- So, the power went out yesterday.
Lightning struck.
Thank you, Power Wall
this was such a good decision.
And for me it was a waste of money, and I regret it.
(gentle music)
Power doesn't work on this one,
works on all the other ones, not that one.
I gotta get that fixed.
What you're seeing right here
is actually the stormiest that it gets
in our little town in Southern Utah.
So much for a good time lapse.
The camera literally almost slid off of the car.
We get rain, we get lightning in the summertime.
They're called summer monsoon storms.
They have them here in the Southwest.
And it is really fun.
In fact, yesterday our power went out
for five minutes and these power walls turned on
and ran the house for five minutes
all by themselves.
We have had Tesla solar,
and Tesla Powerwalls for six months now,
and I'm not gonna wait until the year review
to tell you my thoughts on having the Powerwall.
Before I go into all the reasons why,
I need to first tell you
that I definitely regret buying the Tesla Powerwall,
and for me it was a waste of money, and I regret it.
And I'm gonna tell you the reasons why from my perspective,
and maybe that'll help some of you
in your decision to buy a Tesla Powerwalls.
(upbeat music)
I am not a Powerwall hater,
I do like the Powerwalls,
but I shouldn't have bought it.
Let me explain.
Got my Tesla surfboard that we cut in half
for a video a while back.
Still have half of it.
I wonder if it still floats.
(laughing) It still floats.
Tesla surfboard, first time it's seen the water
since the ocean.
(laughing)
Yes.
I am grateful to have the solar up here,
and I am grateful to have the Powerwalls,
and I think it is a great thing to have in the future.
And I see a lot of people in the future
having battery packs to help them when the grid goes down,
but from a straight financial side of things,
there are considerations to have
when you're deciding whether to spend $10,000
on a battery pack or $10,000 on more solar panels.
And I'll share all the reasons why,
and what my considerations are,
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And now we're gonna go back
to looking at the data behind a Powerwall.
Is it a good decision or not?
I don't think it is,
but let's find out why.
We have solar panels on three places on our roof.
We bought Tesla solar,
so they're not the Tesla solar tiles
that you see where you actually get the full roof roofed,
but they are solar panels that are bought through Tesla.
We were lucky enough to get one Tesla Powerwall for free.
Thank you to all of you guys
that used our Tesla referral code to buy your Teslas,
Tesla just gave us one for free,
which is really cool because those costs around $8,500.
One of them is not gonna do much,
especially for the house that's as large as ours is
with our entire office built onto it.
So we bought a second power wall at full price,
which was about $8,500,
and then with installation
it's around $10 to $11,000.
Our solar is covering about 35%
of the energy usage for our house,
which is pretty good considering we have one, two, three,
four electric cars.
We only drive electric.
We only charge at home really,
unless we're on a road trip.
And then we've got all the air conditioning units,
we have the studio where we work inside of there.
There's a lot of things going on in the house.
So right now it's the middle of the afternoon,
but as you can tell it is pouring rain.
So my solar is currently generating zero,
and I'm using around 6.5 kilowatts.
We have our pool cleaner going on right now.
We have some lights on in the house,
but I'm gonna show you,
I'm kind of curious by this,
how much energy does our house use
when we're charging all of our cars,
and running our air conditioning units.
One way to test it out,
let's just plug all these things in and test it out.
All right, are we ready?
I am screen recording.
You will see it live.
I'm gonna put it on the screen right now
so that you can see my screen recording
of what it looks like.
This is for the Roadster.
Let's plug in the red one over here.
(charger beeping)
Beeping at me.
We are at 5.3 currently,
and
oh, I hear some fans going.
It turned yellow.
That should mean that the charge is about to happen.
And there we go, 13.5 kilowatts right now.
Let's plug in the next car.
Tesla model X.
We have plugged that in.
And,
whew, it is humid in here.
We're gonna let it go up.
Okay, 16.1.
It's gonna go higher than that.
19.1.
Tesla model S.
34.7.
Okay, let's go inside where the air conditioning is.
Oh, it's so hot.
Alexa, turn the house on.
What this will do is open up every shade,
and it will also turn on every light in the house.
There we go.
All the lights are on.
Let's see what that bumps it up to.
All right, so that's what the lights on.
We got a couple more kilowatts.
Now we are going to turn on
all of the air conditioning units,
because right now they are all turned off.
I turned them off just before this.
Let's set the house to a nice 71 degrees, how about that?
That should be all of them.
Now we're at 38.2.
Oh, there we go, 50.
That's so much energy.
51.6.
Oh my gosh.
You can see the spike.
This is where we were all day along,
we were around like 8.8,
and we were up to 17,
had a little outage for a little bit there.
Not a power outage,
just sometimes the data doesn't report properly.
The highest we got was around 25,
and now we are all the way up to 51.4 kilowatts.
For the first few months
I would have the Tesla Powerwall
charged up during the day.
So whenever there's excess power coming from the solar,
instead of pushing it back to the grid,
it would push directly into our Powerwall.
So it would take it from 20% full
all the way to 100%.
And then what was cool is that
for the first few hours of the evening,
instead of pulling power from the grid,
we would drain the Powerwalls from 100% down to 20%,
and then redo that every single day.
We didn't use any energy from the power supply
for like eight hours,
and it was fantastic.
Thank you, Powerwall, this was such a good decision.
Then I called my local power company
and asked them "How much is the energy company
"paying for the power that I'm pushing back to the grid?"
And it turns out that any energy
that I pushed back to the grid,
they buy it for 100% of the cost.
So basically give me a one for one credit
for when I use it later in the day.
So the grid is my Powerwall.
It's really nice to be able to have a power company
that buys back my energy for 100%,
but to be fair, they did tell me that next year
they're only gonna buy it back for 80%.
The year after that they're gonna buy it back for 60%.
And the year after that,
they're gonna go down to 40%.
So at that point, give me a few years,
three or four years,
I think my Tesla Powerwall will finally
be worth its money
because I can use it to store energy
and feed energy back to my house
because the energy that I'm selling back is only 40%.
So by me cycling through my battery Powerwall
every single day,
I'm actually degrading the battery,
and the sooner that it's going to basically be dead
and unusable and you need to go buy another one.
My battery pack is only there for an emergency,
like if something crazy happens like the power goes out,
which this is the stormiest weather
that you're going to see in our little town,
honestly, like this is it right now.
This is actually kind of crazy this wind.
But like the power went out yesterday.
it went out for five minutes because lightning struck.
I think I can survive for five minutes.
Gosh, that storm is looking pretty big.
I'm gonna go in the garage.
So yes, it is good to have a Powerwall
or a backup whenever the power does fail.
And when I say it's not worth the money,
what I mean is that I could have taken that $20,000
that it cost to put these on the wall,
and I could have put a bunch more,
maybe 20, maybe 30 more solar panels on the house.
Every single day that would be generating money for me
and money for our house, decreasing the cost.
Now the thing that you have to understand
is that the two Powerwalls that we have,
they are only 13.5 kilowatts of energy inside of it.
So we have two of them,
so that's what, 27.
And the max output is five kilowatt hours at one time.
So we can get 10 kilowatt hours coming out.
In fact, I'll show you what that looks like.
If we wanted to use the power wall right now,
I can change it to self powered,
and watch this.
We're going to take all the energy
from the Powerwalls right now
and push it to the house.
So even with two Powerwalls that are fully charged,
right now with all of our cars charging,
with all the lights and the AC on,
which is not recommended,
we don't do this all the time,
we can only get 10 kilowatts out
max out of the two different Powerwalls,
five per Powerwall.
This is going to drain incredibly fast.
Like maybe in an hour or two it's gonna be gone,
and you can see we're still
pulling 42 kilowatts from the grid.
So, yes, I know a lot of you in the comments are like
"Wow, your house is like a commercial building."
Yeah it kind of is.
Luckily and fortunately for us,
the power costs in our city is the same day and night.
There's no more expensive in the day,
cheaper at nighttime.
It is six cents per kilowatt.
So if we look at yesterday, for example, 256 kilowatt hours,
256 times 0.06.
So yesterday it cost us $15 and 36 cents
for all of our energy usage that we had yesterday.
So basically our solar panels saved us $4 yesterday.
If we had more solar panels
instead of the Powerwalls,
we would've made more money right here
because we're really not using our Powerwalls everyday.
So that's a decision.
If you are thinking about getting Tesla solar
and Tesla Powerwalls,
you really need to look at what is the cost
of the energy of electricity in the city that you live in?
How much will they buy it back for
when you push energy back to the grid?
And then also how often do you have power outages?
If you have them a lot,
then the benefit of that
is gonna weigh heavier than just the cost of how much energy
you're saving from that side of it.
For us, probably not the most useful thing.
So I am thinking about getting more solar,
and I was thinking about getting one
or two more battery Powerwalls
so that we could store more energy and use it,
nut after watching this for six months
and looking at the actual raw data,
I've learned I really need more solar,
I do not need more Powerwalls.
I can survive with my two,
'cause if the power goes out
and we just pull off of the Powerwalls,
all that it will do
is have the lights run for our entire house,
and then the AC unit for our studio,
'cause it's just one unit,
it's a contained place,
and if really it really got hot at nighttime,
we could run it in there.
So there is a video that I did not plan on making,
that I wish I didn't buy Tesla Powerwalls,
but I kinda wish we didn't buy it.
It was not the best use of money.
I'm willing to admit when I made a mistake with money,
and we did with that one.
I should not have bought the Powerwalls.
Now, if we ended up selling the house,
which we might within in a few years.
This is our dream home, but the kids grow up, they move out.
Maybe there will be some benefit
to the next owner and some value,
and we'll get our money back in selling the house
in that it's already here,
but as of right now I wish I had more solar units.
So anyway, thank you guys for watching,
let me know your thoughts.
I hope this was helpful to some of you.
I know a lot of you in the comments are gonna be like
you don't know anything
about what you're talking about, blah, blah, blah.
That's fine, let me know in the comments.
I love learning from you in the comments,
even when I'm wrong.
This is a rainstorm,
and this is about as bad as it gets where we live.
I love it.
I love the lightning.
I love the thunder.
I love the rain.
Those storm clouds are pretty ominous,
and they look kind of reddish.
Like they have a red hue to them
compared to that one over there
that's just dark and rainy.
Look at those clouds.
(rain pounding)
It is so wet out there.
I love this.
This never happens.