Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome to today's video this is my long waited follow-up to my Tesla solar system and power wall installation which I documented over the summer in 2018 and I promise you guys I was going to do a follow-up where I gave an assessment of the actual performance of the system the cost involved whether I think it was worth it as well as any other details I think might be useful and that is what we were doing today let's get started of course here's hydro series RGB platinum coolers are made to keep cool even in the most thermally challenging situations with mlpro RGB fans included to maximize performance with minimal noise as well as a pump with a thermally optimized cold plate a low noise design and dynamic multi zone RGB lighting with 16 individually addressable LEDs find out more about Corsairs hydro series RGB platinum coolers via the sponsor link in the video description so let's start off with the timeline how long did it actually take for this whole project to get installed and up and running it has been 15 months since I did my initial $500 deposit for my tesla powerwall and in the in-between we've had hurricanes we've had some snafus when it comes to scheduling but ultimately everything did get up and running but I actually kicked this whole thing off on September 4th 2017 I put a $500 deposit down and the idea at the time was get this installed now during winter and possibly spring so it's ready for the summer of 2018 and we'll see as we proceed how that actually went on the 13th I was contacted by a Tesla rep to proceed with the project on the 15th I requested assistance getting an entire system put together not just the powerwall but also solar panels and potentially a main electrical box upgrade on the 19th I was advised that the plans for my system would take about 30 days to complete and that there would also be a potential delay due to disaster assistance that Tesla was participating in due to the Hurricanes last year in Texas Florida and then eventually in Puerto Rico with hurricane Maria in October of 2017 I sent them some copies of my utility bills and I received my first power wall order confirmation email but it was only for the powerwall note that I had asked for assistance with a main panel upgrade and solar as well so moving on to November 2018 I pointed out that the plan only included the power wall and that I wanted solar and electrical panels well I had a call with a Tesla rep on November 9th and then we signed updated project documents on November 13th planning to go ahead with the power wall and the solar note again that the main pan still was not included although I will take some responsibility here because I didn't notice that either on November 13th they did the first site survey and actually sent out a rep to walk through and do a solar meter that they put up on the roof in the back to sort of gauge how much solar was being received in that location this was also my first introduction to Tesla safety procedures and I actually really appreciate this they secured all the ladders when they're going up and down not off of the roof and they always drill into the apex of the roof and use tie downs with harnesses for all of their employees that are working on the roof again just for safety and I think that's a good way to go about doing it also in November I registered on the Tesla website because Solar City was actually starting to be phased out Tesla has a better brand name since Elon sent his car into space so Tesla now in that Solar City they merged together and then all the documents were signed by all relevant parties on November 26th and I was still anticipating delays at this point so it was a month later on December 23rd that I got the installation scheduled email yes for 4 months later in April so April 2nd and this again was due to power wall orders being backed up due to Puerto Rico hurricane Maria relief so I was ok with that although I want to point out that I did ask Tesla after the fact if normal people should expect this amount of delay and they said no it should happen much quicker however if you go on the test website right now they're currently delayed until like next year sometime they are backordered so I don't know what to tell you exactly but this was my experience so moving on to January 2018 and I received my first initial contact with Southern California Edison who is my local utility here who Tesla has to work with in order to do all this stuff after that point I was copied on regular email updates between Edison and Tesla but I did not need to participate at all they handled everything between the utility and Tesla team an SCE engineer was assigned to my project on January 17th so jumping ahead to March on march 8th I had my first Tesla site walkthrough apart from the initial one that they did in 2017 and then after that we had some scheduling issues Tesla somehow had two installation teams assigned to my project they're gonna try to install early on March 20th but that was never actually confirmed so a team showed up that day but we weren't ready for them so it got pushed back to April 2nd everything was ok though I March 26th Jerry one of my favorite Tesla Tech's who I worked with showed up to do another walkthrough he also discovered at that point the main panel upgrade was not actually set up yet so we had one week to kind of scramble to get that main panel upgrade arranged added to the project and it had to be approved by Southern California Edison as well I was worried it was gonna delay stuff even further since it was already April but fortunately they were able to expedite everything and we move forward with the main panel installation on April 2nd about a week and a half later on April 11th I paid the first half of my invoice and the solar was scheduled to install but then the team arrived they inspected the roof and they decided that my roof was too old and we're now they have a policy that they will not install solar on top of a roof that is too old and might need to be replaced soon which makes sense but they usually let you that know that at the beginning of the installation process so fortunately they said because they hadn't caught that they offered to cover the cost of reroofing the area under the solar array so that was like bonus free part of a roof for me which is cool although it did introduce a little bit more delay to the installation so the power wall was installed on April 11th and then a couple weeks later on April 26th we scheduled the reroofing with Tesla's roofing guy Adolfo and that was scheduled for the week of April 30th to May 4th on May 2nd the roof was replaced and then on May 11th the solar array was finally installed and then you have to wait again maybe as little as a week but up to a month they said because the utility has to give permission to operate so we had a couple weeks we're waiting around I was hoping to turn it on because I was going to leave for a couple weeks to go to Japan and Taiwan for two weeks at the end of May and beginning of June and then of course as we're at the airport on May 25th I get the permission to operate email so we had to go away for two weeks before I could come back and then actually turn the system on which I tried to do on June 11th as documented in my installation video it was unsuccessful at first on June 12th I called Tesla I just sort out registering my gateway to my account D from Tesla helped me out with that and then I was able to turn the system on Rey so that is the recap of the installation from initial deposit to system being turned on in mid-june it took quite a while again your mileage may vary if I have any advice to offer for you it would be to know what you wants at the beginning because I sort of said hey guys I'm signing up for a power wall baby you could also figure out the solar and the electrical panel I needed to be a little bit more forthright with that and be like I want this this and this and then I think they would have had the plans ready from day one and we would have maybe not had to deal with those delays that happen in little time in like December January and February moving on to my actual setup though the specs of the system my solar panels are model SC 325 solar city 325 which is 325 watts per panel that's peak if it's getting full sunlight and making all the use of all the sunlight and I have 18 panels so that gives me a five thousand eight hundred and fifty watt peak output array of course you're never really gonna hit your Pete peak output for various reasons efficiency and how much Sun is actually hitting in the direction of the sunlight and everything so I'm actually dealing with probably more around five thousand to fifty two hundred Watts peak generation my main electrical panel is now a two hundred amp panel upgraded from the 100 amp panel that was here from the sixties when my house was first built and then I have a 100 amp subpanel and that is what the tesla powerwall is connected up to so that is the battery backed up circuits on the 100 amp panel the remaining hundred amps for my main 200 a panel are fed over to my air conditioner unit I was initially told that the AC wouldn't be backed up by the power wall but I think it kind of is actually more on that in just a minute finally of course I have the power wall to and that features a fully integrated Tesla inverter 14 kilowatt hours of energy storage five kilowatts of continuous power and seven kilowatts of peak power round trip efficiency is 89% for the AC power wall that I have and the operating temperature range is negative 20 C all the way up to 50 C so that's a pretty wide range for most people it also comes with a 10 year warranty with unlimited cycles so that's pretty nice too in case you're wondering it weighs 269 pounds or 122 kilograms now if you're actually going to be using your solar end power wall setup you will be using the Tesla app this is actually pretty useful because it lets you see a live view of solar generation from your solar array that's in yellow also it shows you how much power your home is currently using that's in blue also how much power your power wall is delivering to your home or if it's charging from the solar that's in green and then your electric grid power is listed in white if you're drawing from the grid or if you're feeding power back to it so a few examples here of solar generation here at my home going from summer to fall to winter so back on July 7th in the heat of summer I generated 32.2 kilowatt hours on a bright sunny day where I was getting most of the solar generation for most of the day it's not too bad although of course it's hot at the time too so you have to bear that in mind as well on September 23rd in fall I generated about five point six kilowatt hours this is also on a bright sunny day so I'm just trying to see in the best conditions depending on the month how much power I'm actually going to get of course the days get shorter here in the winter as it does in most places that's not on the equator so if you move to December actually December 9th just recently 22.7 kilowatt hours is how much power we generated so as you can see it's gonna dip down in the winter and get better in the summer so I have a few examples to share with you guys so back on July 8th we have a heavy a/c usage day it was very hot outside we had to have a/c on and we drew 50.3 kilowatt hours for the entire day there now on this day you can see draw spikes in the 8,000 watt plus range which is far beyond what the power wall is actually actually able to handle so you're gonna always be drawing power from the grid on a day like that when you're drawing more power than what the power wall can push to you so there you obviously draw some grid power on that day we actually drew 21.6 kilowatt hours from the grid but you can see there's a good 30 kilowatt hour gap there that was covered by the solar so that's nice let's move over to a worst-case scenario day it's hot and it's also partially cloudy and it's still the summer for some reason that happens sometimes late summer here in California we got 25 point one kilowatt hours from the solar on this day it was pretty spotty during the day it was kind of partially cloudy off and on we drew 28.9 kilowatt hours from the grid and that was due to the heavy air-conditioner usage that we had going on throughout the day but we also only had 1.8 kilowatt hours drawn from the power wall which is much less than the previous example where we had about 30 kilowatt hours that is because the power wall started with low power because we had had several days of heats where we were using the AC during the day the power wall would run out at nights and then in the morning when it's supposed to start charging itself back up again when the Sun comes out we're turning an air conditioner back on again so the AC is using up so much power that the power wall can't charge therefore we only got 1.8 kilowatt hours of usage from it but again that is a worst case scenario with 50 3.5 kilowatt hours of home usage on that day let's switch over to November jump for a couple months and we'll talk about a rainy day because rain is nice here in California it keeps fires from happening and stuff but it also keeps the Sun from shining so on a rainy day we get 5.1 kilowatt hours and you feel like your solar generation is pretty used we also used 18.1 kilowatt hours that day so you can see there's a pretty substantial gap that had to be covered by the grid and if compared to just the day prior we got twenty two point four kilowatt hours of solar generated and that was on a bright sunny day it was nice that those work back-to-back so I can give an a/b comparison between the two the other thing that happens in the colder months here is heating starts to become a concern my wife gets chilly so we have a portable electric heater that we use in the bedroom house heating is fortunately handled by natural gas but you can definitely see small spikes in usage on that day from the heater cycling on which of course does increase power usage even when you don't have to worry about the air conditioner and one more example day here and this is actually the 12 hour charity livestream that we did just a little over a week ago so on this day of fortunately it was cool so we didn't need to turn the air conditioner on and I was actually pretty surprised that with our three-person streaming setup that we had going on out here in the garage we were only drawing about 1,500 to 2,500 watts for most of the day there was also a bright sunny day so we had twenty two point seven kilowatt hours of solar generated that was able to charge the power wall while also providing power for us while we were out here gaming and stuff so that day we didn't even have to switch over to grid power until about 8:00 p.m. this is on a day when I was expecting we were gonna be burning up all the power that was coming in so I was pretty happy about that and also a great demonstration of how the battery allows us to stay self powered during those key evening hours when power draw typically increases in residential neighborhoods and often your rates can increase as well on that day we use thirty eight point nine kilowatt hours total which is a lot considering that we didn't have the AC going so when it comes to general usage the thing I noticed most of all I think was just a couple months ago in October when I kind of forgot it was there the month of October was actually a good month when it comes to solar generation it was very dry here in California but that meant it was very sunny and I was also pretty cool out so I didn't need the a/c we had lots of solar coming in wasn't using exorbitant amounts of power so we actually got a credit in October of about twenty-five dollars the other thing I mentioned earlier is that the air conditioner was not supposed to be powered by the solar and the power wall but I think I know how it actually works even though the AC is not directly connected to the 100 amp panel that the power wall backs up we have a two phase power delivery system here so I believe what's happening is when the AC is on its drawing power on one phase to power the air conditioner while it's also feeding power back the powerwall on the other phase so from SES perspective it's a net zero and so effectively we are powering the AC with the storage power here so I believe that's how it works don't quote me on that for sure but at least when it comes to functionality and usability that's the only way I can see it working says it's physically not connected otherwise and now on to the cost-benefit analysis I know a lot of you guys have probably been waiting for this I'm going to take into account the upfront cost of the system we also have a tax credit that's coming in actually I'm going to be getting that tax credit in another month or two when I file my taxes for 2018 and then there's also of course the estimated time that the system might take to actually pay for itself so I have about three full years of electric bill history from 2016 to 2017 to 2018 however I can only really do direct comparisons from July onward because of course the solar and everything wasn't installed before then so if I'm looking at the last five months of the year July through November you can see that my average power bill was about a hundred and eighty four dollars two hundred and eighty seven dollars in 2016 and 2017 now if you look at 2018 my July bill was eleven dollars and 81 cents my August bill was the most expensive one at a little over seventy dollars September was about eleven bucks in October I got that $25 credit and then in November we're at about ten dollars so I'm a virgin about fifteen dollars and 74 cents per month that I am paying in my electric bill which is pretty minimal but some people were like well shouldn't you be making money on this Paul maybe but let's take this a step further if you compare what I'm paying on average per month now to what I paid on average per month in 2016 and 2017 I'm saving about a hundred and seventy dollars per month one 69.6 nine according to my calculations the overall cost of the solar and powerwall system including the electrical panel upgrades that I got was thirty two thousand four hundred and twenty-five dollars and seventy five cents I paid this upfront because I didn't want to finance it and if you calculate that it's actually still pretty expensive and it will take quite a while for me to recoup my cost on this but you also have to take into account that right now there is a federal tax credit of 30 percent towards your solar system that you have set up so I'm going to get a tax credit of a little over nine thousand seven hundred dollars that will apply towards what I owe for taxes so I will owe about nine thousand seven hundred dollars less on my taxes this year which is pretty nice that means my total cost was twenty two thousand six hundred ninety eight dollars divided that by the savings per month of about 170 bucks that gives you about a hundred and thirty three months that means I will pay off the system or the system will pay it for itself in just over eleven years about eleven point one five years to be specific this does fall in line with my expectations when I was getting the system installed the anticipated time to pay for itself was ten to fifteen years so that's just about right and I want to point out that the solar array has a twenty year warranty and the powerwall has a ten year warranty and the entire system has an estimated useful life of thirty five years so hopefully the powerwall won't give out prior to me having the system pay for itself but the powerwall is actually not that difficult a thing to swap out or even add a second one to but assuming that my average cost savings stays about what it's been so far I think it's safe to say that I am happy with the investment I have made so far so let's talk about pros and cons what do I like about this system well one it just works not to quote Jensen or anything like that it's been functional and like I said during the month of October I kind of forgot it was there and it ended up getting me a credit also speaking of it's really nice to get a credit on your power bill from time to time or at least know that when you're not here like if I go on vacation during the summer or something like that it's still here sucking up the Sun juice and converting it into electrons and all the sciency stuff that goes on behind solar power the final thing to point out would be that it was was nice to get like half of a free roof from Tesla although that's not something that people would usually expect but it was good of them to cover that once they discovered that it was something that needed doing although it did delay the project by a week or two but it wasn't too bad as for dislikes though I have noticed and this is a minor thing but either the solar inverter or the power wall is right on the outside of my bathroom our ensuite bathroom back there and it makes the noise kind of a weird just a noise that I can hear from time to time like I said it's minor we can only hear it in the bathroom but that I pointed out I would also prefer to not have the always-on Tesla reporting square that's got to be connected to your network that sends telemetry data back to Tesla all the time it's always got to be there it's always got to be on and the Tesla will turn itself off if it doesn't have connection to that after a period of 24 or 48 hours or something like that it's weird also considering that there's a pretty stark lack of detailed usage reporting available on the Tesla website if you log into the Tesla website it basically shows you what you have installed there's nothing you can see as far as like what it's been used or anything that the app is pretty detailed on what's what it shows you but only for the past day or two if you go beyond that it just gives you bar charts without too much actual specific numbers on there and there's no way to like exporter or porch or anything like that those are some features that I feel like it would be really nice to add in the future and it would have made making this video a little bit easier - finally it is nice to have the battery backup but if you wanted to have the battery backup or sort of view it as an independent system like if the grid went out or if there was a zombie apocalypse and the internet didn't work anymore and the grid didn't work anymore you would still be kind of Sol with this system again because of that Internet connectivity requirement for the system I'd like to have a zombie mode where you can like shut yourself off the grid and still be able to get solar power and use your power wall just in case of some horrible situation like that to give yourself a little bit more usage out of it without having to like get back on the Internet in order to get it to turn back on finally I want to remind you guys that I am in Southern California we have much sunlight here all the time or a lot of the time so the effectiveness of solar for you is gonna vary greatly depending on your weather of course you can always add more panels to your array if you aren't generating enough electricity for your needs but that of course ups the cost of the system - my advice for you is to let Tesla know upfront what you want installed especially if you're going beyond the power wall it's also including a main panel upgrade and then finally I wanted to give a shout-out thank you to the folks from Tesla who helped me out with this installation that includes Jerry Powell Johnny Jonathan Cora and Tom from the installation team and then on the planning side ian connor melissa and Don were all very helpful in this installation but guys that is gonna wrap it up for this video thank you so much for bearing with me as I have waited so I could have some actual data to share with you guys about my usage of the power wall over the past six months or so also a huge thank you to any of you guys who use my Tesla referral link which is down in the video's description if you happen to actually purchase something from tesla powerwall or otherwise they do not sponsor me or anything like that but if I get enough referrals I can potentially get a free red power wall signed by Elon Musk which would be super cool and would also add to my my power capabilities here in my home thank you all so much for watching though and one last teaser I know this video has been long anticipated and I've delayed it but I have one more coming soon a follow up on the HTTP see unprecedented anyway guys thank you so much for watching we'll see you next time