Six months ago I put my hand on the main switch for the whole house, flicked it off, walked inside — and every single light was still on. That was the Anker SOLIX X1 taking over, and you guys loved that video. So today I want to show you what's happened since. After six months of living with a 30 kWh Anker SOLIX X1 home battery here on the Gold Coast, we've paid a few hundred dollars for power. For the whole house. In six months. Before this system went in, we were paying at least $1,000 every quarter.

This is the six-month follow-up: I'll walk you around the battery on the wall and the solar on the roof, then go through every number straight off the Anker app — the live night-time reading, the six-month totals, how much the battery actually did, the solar against our installer's quote, the power bill, and what's changed since we joined Origin's virtual power plant. One honest note up front: these are one household's real numbers, through one very wet winter, and we haven't had a proper blackout since the install — the backup test is the one we did on day one.

▶Watch the 6-Month Review

01Six Months on a Waterfront Wall

Here it is outside, still on the wall, and honestly it looks as good as the day it went in. No marks, no corrosion, nothing. That matters here, because we back straight onto the water. We've got salt in the air, humidity, heat, and some proper storms rolling through over the last six months — and we're heading into storm season right now.

That's exactly why we were happy to put it outside in the first place. The X1 is IP66 rated and carries the C5-M marine-grade anti-corrosion rating, the top rating you can get. Coastal, salty, hot — no dramas. And I still love how slim it is: only 15 cm deep, flush against the wall. It doesn't look like some ugly industrial box you want to hide down the side of the house. On a Gold Coast home, that genuinely matters.

02The Setup: 30 kWh and the Power Dock Pro

As in the original install video, we've got six battery modules stacked on top of each other at 5 kWh each — 30 kWh all up. Inside is LFP (lithium iron phosphate), which is the chemistry you want for something that's going to be on your house for the next ten years, and it's backed by a 10-year warranty. Putting something this important on the house, that gave me a lot of confidence.

Next to it is the Power Dock Pro. That's the bit that makes this proper whole-home backup — not just the fridge and a couple of lights, the whole house. It's also what lets the solar keep charging the battery when the grid is down, which I'll come back to.

03The Solar: 13.2 kW on the Roof, Two Inverters in Parallel

Round the front, up on the roof — you can barely see them from the street, which I love — we've got 30 panels at 440 W each, so a 13.2 kW solar system, running into two inverters working together. In the app's device list you can see both of them: one runs as the host and the other follows it in parallel. That's how the two work together on a bigger setup like ours.

The idea is simple. Solar fills the battery during the day, and the battery runs the house at night. And that's basically the whole story of the last six months.

04Half Past Eight at Night: Grid at Zero

Inside, about 8:30 at night, the sun's long gone and every light in the house is on. So I pulled up the app to see where the power was coming from. Solar on standby, obviously. Home load 3.93 kW, battery supplying 3.93 kW, sitting at 83%. Everything running in the house at that moment was coming straight off the battery outside.

And the grid? Zero kW. That's what I love seeing.

05Six-Month Totals: 6.57 MWh and 98% Self-Powered

At the top of the app is the running total since we switched it on: 6.57 MWh produced — that's about 6,570 kWh of power off our own roof in six months — and 7 tonnes of CO2 saved.

Tap into the self-powered screen, which is my favourite screen in the whole app, and it says 98% self-powered. It breaks that down as 48% straight from solar, 50% from the battery, and just 2% from the grid. So half of everything this house has used in six months has come off that battery on the wall — night time, early mornings, cloudy days. That's the battery doing exactly what we bought it for.

06What the Battery Actually Did

The year view (which so far holds our six months of data) shows 2,175 kWh of home usage, and the battery discharged 1,117 kWh of that. Again — about half.

The biggest month for the battery was July: 266 kWh off the battery in one month. That was the middle of winter, short days, the house still needing power, and the battery just covered it.

07Solar vs the Installer's Quote

I want to be straight with you on the solar. Our quote estimated around 18,572 kWh a year, which is roughly 1,550 kWh a month. Coming through winter, we sat a bit under that pace — and we had a very rainy, very cold winter this year.

But watch the monthly bars: every month higher than the last. September, the first proper month of spring, did 1.53 MWh — right on the pace of the quote. And the best single day so far was 20 September: 67.67 kWh off the roof in one day. That's wild.

08One Day, Zoomed In: Battery First, House Second, Grid Last

Zooming in on the day I filmed shows how smart the system actually is. Solar made 24.3 kWh, peaking at 7.81 kW. Here's where it went:

• 54% — 13.18 kWh charging the battery
• 40% — 9.65 kWh running the house during the day
• 6% — 1.48 kWh sold back to the grid

So it fills the battery first, runs the house, and whatever's left goes back out. That's exactly how you want it working.

09The Bill: From $1,000 a Quarter to a Few Hundred in Six Months

Okay, the bit everyone wants to know. Before this system went in, we were paying at least $1,000 a quarter — call it $4,000 a year. Since then, with the air conditioning running, fans on, everything going, we've paid a few hundred dollars across the whole six months — around $500.

The quote estimated $3,000 a year in savings. Going from roughly $4,000 a year down to a few hundred over six months, we're well on track for that.

One thing you'll notice: the app has an earnings figure, and on ours it's blank. That's because we never entered our electricity tariff, so the app doesn't know what our power costs and can't show the dollars. Do that on day one — we didn't. For us, the proof is in the bills, and the bills say a few hundred dollars.

10New Since the First Video: Origin's Virtual Power Plant

Here's what's changed since the original review. We're with Origin, and there's now a banner in the app that says under VPP control. That's a virtual power plant: the X1 works with Origin's VPP, so our battery isn't just looking after our house — it can send power back to the grid when the grid needs it.

Look at September. We bought 0.01 MWh from the grid — basically nothing — and sold 1.11 MWh back. On 21 September alone we bought 0.2 kWh and sold 49.97 kWh. Our house has gone from paying for power every single quarter to sending more back out than it takes in. That's the future right there.

11Backup: Tested on Day One, Ready for Storm Season

The reason we did all this in the first place: after Cyclone Alfred, sitting there in the dark, we said never again. I'll be straight with you — we haven't had a proper outage since the install. But we know it works, because we tested it. Main switch off, walk inside, every light on.

The X1 switches over in 0 milliseconds on the load side, so the house doesn't even flicker. And with the Power Dock Pro, the solar keeps charging the battery even when the grid's down. So as the storms start rolling in this summer, I'm not sitting there worrying about it. That peace of mind, you can't put a number on.

⚙Our System at a Glance

$Where to Buy + Giveaway

My friends keep asking me when they should get one. My answer: now. We'll be back with the summer numbers, and then the full 12 months once we hit a year. My parents have since put in solar too — that's how much they liked what they saw here. A head-to-head against BYD and Tesla is coming in a future video.

Want backup you can carry? The grab-and-go end of the same ecosystem is the Anker SOLIX C1000 Gen 2 portable power station.

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▶Watch the Original Install & Blackout Test

Want to see the install and the main-switch blackout test from day one? Here's the original video — and you can read the full Anker SOLIX X1 install review:

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Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Anker SOLIX affiliate we may earn a commission from qualifying purchases and installer quotes at no additional cost to you. All opinions are based on hands-on real-world testing on our own home.