Just over a year ago, I reviewed the Anker Solix F3800 Portable Power Station, which is great; the only issue was that it was huge and heavy. So, while technically portable, it was not pleasant to move around. Since then, I have doubled my usage of the F3800, got another one, and had an electrician install the Smart Home Power Panel from Anker, plus a sub-panel that Anker offers to create a fully backed-up home/studio.

The F3800 is now offered in a package with just that, two F3800s with a smart home panel, and you can add on the sub panel depending on your use case. This package is designed to meet the rising demand and plea for electrical backup and sustainable power in this digital world.

Not only is this a residential power backup solution, but it also acts as the inverter and does all the heavy lifting if I want to add solar panels and cut back on my grid usage. All around, the F3800 was impressive, and one of the best portable power stations I've reviewed. Where it lacked is mitigated when you add another and the home power panel and shove this in your storage area behind your office, granting peace of mind for your home in case of severe weather or power outage, plus the opportunity to throw solar panels on your roof to collect some extra power from none other than the sun.

Anker Solix F3800 Home Power System: Price and Availability

This package from Anker is typically priced just north of $9,000. However, they are currently discounted to $5,599 with the code WSTDQR0929. There are options for installment payments through several different providers through Anker's website if needed, which is lovely as these are offered exclusively via Anker's website and have limited-time promotions.

Anker Solix F3800 Home Power System: Unboxing & first impressions

Since I already had one F3800, I was familiar with what it would be like to receive another. Nothing was different; the only new part was getting the power panel and the sub-panel. The Smart Power Panel was smaller than I expected, but I'm not upset because it fits better than I thought on the wall I picked.

Right now, I only have two F3800s. However, in the future, I will probably expand my battery capacity by adding a BP3800, which is just a battery unit that one of the F3800s could utilize. I could add up to 12 (6 per F3800) BP3800 batteries, each at 3840Wh capacity, totaling a whopping 53.8kWh battery capacity stored for my home.

Another thing I will add is solar panels. This time around, I did not grab any. However, I will probably add these in the future, especially since all I need are the panels and the cable to get down to my basement since I already have the inverter and batteries installed.

The setup process was straightforward; I called an electrician. In all seriousness, though, the electrician also had a pretty straightforward setup. He located my breaker in my basement, tailed off of that to connect to the Smart Home panel, and then integrated a sub-panel as well, so if I do have to power my home via these batteries, I can designate where that power is even able to go, prioritizing the essentials, and not having to worry about if there is something in my home that was left on that is not essential that would be a waste of battery.

After installing these, I could plug the cables from the power panel down to the F3800s, tuck them away, and then set them up through the app. I added my home, connected the unit to Wi-Fi, and then it registered that the F3800s were connected. From that point, I could see what I was pulling off the grid and set how much capacity I wanted the batteries to fill to (I chose a standard of 90%, with the ability to trigger "storm guard" that will quickly fill the batteries to 100% when I get an alert that there is a storm coming and then go back to my standard after that storm has passed) and the ability to set up other safety and battery preservation settings.

Anker Solix F3800 Home Power System: Design & build quality

The overall design of this setup is quite sleek. I've seen some significant and cumbersome setups, and they always need to be placed outside because they have exhaust systems from gas generators.

The reasonably sized power panel can be mounted to the wall with two simple brackets. Lastly, the sub-panel can be mounted on identical cross beams to the power panel, making installation easy.

Anker Solix F3800 Home Power System: In use

So far, having my entire home backed up with battery power has been fantastic. It's freeing to know that, with my three kids and my wife, we can ensure that our house and what we need for the children are okay in a power outage. Any sound machines, heaters, fans, night lights, monitors for their rooms, security alarms, and so forth are all backed up in an emergency, storm that knocks out power, or grid outages.

Previously, in the "prepare for the worst" mindset that I have and my unique situation where I have a multitude of power stations on hand at any given time, I would have power stations set up around the house at key areas ready for a power outage as a UPS, or I knew that if I ever needed to, I could run down to my office and drag one of the big ones up to plug in the fridge, a heater, or whatever else I needed in the moment. Now, however, I don't have to do any of that. Granted, I still have the Solix C1000 running my main desk in my office, but that's simply because I chose not to include the finished part of the basement in my sub-panel so I could focus the battery on more important things that I don't already have a solution for such as the heat, stage one of my AC, fridges, kids rooms, primary bedroom, and the microwave. I also chose to have my living room backed up, knowing that my central unit for my mesh router system (review coming soon) and the modem is there.

Because of the draw of my stage one AC unit for my house, I opted for two F3800s to get the 12kW, as opposed to the 6kW that I could get with just one F3800.

Another great feature is that I can output at 120V or 240V, depending on the demand of the equipment. This means that if I wanted to, I could run my electric dryer, charge my not-so-real-but-maybe-in-the-future Tesla, or even run another stage on my HVAC.

All of this "preparing for the worst" is great, but what might be the coolest part of this setup is something that I haven't even mentioned yet. It's the fact that I could throw some solar panels on my roof or even in my yard if I wanted to, and I could harvest the sun to not only refill my batteries but help run my house in a power outage or even offset my grid usage. I could set this up to where, in peak hours (if I lived in an area with peak hours for electrical), I could pull from solar and battery power and then recharge in the lower hours, utilizing solar when I can and then pulling from the grid last, saving money on electricity. All of this could be set automatically, meaning that without even thinking about it or changing anything I am doing, I could save real money on electricity with this Anker SOLIX Smart Home Power Kit.

Anker Solix F3800 Home Power System: Final verdict

The Anker Solix F3800 Smart Home Power Kit offers a near-perfect blend of performance, scalability, and sustainability. While its steep upfront cost may give potential buyers pause, its ability to be both a backup solution and a solar powerhouse, saving you money on electricity every day, makes this an incredible two-birds-one-stone solution.

Copilot has three main uses in Word: creating a draft for either an entire document or for sections of it, based on a prompt of up to 2,000 characters; rewriting selected text according to a prompt; and answering questions about a document’s content, including summarizing it.

When you create a new document in Word, you’ll see how much Microsoft wants you to draft using Copilot: it’s the first thing you see. And any time you make a new paragraph, the Copilot icon shows up in the left margin, letting you input a prompt to write a new section. If you select text, the icon shows up with an option to rewrite the selection. There’s also a Copilot icon in the Home toolbar, which opens a sidebar so you can ask questions about the open document, summarize it, or write additional parts.

The output quality of any big language model depends on the prompt you provide. If you aren’t specific or clear enough, Copilot Pro will produce dull texts that don’t match your voice. You must give sufficient details and context for it to understand your purpose and style, as well as information about the preferences of the audience, all of which can be tricky in a prompt limited to 2,000 characters.

Occasionally, it’s vague, drifts off-topic, or entirely ignores explicit instructions – for example, about word counts or facts you have told it to include. You must check and edit the texts that Copilot Pro writes to make sure they’re right for your goal and audience.

Copilot has its own little linguistic ticks, which you will probably need to be explicit about in prompts. It absolutely adores bullet-pointed lists, and will include them every time unless you tell it not to. Similarly, and likely reflecting the web content on which it’s trained, it loves to include “hints and tips” sections in virtually every kind of content.

Rewriting is also erratic. Although its grammar is impeccable (albeit with a penchant for the Oxford comma and American spellings), Copilot won’t catch and fix all the problems in your paragraphs; think coherence, structure and flow. It’s no replacement for a dedicated tool such as Grammarly or LanguageTool. I even found that Copilot added in things that Microsoft Editor thought were errors.

Copilot can still be handy in Word if you use it for what it’s good at. For example, instead of making it write a whole document, ask it to create an outline for you to work. This delivers solid results, and if nothing else avoids the blank sheet of paper issue.

I also found it handy to keep the sidebar open when working on a long piece; in one case, I needed to make sure that every chapter included a call to action at the end, and that’s something Copilot is great at. It’s also handy for those moments when you want to get suggestions for something, whether that’s as trivial as looking for an antonym or as complex as “give me five typical Russian male first names, popular in the 1950s”.

Considering that this is Microsoft’s first stab at Copilot for Word, it’s an impressive piece of work.

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If you want an example of what not to use Copilot for in PowerPoint, then I have just the thing.

You might think that asking Copilot Pro to “create a presentation about Copilot Pro in PowerPoint” would be an easy win for the AI. You would think wrong: instead, it came up with a presentation about a fictitious piece of software that appears to combine advanced aircraft flight planning with a collision avoidance system – which it illustrated with a picture of a car.

Of all the Office applications, PowerPoint probably benefits least from Copilot Pro when it comes to creating documents from scratch. This is down to it not having one of the key features that business users of Copilot get: the ability to take a Word document and turn it into a PowerPoint deck. PowerPoint is, fundamentally, an application for taking information and presenting it in a visual format, and a 2,000-character prompt just isn’t enough for anything except the shortest presentations.

What Copilot is good for, though, is taking an existing deck and improving it. If you don’t like a visual being on the left-hand side of a slide, you can just ask Copilot to move it to the right – although you also need to tell it to move whatever is already on the right to the left, too, if you don’t want a visual pile-up to ensue. Similarly, asking it to change the headline font on all slides to, say, Constantia – and it makes the changes in seconds – feels magical.

Wisely, Microsoft includes a set of pre-made prompts to get you started with the kind of things that Copilot is good at. For example, it can scan a deck for deadlines and list them all out, helping you avoid that moment when you realize you have combined two people’s work and got entirely different deadlines for a project in them.

Overall, stick to the preset prompts at first, and Copilot Pro in PowerPoint is a useful tool.

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There are three key features in Copilot for Outlook: summarization, drafting and coaching. Summarization is probably the feature you’ll encounter first, as every email you receive has a prominent “Summary by Copilot” bar at the top.

Click on this, and it creates a short, easy-to-read summary of the key points in the email. How useful this will be depends on the kind of mail you get. But if you spend a long time reading complex emails and trying to work out what the point is, you’ll love it.

The second main feature, drafting, is like the drafting feature in Word, in that you give it a prompt and it writes the email for you. You can vary the tone using pop-up options – direct, neutral, casual, formal or, erm, “make it a poem” – and set the length as short, medium or long. Beware: Outlook uses the last tone you selected, so if you do decide to write a poem, remember to change it before drafting an email to your accountant.

As with Word, I’d categorize the results as “something to start with and personalize” rather than the finished article. Tonally, it veers towards the extreme: formal is very formal, and casual is probably fine for sending to family and close friends only. In my tests, direct produced the best results, although some of its phrases required toning down to stop them sounding like the kind of email you get from the bailiffs chasing you for a late payment.

My favorite feature is coaching. This checks the content of an email you’ve written and gives you tips on how to improve it, with clear advice that’s actually useful. It advised me to make my tone more confident, which professional writing coaches have told me in the past.

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It could be because I tried Copilot in OneNote after all the other apps. It could be a because I’m not a regular OneNote user. Or it could be that this is indeed a, “oh, I suppose we should add it to OneNote as well” kind of effort.

Copilot appears in OneNote the same way as most other apps: as a button in the Home ribbon. You can do all the things you’d expect, such as summarizing meeting notes and creating action points. But where in Teams it feels powerful and integrated, here it feels like an add-on.

For example, I hoped that it would tie in with the transcription option, perhaps creating a rival to Otter.ai that not only delivered the notes but gave me something extra, such as sentiment analysis. But no, it couldn’t even remove the timestamps from the text when I accidentally kept them in.

You’ll also need to be careful about where you file notes, as Copilot has some difficulty discerning between the active note and all the ones filed within a project. Mind you, the fact that it can work across a bunch of collated notes has its advantages, too.

Copilot in OneNote performed best when working with my scrawled notes from a meeting, deducing that when I wrote some names next to “Who?” that these were indeed the people involved.

If you’re a OneNote fan then you’ll probably like what Copilot Pro can do. But I can’t see this making any new converts.

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