What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025

> Inrush is exactly what it says it is, it's inrush current

These are not terms commonly used in the industry, thanks for the clarification.

> Lots of appliances in your home have a large inrush, much larger than the breaker they're on.

And inverters are designed to compensate for short term surges too fyi. The 18k provides 65A for a few seconds as an example.

> well, hell, how the hell you gonna charge ~40kwh of battery with solar array that nominally produces 20kwh a day on its best day, assuming all conditions are perfect?

Because you can't and don't need to...you should be asking the author of the original post, because they do what pretty much every other grid tied system which is that you pass through the power from the grid.

> Backfeed is what the inverter can push out from the battery to the home.

https://www.wartsila.com/encyclopedia/term/backfeeding huh?

> It's the size of the tube coming from the gallons of water reservoir. EG4 18k has a tiny tube, no matter how much battery you put on it.

1. The 18k can push 50A on each leg and most residential are sized at 150a or 200A, which are ridiculously oversized, so at most, even with two EVs and a 4 ton AC running in Texas, I max out at 150A. I can put 3 18k's in parallel if I really want to and its STILL cheaper than a powerwall battery/inverter combo.

2. There is no reason to have a "pipe" so large that it only is used for less than 5% of the overall runtime. This is why the powerwall setup doesnt make any sense.

It all comes down to building techniques, insulation, airtightness, eliminating thermal bridges, &c. There are also many low tech solutions for heating/cooling, such as air/air heat exchanger couples with ground/water or ground/air heat exchanger at a fraction of the price and a fraction of the maintenance.

Of course the average american living in a mcmansion which wouldn't pass regulations in 1992 Poland cannot use such solutions, but really it isn't a problem of climate, you'll find passive houses from africa to norway and everywhere in between, most of them without heat pumps

Yes, if you want to be super precise you have to factor in both the time value of money on one hand and inflation & energy bill increases on the other.

But very often these will roughly cancel each other out.

>These are not terms commonly used in the industry, thanks for the clarification.

It's such an industry term that it's literally a named feature on multimeters.

>The 18k provides 65A for a few seconds as an example.

Yes, you'll see I gave you that spec in the opening comment. It's not a good spec for a whole home hybrid inverter.

>the 18k can push 50A on each leg and most residential are sized at 150a or 200A

That's not how you read a spec sheet for 240v device. A home service is 200 amp, at 240v. That's 48kw potential. 12k is 12k regardless of whether that's (120v * 50a) + (120v * 50a) or (240v * 50a). The legs aren't cumulative. You're implying the standing load capacity is somehow higher than its inrush capacity. It would need to be a 24kw (on the ac side, all of the janky chinese rebrand inverters all list their DC input to try to make themselves seem bigger) inverter to do what you're implying.

(50a * 120v) + (50a * 120v) = 12kw

A small home with a smaller 150 amp service is (150a * 240v), 36kw.

Edit: screw it, I'll address this as well -

>There is no reason to have a "pipe" so large that it only is used for less than 5% of the overall runtime. This is why the powerwall setup doesnt make any sense.

There sure is! The whole point is to offset usage. 50 amp standing load capacity means you can only ever offset 50 amps of usage at one time. Sure, most homes don't hold anything higher than that for long but I've seen plenty of homes hold over 20kw for a bit if they have pool pumps, well pumps, pool heaters, or any number of things going on. Any time the home draws more than 12kw instantaneously you'd be getting charged peak rates, which could be avoided with a larger standing load capacity. In addition, if you're in a municipality with a 'demand' rate you could enter in to a different billing rate any time you go over a certain amperage, meaning that ability to offset more of that in that instance, even just for an inrush, could make an even larger difference on your bill.

Look man, I run an $800 chinese inverter, and my batteries are MuRatas I harvested from decommissioned Sonnen cabinets that I rewired with chinese BMSes. The Powerwall 3 is a really good product and the pricing is great compared to comparable non-diy consumer grade products. The EG4 is not a good comparison point because it has nowhere near the spec or capability. You would need 3 EG4 18ks to have the inrush capability of a single Powerwall 3. Battery capacity (volume) is not the sole determining factor in value. This isn't even relevant but just as an aside, the EG4 isn't even a good value for the DIY scene, and has functionally the same support as rebranded drop shipped Chinese inverters.

Eh?

In some mysterious future where swapping EV batteries during a road trip is a normal activity, then the battery packs won't be living in a vacuum -- their status can be known. Whether it is known by reading the pack's own electronics, by status reports from connected vehicles and charging stations, by direct measurement, or by some combination of these things: The status is knowable. It doesn't have to be a big ball of mystery.

How much value the marketplace finds in this health status is a different question. And this question is one that we cannot yet know the answer to -- this is not a reality that we presently live in.

We can speculate about how that potential future may be shaped, but that kind of speculation is kind of meritless since that version of the future may never actually happen (and at the present, it sure does seem very unlikely to happen any time soon).