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Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

powerwall.tesla.com

161–170 of 341 posts

Re: Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

#161
post #75

I haven't looked into it yet, but I'm curious about using utilizing my Teslas in case of emergency for power. With 75kwh+ each (leased so no concern about cycles) I don't think I'd need a powerwall at home.

If you're concerned about emergencies: for $38 you get a self-contained LED camping lantern that lasts for 30 days on a single charge [1] at the lowest brightness, or 2 days (off at night) on full brightness. For a tiny fraction of the price of a Tesla-based emergency power solution, you could buy two of those for every room, plus an RV cooking gas burner and a big propane tank that covers heating, making food and hot water for washing. Hell, even a big diesel generator would be cheaper (not to mention it's readily available).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Survival-Technologies-30-Day...

Re: Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

#162
post #118

Quick question for the people living in the US (Target customers of the Powerwall). What is your yearly power usage? On the website[0] they put for sizing 10kWh/day/BR. Which means 14600kWh/year for a 4 bedroom house. Here in Germany, working from home with a 4BR+office house, we are using 2550kWh/year. So, I suppose the Tesla sizing is to support a "peak day" usage, but still, I am surprised by the calculations. Thi…

Interesting to compare different countries. Helsinki, Finland here. Roughly 2100kWh/year. 2 people, a flat with 2 rooms + kitchen. We have district heating. Several laptops in the house, frequent home cooking, most lights are LED based, no sauna inside the apartment. We don't pay any attention to manually saving electricity, i.e. turning off lights etc. Our electric company provides a comparison report on their web s…

'no sauna inside the apartment'

Finnish problems

Re: Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

#163
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The thing is cloud-connected, remote-controlled by Tesla. " If your use-case is backup power in case of utility failure, how does that work ? If utilities fail, the network connection to the battery may also fail, right ?

It's not hard to imagine the solution: fall back to sane defaults like every other system not connected to the cloud.

Except that doesn't always happen. Plenty of companies don't have the foresight to think about sane defaults.

There was some IoT dog feeder that didn't have sane defaults posted here a while back.

I know I know "but Tesla". Sure, maybe they'd be different. Or maybe not.

Re: Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

#164
"Powerwall uses an internal inverter to convert DC energy to the AC energy required for your home, lowering cost and complexity."

Does this mean that you don't need to buy a regular solar array inverter if you are deploying it with a new solar installation?

Re: Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

#165
post #118

Quick question for the people living in the US (Target customers of the Powerwall). What is your yearly power usage? On the website[0] they put for sizing 10kWh/day/BR. Which means 14600kWh/year for a 4 bedroom house. Here in Germany, working from home with a 4BR+office house, we are using 2550kWh/year. So, I suppose the Tesla sizing is to support a "peak day" usage, but still, I am surprised by the calculations. Thi…

The big difference is because of air conditioning and baseboard heating, two things that are relatively rare in Europe.

> The big difference is because of air conditioning and baseboard heating (...)

Which makes you wonder why there is not as much high-profile attention on A/C (and to a lesser extent electrical heating) as being a problem worthy of rethinking by Silicon Valley (perhaps even ahead of solar, in North America).

Re: Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

#166
post #102

How long are the batteries going to last? With phones, we expect the battery to deteriorate after a couple of years. This is an investment. Will it need to be replaced in a few years' time?

The problem with phones is that they don't have good management - the battery doesn't have active cooling, or heating when needed. They're also charged to full capacity or depleted to empty a lot of the time. These things are what kills battery life.

"They're also charged to full capacity or depleted to empty a lot of the time."

Does it affect battery life if I keep my phone charged even if it's at 100% ? (My phone is charging during the night, so it will be at 100% for a long time and keep charging).

If it reaches 0%, how does that impact battery life compared to reaching 20% and charging up ?

I never looked up these things but it might influence how I charge all my devices.

Re: Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

#167
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Falling branches don't cut buried power lines. This has everything to do with crappy infrastructure and nothing with love for trees.

Good luck finding someone willing to pay to have squillions of kilometres of above ground power lines buried. Sydney alone has 63,000 kilometres[1] of overhead power lines. One estimate puts the cost at $23.37 billion.[2] 1. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/29/1027926858231.html 2. https://www.ipart.nsw.gov.au/files/7b5531d9-cf65-4b1b-ae7b-9...

According to your citations, that figure is for all of urban and suburban Australia, not Sydney and would be spread out over 30-40 years

Re: Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

#169
post #102

How long are the batteries going to last? With phones, we expect the battery to deteriorate after a couple of years. This is an investment. Will it need to be replaced in a few years' time?

The problem with phones is that they don't have good management - the battery doesn't have active cooling, or heating when needed. They're also charged to full capacity or depleted to empty a lot of the time. These things are what kills battery life.

Phone batteries get hot, but they have plenty of thermal connection with the environment. This is nowhere close to the magnitude of a heat problem you would have within a massive multicell pack, where the direct environment of one hot cell would be a few other hot cells. Active cooling is not something you add to a pack the size of a Tesla to make it survive a few more cycles, it needs it to survive the first cycle. But sure, once you have active cooling you might just as well try to make it powerful enough to create an environment that is even better than that of a single cell phone battery. Just don't hook overboard and have the cooling power demand cut noticeably into total cycle efficiency.

About cycle depth: Does Tesla come with an UI where you can do something along the lines of "I need to go 200 miles the day after tomorrow, do whatever you think is best for the battery in the time until then"? Or at least a setting "feel free to optimize from what you learnt about my driving patterns, except when I press the prepare-long-distance button"?

If not, most of that battery management technology will just be about not being worse than a single cell system. In that case, the difference in perceived durability mostly comes from a wildly different balance between depth of discharge and expected lifetime. Phone makers are quite happy with your batteries getting worse after two years, so they drive them over a wide voltage range, Tesla is in a market where they can't do that.

I suspect that drivers want their "fully charged" just as much as phone users, but I might underestimate Tesla/owners here. Maybe "battery wisdom" just needs some time to sink in. Sony is advertising a "top off the battery only just before the morning alarm goes off", this is the right direction (to bad that the new compact is a downgrade)

Re: Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

#170
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck finding someone willing to pay to have squillions of kilometres of above ground power lines buried. Sydney alone has 63,000 kilometres[1] of overhead power lines. One estimate puts the cost at $23.37 billion.[2] 1. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/29/1027926858231.html 2. https://www.ipart.nsw.gov.au/files/7b5531d9-cf65-4b1b-ae7b-9...

According to your citations, that figure is for all of urban and suburban Australia, not Sydney and would be spread out over 30-40 years

That'll learn me for skim reading and cherry-picking to suit my narrative.
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