Is a Tesla Powerwall 2 Worth it? (1 year review)

it's been just over a year since i bought my tesla power wall or had it installed and so now we're back to take a look at all the data and understand the value that these kind of systems bring whether or not it was worth it or whether or not i made a big mistake let's go at my house i have two tesla power walls these are the powerwall twos and they each have 13.5 kilowatt hours of energy in them giving me a total of 27 kilowatt hours of backup energy with that i'm also able to charge my cars at night from the grid because the cars take a ton of energy and would just eat these things alive just to think about it the tesla model y and the tesla model x both have 80 plus kilowatt hours and remember two power walls combined are 27 kilowatt hours so the way i have it set up essentially at midnight when i reach what's called super off peak time i just go completely back to the grid the house isn't generally doing much you know i have kids we're in bed by nine you know midnight nothing's happening but the cars need to charge and they need to pull a ton of energy and i'd rather do that at this super cheap rate and then kind of you know have to shave it off later which i'll talk about in a second and so that was kind of the main idea was to use this to do this thing called peak shaving and actually save money by owning these devices and allowing me to control when i'm pulling from the grid and when i'm not now when i first got them installed an afterthought i had was that these would help in the event of a blackout but in southern california the weather's pretty calm there's not really anything going on that would really cause this until the power company started shutting off people's power to prevent fires because we do have fires in kind of the eastern part of the state so with that this became in much more handy and we'll cover that towards the end after we get through the cost breakdown for the cost breakdown there's a lot to consider and remember that i also have solar panels so before i got solar panels installed i was spending about 140 a month this included charging electric cars running air conditioning and a really mild climate in san diego not something that you know like phoenix or las vegas or somewhere like that i think it's extremely hot and a thousand square foot home so it's a small home but because we're using electric cars and all that our energy needs were actually pretty high i then added solar panels a 5.3 kilowatt system and this dropped my monthly electricity bill down to 35 which put me at a per kilowatt hour pricing of 13 cents which was down from 23 cents is which i was paying before then when i got the power wall my monthly bill dropped down to 18 which is about a six cent kilowatt hour average now this includes these non-bypassable charges so there's some kind of taxes and fees and stuff just to be connected to the grid that you have to pay and there really isn't a way to get around that so all of that comes into consideration here but really right now it's about as low as it can possibly be i'm paying less than a dollar a day almost like 50 60 cents a day for energy which includes kind of fueling like gas money you would spend on my two electric cars but of course the solar panels themselves cost money so we have to kind of factor that in we can't just assume they were free and we're saving the exact difference between the before and after so the solar panel system costs twenty thousand dollars minus a thirty percent federal itc this is a tax credit that you get bringing the total for my system down to fourteen thousand dollars if you divide that by 25 years or 300 months you get 47 a month this is what we call the amortization or the amortized cost of that solar system on my roof so you have to add that back into the savings previously to get kind of a true savings compared to what i was paying before i had solar so when you add that cost back in you're looking at a savings per month from just the solar panels of 58 that's the net savings just from going solar then i have another 17 in savings by owning a powerwall giving me a total savings of 75 dollars a month but of course that powerwall system also wasn't free now this system would have cost around 13 000 had i bought it directly from tesla using kind of retail pricing after incentives but i ended up getting these power walls for free from the tesla referral program thank you to everyone that used my code and because of that i only had to pay 2 750 for the install so amortizing that cost across the 10-year warranty gives me an added cost per month of 22 or 5 dollars more than it was actually saving me and if you had paid the full amount the 13 000 that means that you would be paying about 108 a month for these power walls which is about six times the cost of the savings i'm getting after also having solar so as we discovered before when you can use the grid as your backup battery through net energy metering or nem which applies to 38 states plus some u.s territories it doesn't really make financially sense to get a power wall however if i didn't have solar this would make good sense in that once you pay more than 14 cents per kilowatt hour you'll be making money on the deal across that 10-year warranty period at least according to one study by some students at stanford now the second reason that i mentioned before at the top were blackouts in the past year at my house here in san diego we've had a handful of blackouts one time i actually saw the lights flicker and i was upset because we'd been kind of having issues with our power wall syncing and everything then i went outside to check and i realized that the entire neighborhood was without power and that flicker was the momentary loss from the grid that my gateway had to switch from that to my power wall and that changed my perspective quite a bit on this whole situation and the financial viability of it so this begs the question how long could you go without having the grid and that's a bit of a tricky answer but here's my best guess i use around 28 kilowatt hours per day of electricity my solar panels generate about 24 kilowatt hours per day so eventually i'm going to run out of juice however in a real grid down situation we'd shift our energy needs to make sure that we used less than our solar panels generated less than that 24 kilowatt hours per day limit then from there we should be able to essentially go on forever with the exception of any days which have less sun than others which aren't a lot here in san diego but with the fires recently and just kind of june gloom and some of the other weather things that are changing here they definitely are present once in a while so is the tesla powerwall worth it after one year or did i make a huge financial mistake well considering i only had to pay for the install it's a no-brainer for me but even if i did have to pay full price the comfort knowing that during a black up my family would be safe and we would still have full power to our entire house that to me is worth it okay but if that's all i'm doing here with the power walls couldn't i go with the natural gas generator they're cheaper right a natural gas generator to power my whole house would cost around five thousand dollars according to angie's list then you have to factor in this semi-annual maintenance of 300 a year across 10 years and you have a total cost of right around 8 000 for one of these things so if you wanted to stack that up against what i have which are two power walls which came in right around fourteen thousand dollars yeah it would definitely be cheaper but if all i really cared about was backup power overnight in the event of an outage i really only need one power wall which would cost right around the same price right around eight thousand dollars so similar price overall but the power wall does offer a few advantages that the natural gas generator just can't help you with first you don't need natural gas to power it you can refill your power wall directly from sunlight and the solar panels on your house so if your power was out and the gas company cut gas for some reason well your generator wouldn't do you any good whereas a power wall would still function the second one is that the power wall lets you buy energy when it's cheaper and then go off grid during peak times every single day saving you money to break that down if i were to look at peak usage which is about nine kilowatt hours for my house at a price of 53 cents per kilowatt hour that cost me just under five bucks four dollars and 77 cents now the super off peak time from 12 a.m to 6 a.m when i would refill my power walls that would only cost me 81 cents for that same amount of energy so small dollars here but it you know adds up so the power wall savings there is just under dollars and ninety six cents per year that's fourteen hundred forty five dollars and forty cents and over that ten year life span the power wall would save me fourteen thousand four hundred fifty four dollars this means that if i didn't have solar and i just wanted to use the power wall to offset those peak charges which i can do with kind of going off grid and coming back and filling it up at night well i would save just about 14 500 over the life of the system which after the cost of that system would mean i would profit about six thousand dollars so when it comes down to it again what's the price you would be willing to pay for knowing that your family is safe during an outage leave me a comment below and let me know what you think would you do the same setup as i would would you have a different setup what would really push you over the edge and make you to buy one of these systems or not let me know i'm really curious also if you want to see my first video about this installation and how i actually did it and all the considerations there's a lot to it check out this video over here that i have and make sure to subscribe for more because the powerwall is something that i'm really excited about and i think a lot of people should explore more in depth and it's a lot cheaper to get going than you know a 50 or 100 000 car so thanks again for watching everyone and don't forget when you free the data your mind will follow i'll see you guys back here in the next one

Channel: Ben Sullins

Views: 1,096,980

Keywords: tesla powerwall 2, tesla, tesla powerwall, powerwall, solar, tesla solar, powerwall 2, renewable energy, solar panels, tesla energy, model 3, home battery backup, solar power, battery, backup battery, how much does powerwall cost, how much does solar cost, review, solar roof, home battery, tesla battery, energy, solar system, elon musk, model x, california, power supply, tesla home battery, off grid, tesla solar roof, model y, electric, tesla solar panels review, installation

Id: IGhdQWyM6B4

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020