- 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, but first I wanna talk about
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for sponsoring this video. 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.
