The Hearth
Portable energy, designed for the everyday
The Hearth is a portable, battery-based energy object on wheels, designed for everyday life and connected to the DELOCA platform. It brings stored electricity into the places and activities of daily living, from cooking on a balcony and gathering in a park to supporting cafés, campsites, campuses and festival events. Charge the Hearth during lower-carbon periods, use the stored electricity later, and access rewards and services through DELOCA.
Meet the Hearth
At the centre of the current Hearth prototype is the BLUETTI APEX 300: a portable lithium iron phosphate power station with 2.7648 kWh of storage capacity and up to 3.84 kW of output.
Around it, DELOCA has developed a protective furniture shell made from engineered timber. Its modular construction is designed to support distributed manufacturing, disassembly and repair, using Australian materials and components where practicable.
The Hearth can be separated into three main parts: the wheeled chassis, battery and upper table box. Its flat-pack construction makes it easier to disassemble and allows it to fit within a typical medium-sized car.
Designed and made in Sydney, the shell draws on Australian outdoor living and traditions of furniture design from Denmark, Finland, India and Japan.
The Hearth is conceived as a lasting personal object: something useful, familiar and cared for over time.
Apartment living and the energy transition
The story of the Hearth begins on the Australian apartment balcony.
Apartment households and renters often cannot install rooftop solar or permanent batteries. The Hearth offers a transitional alternative: charge during solar-rich daytime periods and use the stored electricity later for selected cooking, heating, cooling and everyday appliances.
Designed for balconies, verandahs, terraces, gardens and yards, the Hearth can turn an underused outdoor area into a flexible extension of the home: a micro-kitchen, an outdoor workspace or a setting for an evening meal.
For eligible households, the Hearth can also help make greater use of midday free-power offers by storing electricity when solar generation is abundant and using it later in the day.
An empowering object for enterprise
The Hearth can move beyond private domestic use into cafés, courtyards, markets, events, campuses and other commercial settings.
It can provide portable stored electricity where cooking, refrigeration, preparation, service or gathering takes place, without treating permanent infrastructure as the only starting point.
The DELOCA software layer is being developed to coordinate access, charging and services across people, businesses and locations. At the same time, the Hearth is designed to preserve the user’s agency: people remain able to decide when, where and how their stored electricity is used.
In this way, the Hearth becomes both a practical workhorse and a platform for new products, services and low-carbon business experiments.