Tesla Powerwall 2 | Fully Charged

have you been miss solder PPI if so call us now on o2 three high nine seven oh six oh three two one four four four three nine seven seven six four four four eight nine seven don't worry we only take one 98% cut well hello and welcome to another episode of fully charged now this this episode is very specifically about this the tesla powerwall 2 now i had this installed about eight weeks ago and the reason for the rather unusual opening for this episode was because that's how I paid for it I didn't know I actually had a PP I for those of you over seas you won't know what that is at all and you're very lucky it's called a personal protection insurance scheme it's a con it's a ripoff it was what British banks did so it was a total ripoff I was paying for it for 18 years and I didn't know I thought it was an interest payment on my bank anyway I've got a refund which is very nice and that's what paid for this so it's kind of relevant batteries let's be honest and not terribly exciting to look at you know there's no moving parts there's no little brass valve you can polish there's no little put cams and pistons getting out there it's just a box that goes very quietly anyway this is all about the tesla powerwall three months ago a van arrived and some lovely chaps unloaded a big heavy package inside was a shining white slab [Music] [Applause] [Music] they did some drilling and bolting some wiring and installing and about four hours later it was ready to switch on nice job traps [Music] a few weeks before all this I replace my old 2.2 kilowatt solar array with a new 5.5 kilowatt array [Music] so since I've had the powerwall installed you could have become a little bit obsessed with the app the Tesla app I've got to show you this because it is it is very cool so at the moment that has the powerwall is that a hundred percent it's charged up already because it's a sunny day which is very nice and that's Joe so that initial screen just shows you how much you've got in the battery if I go to power flow there we go so I'm getting 3.9 kilowatts at the moment from the solar panels now 2.2 it's gone down a bit and I'm also charging the car and there you can see it's switching between all the so I'm charging the Tesla at the moment but only on three kilowatts so it's taking it's only on the three pin plug it's not on the normal seven kilowatt charger so it's slowly charging its charging a few miles an hour but what I know is I'm getting all this power just from solar what so the rest of the day so what I do is on a sunny day as soon as it gets to a hundred cent I plug the car in this will soon be taken over automatically by the zappy charger which I'm having fitted soon another program about that coming up in the near future so the sun's gone in now and I'm only getting 0.7 of a kilowatt as you can see there but then you can see that the whole day how the day is structured so that is all the all four things the house usage the solar production the battery usage and usage from the mains so if I turn off everything else you'll see how much mains we haven't used so point one of a kilowatt hour from the mains and then if I slide down and we've given the grid five point two kilowatt hours that's because I was out in the car and I didn't charge it until just now but then you can see the house usage so let's turn those two off that is how much we've used in the house so you can see these little spikes all the way through today that's boiling a kettle that's a washing machine that is making toast this morning it was quite a big dip that all came from the battery none of that was from the grid as you can see from the other one from the grid usage then there were sort of general usage of computers of lights that we're using to film and then most recently that is the car charging and as you can see there's quite a big spike when it first came on and then it levels out so I can see from this that we've used 7.2 kilowatt hours in the house in fact we haven't the cars used about two of those already so say around five kilowatt hours in the house now we can see what the solar has produced it's produced so far twenty point one kilowatt hours today and you can see from the bottom of that that 28.4% has gone to the house forty five point eight percent has gone to the power wall and twenty five point eight percent to the grid now normally if I have a really good day and I'm working here and I'm in control of it I can reduce the amount that goes out to the grid down to four or five percent because I'm putting far more into the cars once the batteries fall so there's this is still obsessive over management from my point of view you wouldn't want to do this every day this is because that's because I'm really you know very much into it you can I'll now show the battery usage so you can see what the batteries been doing today there's these few spikes in the morning which is when we were having breakfast early on in the morning it was quite an interesting one very early in the morning and I don't know what that is what did I turn on at about six o'clock this morning the extractor fan on the shower because I the shower so you can see then the the solar was charging the battery old all this morning and that's what so when it's below the line that is the batteries being filled and when it goes above the line that is the battery delivering so we've only had one point four killer hours from the battery today the rest has been to the battery nine point two killer hours into the battery and it wasn't empty this morning when I woke up so that's why it's full I hope this makes some sense to you and that is that you can see there when I turn on the grid that that is so power going into the battery and then once the battery is full the power goes into the grid you can see that very clearly where it goes gray is where it's going into the grid the other thing you can see from this is how much your daily usage is from the batteries and the solar panels and today it's ninety-eight percent of the electricity that we've used in the house comes from solar and batteries nineteen percent from power wall 79 percent from solar yesterday it was a very good day it was 99 percent forty seven from solar and 52 from Powell but if I look at the longer period so a week as you can see it's now 54% is from the solder on power wall and that the remaining 46% is off-peak electricity being used at night to charge cars and if I look at the month it's a little bit better at 63% and that again the remind the remainder is the off-peak electricity to charge up the electric car so we're running two electric cars a Tesla and a Nissan Leaf so they consume quite a lot of electricity but that's all off-peak electricity and some of this power some of that 63% has definitely gone into the cars as well so it is a combination of the two things but obviously in the first month I had I was really tight with charging the cows because I was obsessed and I got it up to 84% so I think a realistic appraisal of what it would do if you didn't have an electric car is in the kind of high eighty percent at this time of year and probably in the low 70s in the winter so that's the the gist of it the other great thing is I can do from here look I can switch to the car so now in a moment once that catches up so it's charging it's done ninety it's got 98 miles of range and it's charging at the moment but only at 6 miles an hour you can see it's very very slow 6 miles an hour it's only 10 amps so it's off a little three-pin plug and the reason I use that is because it just trickle charges it all the day and I don't take anything from the grid I know that there's enough in the battery and the solar to cover that so I've put in since we've had the this system installed and worked it out it's about 320 miles of total range in the car from solar and battery it's not bad really so let's meet Chris Jardine and find out more about the power wall so I'm joined now by Chris Jardine from Joe Joe solo it was Chris's company that put the new solar around my roof and the new inverter and the power wall here and it's fantastic to have you back Chris thank you very much for finding time to come and explain things to me so what we did this morning which is maybe stupid was say on Twitter if you've got any questions about the power and we got some like about 900 well let's see what rings it yeah let's see what we do but anyway let's just quickly explain one of these so there's solar panels on the roof of the building there they come in the power comes into this inverter that's correct and that is a new inverter and that is because the old one I had was too small that's right so we up sized the size of your solar array and that needed a larger inverter to cope with with that additional power and and so that's turning the DC electricity from the powers into AC electricity and that just lands in the in the fuse board as normal so at the moment I know that the solar is producing quite a lot we're not using much in the house a lot is going into the battery it's charging the battery at the moment yeah that's correct so the the tesla powerwall is is AC connected now which means that the battery unit simply just wires into into this consuming unit so it's very very simple to install and it doesn't really interface or relate to the inverter in any way the only additional piece that it has is this box here which is called the gateway and this is essentially what is controlling the battery telling it when to charge when to discharge because that is one thing that I suppose I think by the time it was installed I did know because we spoke at that the original the power wall one installation you know they're the lights flicker when it switches between the two they don't look it's completely seamless yeah this battery is thirteen point four kilowatt yeah so thirteen point four kilowatt hours so that's a lot of storage capacity that's pretty much double the other models that are on the market so that's really the the key differentiator of the tesla powerwall 2 is is that it has caused this huge it's just a big unit that's useful but obviously you need the rest of the system to match up with that to ensure that you're actually using all of that capacity or on a regular basis otherwise it's just sitting there idle right but let me just go through some of the questions not I mean some of them I know so it says when charging a car does it use power from the battery first or solar then battery yet so that's so many answers to that there's quite a lot of answers to that but it really depends on on how you charge your car but the way that the system was was set up that you generate from the solar during the day that fills up the power wall and then when the Sun Goes Down in the evening the power wall then discharges to the loads within your house so you're running your house off that off the solar energy stored in the battery come midnight the car start to charge and we empty the battery essentially into the electric vehicles so that the battery is empty the next morning ready to go through through another cycle and that means that we're fully utilizing the capacity of that battery right now thermodynamically that might seem a little bit odd that you're charging a battery and then discharged to get into your car battery but from an economic point of view that's the best way of doing things because you're using your solar electricity first of all to offset your expensive grid electricity that's that's feeding your house you're then putting the remainder of your free electricity into your car and then if you need to top up your car to get it full again you can use the nighttime economy 7ai cheap tariffs to get your cars fully full and you can repeat that cycle so that's certainly I mean that's definitely what I've done and what's been interesting is the days when I haven't done that because the cars are full or I haven't used them we're always at ninety nine percent from just from solar and battery in the house you know we've never and then if I charge the car it goes down to zero eighty percent so there's that little chunk that that is the nighttime use of the grid power another question that a lot of people asked was can you charge this from during the night say are using off-peak electricity so that the for instance in the winter so that will be a possibility that functionality doesn't exist at the moment but we understand that it's in Tesla's pipeline to to do that that kind of upgrade and it should just be a simple case of updating the firmware on this control box right to it to allow that kind of functionality to happen in winter you might struggle to get this fall because it's just darkened UK winters and so you might be able to sort of half fill this with cheap nighttime electricity and then top it up with salsa during the winter so you might have a sort of winter operating regime that uses a mix of solar and cheap nighttime electricity and we think that functionality is coming when that functionality does come of course it opens up the possibility that you could use these battery systems without solo yeah which would enable anyone to have one and they could then essentially be buying at the cheapest times that they can they can find it tariff and using that electricity and they want them that's the one thing I know for sure so far since we've had it is we've not used any grid electricity during the peak time not once never so between say 4:00 in the afternoon and 8:00 at night the battery has run the house every single day even on the most miserable grim raining so the grid offering companies are gonna love that yes it makes it a peak is lower that means less power stations required in order to meet that now so yeah that's good yes so what about the feed-in tariffs so that you get a feed-in tariff if you just have solar you get a feed-in tariff for all the electricity you produced as having the battery change that in any way tesla powerwall is is AC coupled so it simply comes off of this fuse box so it's sitting sort of beyond load side or the generation meter so the generation meter that you do your get your feed-in tariff payments from is sitting between the inverter in this few spots and then you go into the power walk after that so in a sense this is this is your house and that is that is going to that's what the grid reads is that that's correct right a huge amount of people asked how much they cost so this cost around five thousand pounds yep so the the unit themselves costs around about 5,000 pounds obviously plus installation and v80 it's worth explaining the v80 situation in a little bit more more detail solar PV systems are eligible for five percent VAT and if you install a battery alongside a PV system then you'll pay 5% that on the battery life if you're getting a battery retrofitted so you already got solar panels yeah you're just joining the battery yep and if you're just joined the battery on and the later date retrofitting the battery an existing system then unfortunately you pay back a 20% right right but the other thing that I was fascinated by is the cost per kilowatt hour of the batteries in this so this is thirteen point four killers there's other batteries we're going to be looking at on fully charged seems sanan in particular but they're all there costs per kilowatt hour considering all this is somewhere around 325 340 dollars US dollars a kilowatt hour and the other ones are between 900 and 1,000 dollars a kettle outage is it you're really quite say so the unit's themselves are sort of comparable in price to two other units on the market Bob see it's got this greater capacity so per unit of storage per kilowatt hour they can store that this is the market leader in terms of that price obviously that's only useful if you can fully utilize all of that story so we like to sort of think of a battery as a sort of bathtub analogy where the battery is the bathtub your solar generation is the taps that are filling it up only in summer dribbling in in winter and then there's the plug hole as well the size of the plug hole that is the amount of electricity that these units can can discharge the other sort of defining characteristic is that it can actually output more power than other batteries on the market so this can discharge five kilowatts of power into the Hat into the property whereas most other units would probably only be around two kilowatts of power right what that means is if you're running a three kilowatt kettle yeah your power walls going to cover that yeah hundred percent that's why you're seeing such high usage of solar electricity in your house is that this has actually got the power to cover all of that I think the only things that it wouldn't cover would be you know very high powered appliances like an electric shower quite a lot of people asked about what the return time on investment would be which i think is hard to tell yet because yeah I can't tell yet because I don't know you know I haven't had enough electricity bills for long enough I've noticed that over a hundred pounds a month drop in my or about 120 pounds a month drop in my electorate bill but then I'm quite a high user because of having two electric cars but I don't you know you have you ever have you done any estimates of what yeah well means it's only something we've had a look at it's very difficult to say what the exact payback will be because it depends on the utilisation at the battery and how much you can sort of fully discharged on fully charged up again on any given day I think if you look at cost of batteries you know there's still a comparatively expensive piece of kit and the economics of them is you know of the order of the lifetime of the battery itself what we're seeing is that when it's put in in conjunction with solar it is probably marginally increasing the payback period right if you're putting solar and the battery so during the battery compared to just so laughs yeah and probably you know probably puts another couple of years on the payback period there if you're retrofitting a battery back to an existing system obviously you're playing with twenty percent of bat and then yeah that picture looks looks worse so if you're looking at batteries as a purely economic thing to do as a way of making money then I don't think we're we're quite in that ballpark yet give it give it a couple of years you know the battery cost came down by 40 percent last year so really in one year one year yeah so so the learning curve on these the way that they're getting cheaper and cheaper and that is coming and I think batteries will soon be a be an economic thing to do now that is of course with with the current policy environment and I think we're seeing recent government announcements looking at introducing novel tariffs that might support storage so you might be able to buy electricity and from the grid when it's cheap and sell it back when they really need it and get paid handsomely for it so there may be things in the pipeline that will improve the economics of of current battery battery systems we're seeing people that are saying I've got this solar system but I'm out all day yeah I never get to use my solar generated electricity I get a battery then I can know that I'm using that energy that that electricity that I generated myself I mean that is one of the questions was because which I've experienced because we had a power cut here only a week after we had first I don't installed it and currently it won't run the house when there's a power cut that's correct so but is that something you can see that that will a bench that will come and we know from Tesla that you know they're they're looking to have that kind of backup capability what what the unit will do at the moment is it's essentially monitoring the amount of electricity coming into your house and out of your house at your front door and it's trying to set that two to zero right now that's got its own control box that does that and that seems to operate quite well but in order to you know satisfy the grid people that has to work absolutely faultlessly right in the event of a power cut there will be people outside working on the lines and they don't want to get and so you have to be absolutely certain that they don't get that so in a sense that where if there's a park at this this system needs to be isolated from the grid yeah that's that and that at the moment that isn't possible yeah that's not possible at the moment but I think that that will come we're seeing the demand for that kind of functionality for it to you know access backup power in the event of a power cut I think it is worth reminding people that you know in the UK there's an average of about two minutes of power cut per year yeah because we I mean even here we used to get them all the time when we first lived a many years ago because the local grid was probably a bit Dicky because it was very old and they've clearly done something you know we don't get and that was the first one we've had for probably five years it was so weird that it happened so soon after we had this install so it is very rare now it's very rare is very reliable so yeah yeah purchasing a battery system just accustomed right through those minutes may not be entirely sensible thing to do no do you need spare capacity on your consumer unit brackets fuse box to fit it I'm not sure whether is it going to break if it's hit with the football it is quite so this core solid says the football question I think I think it would survive a football but let's say in terms of the consuming unit we can actually see this here so we've got one one fuse here that's connected that was already at old yep and we've got one here that connects down to the Gateway which is the control box so you need to spare slots right in your consumer unit to attach that directly otherwise it will need a new consume unit and a little mini one added on the side in terms of expense fitting it's not a big that's not a massive deal with it I mean we were here what four hours yes yeah I'm fitting this when we were here with you so it was certainly a simple yes and these can go outside there could be outside the houses they can go inside or outside and they can go floor-mounted like this is or they can be be mounted on the wall yeah I mean this is this is joined to the wall just in case you're thinking it might fall I'm not leaning on it to stop it falling over its jaw yeah these are these are 120 kilograms these and these units say don't want that toppling over particularly if you've got a nice Tesla Model S that would pop next to it that wouldn't let them be great so this would be very ironic someone asked how long it would take to say it was empty at midnight how long it would take to charge on economy 7 and I just waited out from what it takes to charge the car and it's the 13 and a bit kilowatt hour battery I reckon a couple of hours with nickel but it really it depends on what it can pull from the grid so I would imagine five kilowatts is what it can take from the sollozzo yes it's taking five kilowatts from so so I think it'll be fooling yeah yeah and it would cost thirteen times five pence I can't do that maths that's quite somebody so it cost 65 P to charge it at night so someone's asked because I've seen pictures of it I know it's possible you know could you get more than one of these you know and does it would it make sense to like have a row of four if you just had a bottomless budget I can't really tell I at the moment this is doing everything that I needed so it's right so yes you can daisy chain these together and and and run a fleet of a fleet of batteries and that's the sort of applications that we might see in a more commercial setting a hotel or something like that so we can connect more than one together is it sensible for a household to to do that again it's about it's about getting the balance right so you know we've used this bathtub analogy of the taps the the bathtub and bug hole yeah this is this is a big bathtub already you could daisy chain them together get a massive bathtub but if you're only dribbling in a little bit of solar electricity then they're never gonna fill in yeah yeah and if the loads aren't they're never gonna drain er so that's where I suppose our skill as system designers comes in in in terms of getting the balance right between what's being generated what you need to store and what's being discharged and I think that's why yeah your system is is working so well it's because it's got a beefed up larger solar array feeding a large battery feeding a large load yeah it's late because of the cars not because you're profligate in your not entire electricity consumption that bad all matches yeah so that kind of system would would work well last one is how long it lasts yeah I mean I think we'd be working on the basis of around about 10 10 years for a unit like this but you know it may well be the case that because it lasts younger yeah and the performance will degrade right you know over that time so yeah but if after 10 years it's only storing 10 kilowatt hours so you know I mean you've lost you know and that's quite a big percentage loss of its total capacity thank you I'll just yeah I mean I think that's the thing is that just die like the whole thing just goes goes to a certain point then just stops it basically loses capacity over that period yeah nothing you know this is this is a new technology a new application for that technology so we don't really know what that degradation over time looks like if certainly if it maps maps solar PV where solar PV is expected to last 25 years but yeah we could easily see that a not certain year 30 40 yes yeah but that's brilliant Chris thank you so much I mean I'm I can honestly say I'm a very happy customer it's fantastic it's you know it's done more than I you know you can't really imagine what it's going to do until you've got one you know it's difficult to see how it will affect the way you charge things and run your house you know it's definitely made such a big difference it's absolutely extraordinary and you've done a brilliant job I can say that with all honesty I paid for it you know I'm not being paid to say it's it but it was really you know very painless operation having it put in and it's been a real success I wash quickly out because you would put in other people's batteries you're not just doing Tesla batteries I mean that's a yes so we consider ourselves technology agnostic and and yeah we will we will install it any kind of battery and that you know we think is is a technically good option and we would consider that on a on a case-by-case basis again trying to match you know the taps to the bump-out to the profile yeah yeah that said because the Tesla's unit price is is cheaper than its competitors then kind of in the lead in when it kind of becomes a viable option well that's all we got time for thank you very much for watching I'm just obviously obsessively checking my app at the moment I'm getting 3.6 3.7 kilowatts of solar from the old panels marvelous so thanks for watching please subscribe to fully charge and also have a look at the little patreon link beneath this video and as always if you have been you [Music]

Channel: fullychargedshow

Views: 1,214,819

Rating: 4.8896399 out of 5

Keywords: batteries, Tesla Powerwall, Tesla, Powerwall, solar, solarPV, photo voltaics, inverter, 2040, Fully Charged show, electric car, electric vehicles, electric bikes, hydrogen fuel cell, bio gas, smart grid, micro grid, renewable energy, sustainable development, wind turbines, battery, Robert Llewellyn, Red Dwarf, Scrapheap Challenge, internal combustion, diesel, Fossil fuel

Id: nWLzlrGGuxQ

Length: 28min 15sec (1695 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Cubicbill1]

Increbibly interesting video, well worth the time. I'm glad to see the powerwalls are getting produced and shipped.

[u/reefine]

That is a sleek looking app.

[u/chriswilmer]

Confused about what they said about back up power during an outage... that is exactly why I am getting a powerwall and supposedly they are installing in my house in a few weeks... I sure hope it works for backup power because I don't have solar!

[u/Filippopotamus]

This guy is so entertaining to watch. You can tell he is genuinely friendly and just an overall nice guy. Great video, great info. Long, but recommended!

[u/vita10gy]

Anyone know if there's a way to put something in place that gives you something like that app tracking without the solar/powerwall? It would be nice to see our power usage. We use something like 2200 kwh a month and it seems like that's high even for FL in august with a pool pump.

Edit: Nice, thanks all. A little spendy maybe, but perhaps I'll get one and have the electrician who installs the tesla charger throw this in there.

[u/jesperbj]

Fully Charged is my favorite show

[u/[deleted]]

Note, this is in August. The dude sounds British. In any other months is more like 5% gonna be powerwall and solar vs the 60% in summer.

I have ~20m2 of solar installed at my home. Make about 5.4MWh yearly. Of which about 4-4.5 in the months end april-beginning september . The rest of the time its basically grey and damp. Comparable to britain's weather

[u/MC_Babyhead]

If the Powerwall 2 has a built in inverter then why is the SolarEdge inverter necessary?

[u/averymann4]

Why did they install it so low to the ground? What if there's a flood?