set of current transformers clamped on the incoming legs. Those CTs are doing more work than they look like they are: they tell the system how many amps the house is pulling per leg, and that reading is what lets it decide when to discharge batteries instead of buying power. If your utility has shifted to time-of-use rates, this is the part that pays for itself.
Anker quotes 6 kWh per battery module and up to five modules per inverter, with three inverters stackable. Do that arithmetic and the ceiling is 90 kWh. Steve says "90,000 kW" on camera and the number is wrong by three orders of magnitude. More than one commenter caught it, and it matters — 90 kWh is a serious house bank, 90 MWh is a substation.
The install day, in the order it happened
The electrician's sequence is worth copying even if you never touch this brand. First the loads come out of the main panel: each existing circuit that is moving is capped or wire-nutted, extended through the wall, and re-landed on a new breaker inside the combiner. Every conductor gets labelled as it moves, which is the difference between a panel you can troubleshoot in five years and a panel nobody wants to open.
Then the CTs go on. On a Square D panel the CT landing point sits on live busing, so this step is done with the meter pulled. Cory is blunt about it: Southern California Edison will disconnect the meter for free, and a homeowner should not be inside that panel with the service energized. That single sentence is probably the most valuable minute in the video.
Only after the loads and the CTs are in does the inverter get tied in — AC input from the grid side, AC output back-feeding the backup panel, two PV inputs on the top of the unit, and the DC generator input. Steve's inverter ended up with two 15 A solar inputs rated to 450 V DC each, a shutdown and power button, and one spare DC source connection.
Breakers, lugs, and the detail most videos skip
Because the circuits were extended more than six feet, the install needed arc-fault protection on the moved loads. That is a code requirement in California and in most of the NEC world, and it is the kind of line item that shows up late in a quote if nobody planned for it. Cory put new AFCI breakers in rather than reusing the old ones, which is the correct move when the conductors are new to the panel.
The heavier circuits got lugs instead of wire nuts. Cory's rule of thumb is that wire nuts are fine under about 20 A, and once you are dealing with a compressor that runs for hours, a mechanical lug makes a stronger joint that generates less heat. If you have ever smelled a warm wire nut behind a dryer, you know why he bothers.
There is also a generator or load space in the combiner where a two-pole breaker can back-feed the batteries directly, and a separate PV section for an existing solar system. Steve's house has neither yet. He says plainly that he bought the battery before the panels and does not recommend that order — the system is designed to be fed by solar, and without it you are charging from the grid and arbitraging rates instead of generating.
Three inputs that can run at the same time
Grid first. The unit accepts 120/240 V split-phase and up to 9.6 kW of AC input, which is fast enough to refill a working bank between storms. It also passes power through while charging, so the house does not go dark because the batteries are busy.
Solar second. Each inverter takes up to 9 kW of PV, which becomes 27 kW across three stacked units, with an input window of 30 to 450 V DC. That range is wide enough to accept a string of residential panels directly, which is the whole point of a hybrid box.
Third is Anker's DC smart generator, which is a different animal from a portable gas unit. It outputs a constant 4.5 kW DC without the AC-to-DC conversion loss, starts and stops on battery state of charge, and runs self-tests. Steve cannot use one in his location, so this part of the video is spec-sheet material rather than field footage. The useful point is that all three inputs can operate simultaneously: generator running, sun comes out, solar chips in, grid returns, everything hands back without a manual step.
Output: impressive numbers, with one caveat
One inverter delivers 7.6 kW continuous; three deliver 22.8 kW; 240 V split phase means big loads like HVAC compressors are in scope. There is a turbo mode that holds 10 kW for up to 90 minutes, and a per-unit startup surge number that Steve quotes as 37 kW — 66 kW with two units — which is how he frames running multiple five-ton air conditioners.
Treat the surge figure as marketing until you have seen a clamp meter on it. Surge ratings are measured for fractions of a second under lab conditions, and the real question for a house is whether the compressor starts on a hot afternoon with the well pump already running. The video does test something close to that, and we will get to it.
The transfer time is quoted at 20 milliseconds, which is the number that decides whether your desktop reboots. Twenty milliseconds is faster than a UPS handoff on most consumer units and comfortably inside one AC cycle, so clocks and computers ride through.
Two tests, both louder than a spec sheet
Test one: someone flips the main breaker while the cameras roll. Lights stay on, nothing flickers, no beeping from the electronics. That is the whole point of a battery backup and it is boring in the best way.
Test two is the interesting one. Steve turns on the air conditioner and then the whole-house fan, and watches the app. Draw jumps from about 1.6 kW to 4.7 kW, with a spike he reads as roughly 2.9 kW of surge on top before the load settles. No dimming, no dropout. It is not a five-ton compressor starting against a full house, but it is a real inductive load stack and the system shrugged.
What the video does not show is a multi-hour outage with a heat pump running, which is the scenario that actually sizes a bank. If you are in a wildfire-shutoff state, that is the test you care about, and it is a load calculation rather than a camera test.
The app settings that decide the bill
Four screens matter. Time of use lets you define seasons, peak windows and your own cents-per-kWh, and the system switches the house onto batteries at the boundary. Steve runs 4 pm to 9 pm on battery every day, at 59 cents peak versus roughly 20 to 26 cents off-peak, which is a rate arbitrage rather than a backup feature.
Storm guard watches weather and charges to full before a system arrives. Manual backup mode forces 100% on demand. Off-grid mode turns the unit into a standalone source for a cabin or a job site.
The one that surprised him is circuit priority. You can drag circuits into must-have, nice-to-have and non-priority buckets, and the system sheds the lower tiers as the bank drains — garage and kids' playroom drop off at 50%, fridge and network stay on. If you have ever watched a battery hit 15% with the oven still drawing, you understand why this exists. Individual circuits can also be switched off from the app, and two circuits can be merged into one tile by dragging them together.
Four ways to buy into the platform
The power dock is what Steve has: the smart panel that manages all inputs and schedules. It is optional. The cheaper path is a smart inlet box, which keeps manual control and time-of-use but drops the automatic input juggling. Cheaper still is wiring the E10 straight into an existing transfer switch or inlet box and skipping both accessories. The last option is the dolly: batteries on wheels with a power strip on top, which turns a fixed backup into something you can roll to the job.
That ladder is the most practical thing in the video. You can start with one battery and an inlet box, then add modules and a dock later as the budget allows. The trap is buying the cheap entry configuration and then discovering the panel work — breakers, labour, permits — costs more than the box itself.
Cost, warranty, and who should not buy this
Steve does not publish his invoice, and commenter Michael8w reports a full install in Austin; another, WheelieAwesomeAdventures, says he paid about $13,500 for four batteries, an inverter, the smart generator and installation, plus a $2,000 service fee to the manufacturer that he suspects is a credit toward the final quote rather than the whole labour bill. Treat any single number you see online as one person's configuration, not a price list.
Warranty is the weak spot several viewers picked up on. Five years on a system you expect to cycle daily is shorter than the ten to fifteen years common on stationary home storage, and it is worth reading what the five years actually covers before you sign.
Who should skip it: anyone without solar who is not on a time-of-use tariff. You would be charging from the grid at off-peak and discharging at peak, which is a real saving in California and close to nothing in a flat-rate state. Steve says as much himself. Also skip it if your panel is old enough that the electrician starts shaking his head at the sight of it — the battery is the cheap part of a service upgrade.
A checklist before you sign anything
Ask for the breaker list in writing: which circuits move, which stay, and where the AFCI requirement lands. Ask who pulls the meter and who pays for the permit, because that answer varies by utility and by city. Ask how the CTs are landed and whether the panel supports them without a service change. Ask what happens to the existing solar inverter if you have one — AC-coupling into the combiner is a different job from DC into the E10.
And ask for the commissioning screens: a screenshot of the circuits named, the time-of-use schedule, and the storm guard enabled. A system that is installed but unconfigured will quietly buy peak-rate power all summer while you assume it is saving money. For the wider set of home backup options, our guide library covers sizing, chemistry and generator comparisons; if you are specifying a bank for a property rather than a single house, the product range includes wall-mounted and stackable storage built for that job.
What Viewers Are Asking (Top Comments on the Video)
The comments under this video are unusually practical — owners reporting real installs, real invoices and real outage behaviour, plus a few corrections Steve never addressed on camera. Where the creator replied, his wording would be quoted; on this video he did not reply to these threads, so the answers below are ours.
If you are specifying storage for a property rather than a single house, we build the other half of this conversation. Dajiu Energy has been making LiFePO4 packs since 2017 — drop-in replacement batteries, EV and golf cart packs, wall-mounted home storage, portable stations, commercial cabinets and battery swap units. The wall-mount and stackable lines are aimed at exactly the job the E10 does, at capacities from a few kWh to rack scale: browse the product center or read the buying guides on sizing, chemistry and backup panels. Send us the load list and the panel photo and we will tell you what the bank needs to be.