Electriq Power went out of business. What should PowerPod owners do now?

Electriq Power Holdings, founded in Silicon Valley in 2014, filed a voluntary petition for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on May 3, 2024 (BusinessWire). By June 2024, the company had engaged an auction firm to liquidate more than $18 million in assets (Solar Power World).

Chapter 7 is liquidation, not reorganization. There is no ongoing entity that continues to operate the business, honor warranties, or maintain the servers behind the PowerPod's monitoring app. That is the key difference from a Chapter 11 filing, where a company sometimes keeps operating while it restructures debt.

In some California markets, Electriq had partnered with city programs to install batteries, and homeowners in those arrangements were also left sorting out liens tied to the financing structure, a situation that made local news in Santa Barbara County. If you're in a similar program, that lien question is separate from the hardware question and worth a conversation with an attorney, not a contractor.

Your battery may keep working for years. Lithium battery hardware doesn't stop functioning the day a manufacturer closes its doors. But as a practical matter, three things change:

• The manufacturer warranty has nobody left to honor it. A written warranty is only as good as the company standing behind it.
• Replacement parts are scarce. If a component fails, sourcing an OEM part from a liquidated manufacturer is difficult or impossible.
• The monitoring app can go dark without notice, since there's no company maintaining the servers or pushing updates.

No contractor can revive a dead company's warranty, and you should be wary of anyone who claims otherwise. That promise isn't something a third party is able to make good on, regardless of license or certification.

What a licensed C-10 electrical contractor can do:

• Test whether your battery is actually charging and discharging on schedule.
• Diagnose inverter and gateway faults.
• Assess whether a repair is realistic or the honest answer is replacement.
• Install a supported battery, Tesla Powerwall or Enphase IQ, from manufacturers with deep, funded warranty programs, in many cases without affecting your existing net-metering status.

We confirm the specifics for your system first, since every PowerPod install has its own inverter pairing and panel configuration. If a replacement makes sense, $0-down lease and financing options are available through our partner network. See solar battery installation for how we approach a replacement project.

Under SDG&E's evening peak pricing, storage usually carries the savings, not the panels alone. We'll model that from your bills, not a brochure. California's property tax exclusion for completed solar-plus-storage runs through January 1, 2027, which is also worth checking against your timeline if you're considering an upgrade rather than a like-for-like swap.

If your PowerPod is still functioning and monitoring correctly, there may be no urgency at all. The right move is often just a periodic health check rather than an immediate replacement. If it's already showing faults, a quiet app, or a battery that isn't cycling on schedule, that's when the replacement conversation becomes worth having. Either way, start with a roof inspection if your solar and battery share mounting infrastructure that hasn't been checked recently.

1. 1Check whether the monitoring app is still updating. If it's gone dark, that alone doesn't mean the battery is dead.
2. 2Have a licensed electrician run a health check on charge and discharge cycles, not just a visual inspection.
3. 3If you're in a city-partnered Electriq program with a lien, talk to an attorney about that separately from the hardware question.
4. 4If replacement is the honest answer, compare Tesla Powerwall and Enphase IQ options and ask about financing before committing.
5. 5Keep your existing solar system's paperwork handy - your net-metering tariff status matters when swapping battery hardware.

Estimates are always free. Contact us or call to get a battery health check scheduled, and if you decide replacement makes sense, we'll walk you through solar battery installation options that come with a manufacturer that's actually still in business.