special shout out to Tezlab for making this video possible
the must-have companion app for any tesla owner
i have been waiting two years for my tesla powerball and now
i finally have it installed i've had it for about a month i've had a chance to
use it to understand all the different settings and the properties
and in this episode i want to talk to you about everything you need to know about the powerwall
first and foremost when you buy the powerwall and you have it installed i want to walk you
through what you can expect first all of your electricity for your house runs from a service
panel in this panel you have electricity being provided from your utility company
on the street and in this panel you have different circuits or different junctions and the reason is
because there's a limit to how much power you can draw from copper wire so to spread that out and
make sure that you're not having a microwave and a hair dryer constantly overloading each circuit
you break out your house into different circuits why does this matter because when tesla comes with
their power wall they're going to create a new sub panel they call it the critical loads panel
the idea here really is to back up everything that you can with your powerwall depending on how many
powerwalls you have that will determine how much you can back up so for me i have one power wall as
a result my air conditioning my double oven and my tesla car charging is not backed up those are over
30 amp loads but everything else in my house is if you have two or three maybe you can back up your
air conditioning maybe you can back up your double ovens and things like that talk to your reps at
tesla to ask those questions and get clarity on that so step one they'll come in and they'll pull
all these circuits out of your main panel so my main panel was really busy before now it's
almost entirely empty because all that's left are the things that are not backed up from here you
have a gateway that is also installed now this is where tesla's incredible eye for detail and their
gorgeous products really shines this typically in most companies the gateway is an ugly black box
made of plastic or steel this is white and it is glass but in this gateway lives the heart of the
internet connected device which knows what's going on as far as how much power your house is using it
makes the judgment of detecting the grid and when the grid goes out to switch to the power wall this
happens instantly you'll see the light flicker for like a little bit but otherwise computers don't
shut down nothing happens all of our desktops carried on nothing crashed or anything else
my powwow is a gorgeous candy apple red and other than that aesthetic look it's identical
to every other powerwall the power wall has 13.5 kilowatt hours of storage capacity now i thought
this was a lot but here in july and august in san diego i'm running my air conditioning and
turns out 13.5 isn't as much as i thought because it can't power my house through the entire night
but if my air conditioning wasn't running that could actually be enough to power me
till the next day when the sun comes back up again now that brings up the solar portion and
by the way if you're considering going tesla solar or powerwall and you want to save 100
and help support the show consider using our link it would help us out and we're hoping to get
future invitations to tesla events so thank you so much for your support as always so you have the
option of either going solar and powerwall or just powerwall and that will change a couple of things
for one i already had solar so when the powerwall came in they took the solar leg coming into my
service panel and they run it into what tesla will monitor and record and feed into the power wall
when there's excess energy if you don't have solar then you can actually have your power wall charged
from the grid now this might vary from utility to utility so talk to your tesla rep they'll
know the rules in your region to help answer that question all right next up let's hop
into the mobile application inside of it you've probably seen your car in the past
but now if you swipe to the right you'll see your power wall so first up we have power flow so power
flow is showing you what is happening right now 3.2 kilowatts is what my solar is producing and
what it is doing is it's powering the house and then whatever's left is charging the power wall
in the performance section it shows you how much of your power was from solar or the power wall so
today only about five percent not very good but it will get better uh later in the day the backup
history will show you when the power outages have occurred and for how long so you can always check
in here and go interesting the power went out but i didn't even know because i have a powerball
and finally the most interesting part is under customize here you have all your different options
if you want the power wall only to just be fully charged in the event of an emergency you'd put
it in backup only but that's not very interesting there's better options second is self-powered what
that means is when the sun is shining and you're making too much it'll charge the battery and when
you need a little bit more it'll discharge the battery simply put it will try its best to never
use the grid next up is advanced and this is where you want to be if you have time of use
here in san diego we have different billing based on time of day the most expensive is 4 to 9 pm at
50 cents and midnight to 6 a.m for me is 9 cents for charging things like my car so if you put it
in balance what it'll do is it'll try to power the house and then charge the power wall as best as it
can if you choose cost saving mode then the power will charge up as fast as it can and it'll wait
until the time you specify for when the prices are really high so here you can edit the prices
and you notice that i've got 4 to 11 30 as my peak time even though it's 4 to 9 i
have the power wall just go ahead and power whatever it can until it runs out of energy
after 4 pm so down below we have storm watch which means that the tesla is monitoring if you live in
like florida and you have hurricanes and things little monitor for events that could cause power
disruptions and it'll be prepared for that and you even have an option to charge your vehicle
even if the power goes out to a certain amount so we've spent a lot of time in the tesla
app and as amazing as it is there's one other must-have app that i use all the time for my
tesla and that is the teslab app here's why the teslab app is so amazing in track you can see
every trip you have taken on your tesla every time you start and stop it and it tells you how far you
drove and how efficient you were if you're a business professional and you drive for work
this is the killer application feature for me with one click you can export bring it into a
spreadsheet and track which was for business which was not and have exact mileage figures
it also tells you your battery scores and how your battery is performing over time
and how much range you're getting the levels of degradation and performance and there's even a
leader board and a community element that really gamifies the entire experience as if driving a
tesla wasn't fun enough already so if you want to have the must-have tesla app for your car
go to teslab.app 2-bit signing up is free and if you want the longer term data of the pro app
then that cost about as much as a cup of coffee a month so that's the application so now let's talk
about what type of mode and what type of a user you might be first and foremost if you have solar
you're either a net energy metering customer or you're not net energy metering means if i make
one extra kilowatt hour today and i need an extra tomorrow they offset and my bill would be zero
if you don't have that you really want to get a power wall because when you have excess solar you
charge the battery and when you need that power when the sun goes down you have the battery so in
terms of lowering your bills and if you don't have net energy metering a power wall is a good idea
second maybe you have net energy metering but it's a really crappy deal and what i mean by that is
if electricity costs you 20 cents when you use it but when you give it to them they give you
five cents that's not a really good deal that means that you would have
to give them four kilowatt hours to offset one that you would use later in the night
so if you have no net energy metering or a bad energy metering plan a powerwall can help you
offset later energy usage when the sun goes down without involving the grid the next question is
if you're a time of use customer here in san diego we have time of use 4 to 9 pm is really expensive
so what my powerwall does is allows me to charge from solar all day and then come 4 o'clock it
kicks in and tries to cut my usage in that peak period completely to zero and what's really cool
is because my solar system is still generating a little bit of electricity i'm actually going
to get a negative bill in that period because four o'clock usually is around negative two kilo hours
five o'clock is like negative one and then the sun goes down and i don't get much after that but the
power wall was powering the entire house in that entire period so those are the different kinds of
categorizations that you would have but the bottom line is if you want to offset your energy usage
the power wall is an incredibly awesome way to do that and if you're trying to make it an economic
choice time of use is really going to be the key if you can charge it at earlier time and
discharge during the expensive time the power wall will just pay for itself that much sooner
in solar there is a huge important phenomenon called the duck curve and what happens is
in places like california where we have high electricity prices and tons of solar
there's so much solar during the high noon period of time that the state of california is actually
wasting it there's way more solar generation than is needed isn't that crazy because we don't really
have much in the way of battery banks and stuff pg e is working on a utility sized powerwall
installation which is great but we don't have enough in the way of storage so as a result when
the sun is shining we don't need that electricity and then at 4 5 6 pm when the sun is setting
we don't have enough and then so the power plant operators have a huge challenge trying to figure
out when should we buy power when should we not some power plants called base load power plants
are always on nuclear for example others are called peaker plants and they can get turned
on and off when the demand is high these are the dirtiest types of energy either natural gas
or coal or something like that and they are very expensive as well and if we all have power walls
we distribute our energy creation and storage we would not need peaker power plants and that
is the environmental benefit of the power wall all right now let's talk about the tesla
installation experience first of all they'll send you emails ask you to take photos of your electric
panel where you want to install it you have the choice of installing in your garage if you live
in a place with really hot or really cold weather you might want to do that here in san diego the
weather is pretty nice and i didn't want to lose any storage room in my garage so i chose outside
you submit the pictures and stuff they'll schedule plans and meetings they'll come out for the first
day they took all of my panels and circuits over from my main panel to the new tesla critical loads
panel that pretty much took an entire day so the actual tesla power wall hanging and installation
happened on day two so on day two they came out had the gateway all plugged up they hung my power
wall and it was fully online and working day three which happened about a week or two later is when
the permitting office came down the representative from the city and they opened up all the doors
checked everything and i got my permit approved then the final thing would be tesla will schedule
a chance for you to come out and if they had to cut drywall inside to access your circuits on the
inside of the house or if they had to drill into your stucco or your siding on the outside of the
house they'll come out and repair all that stuff the only issue that i had was when i first had my
system all installed what i noticed was when the air conditioning kicked on the power wall never
even tried to match it what i mean by that is the ac is not backed up and i know that if the power
goes out my ac will not work interestingly because i have natural gas and the furnace is backed up i
can still get heating which is pretty cool but ac will not work and i know that but what i was
thinking was the power wall can output 5 000 watts or 5 kilowatts instantaneously and continuously so
at 4 or 5 pm if the ac turned on the power wall is actually capable of supporting that much power
and keeping my house running and keeping my bill at zero but it wasn't it wasn't even aware of
those loads and so i called tesla and i talked to him and they came out turned out they had made a
mistake and they were monitoring my critical loads panel not my entire panel right the difference is
the critical loads panel didn't have the double oven the air conditioning and the tesla charger
they came out and put cts on the entire panel so now the power wall is monitoring my entire house
usage so if i turn on my air conditioning and my double oven and my car charging and i'm using 10
000 it can't do all of it but it will eat up five thousand and i'll only pay the difference which is
pretty awesome i love my power wall every single day i know it's a full charge
and it is using the battery during the really expensive periods of time and my bill is even
lower than before the one request i would have and this isn't really to tesla would be to allow
the power wall to charge on the grid even if you have solar at midnight because at midnight i paid
nine cents so i could charge my entire battery for about a dollar 30. then instead of having to use
up 13 kilowatts of solar during that period when it's 30 cents i could send it back to the grid
and get about three dollars worth of credit and then my battery would be fully charged for the
four to nine pm like it does now currently that is not supported and it's because of my utility
company they don't want batteries charging on grid at earlier times and discharging that might change
because really energy arbitrage is what we really need here in san diego and california in general
and around the world storing electricity is the goal so i think this will change and when it does
i'm sure tesla will have a software update in the future so that is the tesla powerwall one of the
most amazing pieces of tech that i've ever bought i know it's just a battery hangs on your wall
but i find it utterly fascinating and if you do too and you're interested in going tesla for solar
and batteries we would hugely appreciate it if you used our link it helps you out it helps us
out and it gives us more visibility with tesla for future events and activities so that pretty much
wraps it up for us hit subscribe like this video share it with your friends if you found it useful
and special shout out to tesla for sponsoring this video and to all of our patrons on patreon
for supporting us as well if you want to be a rockstar supporter of this show consider
supporting us on patreon i'm ricky with tuba davinci thank you so much for watching
you