Powerwall is Seamless

Summary

Jared

And so one of the things that I think gets lost in the message here is what that experience is on a day-to-day, I’ll call it the quality of life experience. You mentioned you’re surprised – how frequently do you think the power goes? Now that you’re seeing it and you probably never even thought about it.

David

So actual outages happen, I mean not all that often. I would say three or four times a year. And they’re usually brief. They’re usually 10, 15 minutes. Now, we just had some storms last week and we had a brief outage. But then after the storm had passed and the power was restored, there were several times that the Powerwall took over.

There wasn’t any outage in the neighborhood. I could see what other houses still had lights, but there was some power anomaly, so I didn’t have to worry about getting a surge or something from the grid because the Powerwall sensed that and took care of it. The other interesting thing about the Powerwall is that Tesla monitors the weather and sends alerts to your system.So if you are, like, when there’s a severe thunderstorm warning from the National Weather Service, the Powerwall automatically charges to a hundred percent. No matter what time of day it is, it doesn’t care what, how expensive the electricity is, it wants to charge and be ready for you. And then if there’s an actual outage, you have that.

Something that a lot of people don’t understand about solar is that solar requires grid power to work. If you don’t have power coming into the house for safety reasons, the array shuts down. It will not produce any power if it doesn’t sense line pressure coming into it. This is super important because if you’re, if there’s a power outage and you’re up on a pole trying to fix something, the last thing you want is power coming from somebody’s house back out to the grid, right?

With the Powerwall, what happens is the gateway, not to get too technical, but it senses that there’s an outage and it actually takes your house offline. It’s a transfer switch. It transfers all control away from the grid. So it monitors the grid, but you’re not connected to it anymore, then the battery produces the power that you need for your house and the power necessary for the solar panels to work.

So here’s the scenario: you lose power at three in the morning and it doesn’t come back on again. The battery is gonna keep you powered up in your house and when the sun comes up at seven o’clock, it’s gonna tell the solar panels to produce power and it’s gonna recharge the battery. So not only do you get through your temporary outage, but if you had an extended outage and you reduced the power that you consume in your house, you could potentially go for days without power just from solar and the battery.

It it’s so hard to get this across too, because we have a house in Florida and our neighbor just put in a generator and I said, “why’d you do a generator?”

And he said “because we’re out power for a couple days.” I said I’m putting in a Powerwall, and he asked how long does it last? I said it only has to last until the sun comes up, because  once the sun comes up it recharges. And this guy is an engineer, right? I would think he would’ve gotten it. And he still looked at me like I had two heads. Like he couldn’t figure out what I was saying. It’s forever. And by the way those kilowatts you’re producing with Dino Fuel, that’s expensive power, man. That’s really expensive. 

And I will say that it is better than Dan forecast for me. So they, you guys, do a proforma of what you could expect on your, your return time.My return time is gonna be far less than what you had predicted