Tesla Powerwall & Gateway 2 installation in the UK. Is it right for your house?

hi and welcome to today's video where i'm going to be talking about our tesla powerwall installation and solar upgrade so this will be a useful video if you are thinking about solar or maybe you've already got solar thinking about a battery i'm going to cover quite a few points i'll try and cover some of the finances as best i can and you can maybe make an educated decision at the end um if you like today's video then please click like just below and of course it'd be great to have you on board as a subscriber if you find these kind of videos interesting you'll probably find my other videos interesting hopefully but in the meantime here is the intro [Music] okay so let me start by explaining what we had and what we have now so when we moved into this house it had seven solar panels on the roof which gave about 1.9 kilowatts um so we've upgraded this summer and taking those seven off and replaced them with 16 new ones slightly more powerful which now gives us just shy of six kilowatts um we also added the tesla power wall um along with the which is a powerwall 2 i believe along with the tesla gateway 2 which i'll explain more about in a moment um which gives us a 13.5 kilowatt storage capacity so that's what we have now um now to explain a little bit about how it all works um said if i talk you through and the different components and how they talk to each other that's probably the best place to start because it's uh it's not overly complicated but you do need to kind of understand what does what and how um so if you look at this chart now you can see that right at the top you've got the six kilowatt solar panels so well they feed in up to six kilowatts um optimally on a really sunny day uh these went in august by the way so i must admit we've not had too many of those since and that feeds into the tesla gateway that does of course go via an inverter um but for the sake of rather than sort of adding an extra component essentially the inverter then puts out the power to the gateway the gateway is then connected to the tesla battery um the battery itself is a largely dumb item i mean the only smart element about it is that it knows that it is paired with that gateway so if for example it was stolen for whatever reason which is um would be difficult because it weighs about 130 kilos but if it was um it wouldn't work with any other gateway without tesla themselves configuring it so it's largely had a dumb battery at the bottom there you have the house um so obviously the the crux of it all everything is about providing power to the house and then over on the left you've got the mains grid so power coming in from um from our electricity supplier connected to that by the way is our pod point so the power point is our electric car charger that we use to charge my tesla car um now the important point here is that i said everything goes into the gateway and the gateway is the only thing that's connected to the house now the reason for that and the way that works is the gateway as i said is the brains so that has all these things coming into it so it has the solar coming in it has the mains coming in it has the battery connected to it and of course the house so it decides what to do with the power so for example if there is power coming from the solar the first thing it does is feed the house so if there's enough power from solar to power the house then that's what it'll do first and foremost if there's more power coming in from solar than the house needs then it puts the excess into the battery so therefore you're powering the house and you're slowly trickle charging the battery if the house has all the power it needs the battery is fully charged and there's still more power coming from solar that's when it puts it back to the grid and you can generate payments all be it absolutely tiny ones unless you signed up to solar about 15 20 years ago um now if there's less power coming in from the solar um say not enough to power the house then what the gateway will do is it will tap into the battery so it'll take power from the battery to power the house what it will do at all cost is trying to avoid power taking power from the grid so it'll run off the battery and then once the battery's either run out or if there's just not enough power maybe the house is using one half kilowatts of power at that point and the battery could only um only has enough power in it to maybe provide one kilowatt of it then the other half will come from the grid hopefully that makes sense um and then crucially um what's really really cool about these if i go back to this chart is when you look at it the interesting thing is that if the power is cut from the mains grid so if there's a power cut for whatever reason um then obviously that will mean that there's no power coming to the pod point and there's no power then going in to test the gateway from the grid what the gateway then does is allows it to completely isolate from the grid um so therefore the battery will run the house so the pod point is obviously one of the major power consumers because when you're charging a car you can take up seven kilowatts it's a lot of power going out um so when it's disconnected from mains what it means is that the the battery can then power the house and so hopefully you have a completely seamless experience in terms of um basically having constant electricity supply the thing you've got to bring in mind is not every battery system is capable of doing this the important thing what the gateway does is exactly that it closes the gate because if you have a live connection between the battery and the mains say the battery the main stops providing power but the battery's still live that can send power back onto the grid which can electrocute an engineer that might be working on the grid fixing the power cut and so a gateway is quite special in the sense that it can lock that door so the battery can power the house in isolation without making the grid harmful that's an important point and it's real differentiator because not every battery has the capacity to do that so just then i touched on the fact that solar if you signed up 15 20 years ago is very different to solar now let me explain what that means um so when they first launched um solar encouraging houses to put them on the government put some policies in place that quite frankly when you look back now are ridiculously good um so for example i think if you signed up right at the beginning for every kilowatt of power you generated you get paid i think just shy of 50 pence per kilowatt even if you use it you literally it's getting paid to generate it and then any excess that you sell to the grid they pay you i think an additional five pence per kilowatt so you can make real money if you have a solar panel um system that was set up and registered said about 15 years ago um that's fantastic if you're one of those guys in which case would you bother with a battery um you could from an environmental point of view but realistically from a financial point of view you've got that much money coming in i'm not sure you're going to be too concerned about what you're saving um but it's you should still obviously keep it in the mix because there's a lot of good reasons to have it particularly my power cut point of view um at the end of the day if your solar is only paying you if it generates and in winter which we're in now it's december uh 2021 um the solar panels aren't doing a great deal so therefore a battery will be really really useful it's great if the solder pays money but only for some so what we get paid as a house that signed on to the policy about three years ago is we get paid the following breakdown for what we generate and what we sell back to the grid which as you can see is very very different to what you would have got 15 years ago so in which case now it's more important to figure out what you're going to do with that electricity because it doesn't really pay you a great deal to put it back to the grid so you want to use it one way or another enter the battery now what the battery of course allows you to do is to be able to take the power from the sun that you're not using as i mentioned before put it in the battery and then when the sun sets or or maybe it's just not as bright then the battery can then power the house the logic in that's very very straightforward there are more factors to take into account though and so say for example with the tesla battery um what we've done uh because we've got the tesla car is the off-peak and on-make electricity tariffs make a big difference so for example we have um octopus go and what that means is we pay five pence per kilowatt for power between half past midnight and half past four in the morning and then it's like 15.8 pence the rest of the time so therefore that electricity in those four hours is super super super cheap in comparison to rest you know it's like just under a third of the cost so we want to use that as much as we possibly can now what the tesla battery does is it's smart enough to know uh what the weather's going to be like so it's got a good idea about how much sun it isn't or isn't going to get from the solar panels so what it does is if it knows there's not power coming from there it looks for it elsewhere once you've told that you're on an off pc peak electricity tire which you do in the tesla app then it knows that if it can't get powered from the sun it should charge the battery during the off-peak hours in those four hours when it's five per kilowatt so our system because there's no sun at the minute or very little that's what it does we'll you'll see our electricity between half past twelve and half past four in the morning just goes really high but at five pounds per kilowatt it's fine it's not cost it'll literally end up costing just a few pounds but that power that's in the battery can run the house on an average day till about six or seven pm yes it'll get a little bit of solar kind of topping it up but essentially we are looking at about 14 hours a day's worth of power coming directly from the battery not touching the grid and then overnight time the grid has to kick in because the battery's dead until half past 12 and then the whole thing starts again so what we do is to capitalize on those four hours is we charge the battery we charge the car and if you've seen one of my other videos you'll see that we have a hot tub and as i outlined in that video using off-peak car electricity tariffs is the absolute key to heating that so we also have the heater on and the hot tub for those four hours so those four hours we blitz our power which is off peak it's the lowest demand on the grid so it's actually better for the grid and then the rest of the day the hot tub stays warm the car's charged and of course our tesla battery is powering the house hope all that makes sense so to be fair you can start to see the appeal um there are two specific tariffs to do with um the tesla battery where how that works is i think it's 11 pence per kilowatt here and what that means is that when we buy any power anytime from the grid it's 11 per kilowatt so what you might say obviously that's not as good as what we have now um with the off-peak but the big thing is that any power we then sell back to the grid also pays 11 per kilowatt so it's a flat fee going in or going out now what that means is it allows tesla to use our battery as well as us so the solar for example any solar that's generated is either stored in the battery power in the house or exported to the grid at 11 per kilowatt uh and then later on the day when the battery's dead we buy that power back at 11 per kilowatt so we get to use every bit of solar power but it also means tesla can use the battery to actually they can charge it and deplete it themselves and actually feed the grid to help the grid when it's under pressure so it actually helps the grid widely but from our point of view i must admit right now we're sticking with octopus go uh and the tesla tariff is from octopus as well um and it's exclusively from them but they um with the ottoman scots right now when there's no sun that five pence during the night allows us to do everything when we get to spring going into summer and we've got more power come from these panels that said we only installed them at the end of august and so we've not really seen the optimum um maybe we'll reassess because at that point there'll be a lot of power generation i've got some figures here for example and our solar generated in september 398 kilowatts um by october it dropped to 167 and in november it dropped to just shy of 73. you know so the difference seasonally is massive um now compared to our old panels um which were a third of the power essentially that means we've generated an extra 265 kilowatts if i value them as the peak rate at 15.8 pence that's nearly 42 pounds a month just from that one month so those extra panels that's a big saving and over the year that will that will obviously pan out a bit a bit better october where the take the solar and consumption was sorry the solar generation was a bit lower we valued that at about 17 pounds 50 so not too much and november was about six about seven pounds 67 so not huge savings when the sun's not out because that's the nature of solar but the battery is saving us money because it goes the battery at 13.5 kilowatts let's say because you we never run it completely dry we always leave it at five percent just in case so let's say it's 13 kilowatts that we're using so 42 pounds per month is being saved by having the battery now you might go great now that's good but obviously the cost of the battery then comes into play because 42 pounds per month is something but what does that really mean uh when you're looking at the cumulative cost so i'll be transparent what does it cost so for us we went for the price of removing the seven kilowatt panels uh sorry the seven um panels that equate it to 1.9 kilowatts and then replacing them with these 16 brand new ones so we were paying for the removal of the old ones um the payment of the new ones and the installation of the new ones because we have them integrated into the tiles as you can see on this picture here so therefore the tiles had to be removed and there was some roof work to be done so there was that side and that cost us about seven thousand pounds nearer nearest nearest damage um the bit that you're probably most interested in is the tesla battery what did that cost um so the the battery the gateway and the full installation um that cost us again pretty much bang on nine thousand pounds uh in august 2021 so it's about 16 000 pound installation all together we've still got the old panels and the old inverter um they were taken off and with the intention of us ebaying them we might get something for it won't be a great deal but let's assume um let's just actually let's assume nothing from it let's just look at our total cost of 16 000 pounds so if i'm saving uh 40 pounds per month just by having the battery um so over the year that's 480 pounds that's not a great deal you know let's round it up to 500 just for numbers we're paying off 16 that's a 32 year break even obviously not ideal but then of course the the upgrade and the solar the value of that is quite important if we look at that throughout the year i estimate that we'll probably realistic that's probably going to be the best part of another um 40 pounds per month in which case suddenly that's a thousand pounds so if there's a thousand pounds being saved from power because you're using the battery and a thousand pounds being oh sorry 500 pounds being saved because you're using the battery and 500 pounds being made um because of the value of the solar add it together thousand pounds 16 000 so therefore you break even is 16 years i'll be following me on this so far um what we did because you can still look at that and think well that's i'm not sure that's necessarily the right way to go what i cannot tell you is how much electricity is going to cost in the future because if the prices continue going up then obviously that break-even point is going to come down um i also can't tell you about um degradation on the battery and tesla assure me it will degrade very very slowly and we should be fine keeping that power input but inevitably there will be some there's all these variables that i can take into account and there's quite a few that i can't so you'll just have to make follow me kind of from an educated guest point of view because i don't think i can give you specifics but specifically because if we look at the fact that obviously we have this hot tub and it doesn't run all the time you know if it's warm enough then it might run for 30 minutes it might run for four hours it's set on its own timer to not run beyond four hours outside of those peak so that's a three kilowatt heater um five pencil kilowatt 15 pence per hour four hours it's costing 60 a night maximum but the chance i probably won't run for that long so therefore that kind of skews my calculations so i can't be super accurate um so you could still look at this and let's say it's a 16-year break even anything not really worth doing um i personally think it would be but then we have something else to take into account because i went from the audi q7 that you will have seen in one of my other videos um to the tesla model 3 which i drive as a company car now which you'll also see in other videos um so therefore my costs went down from about 4 800 pounds a year even with my car allowance from work because the cost of insurance and servicing attacks and diesel it was very thirsty and tires and all those things the car was costing about four thousand eight hundred pounds a year um even taken to account and said business mileage reimbursement uh and all the benefits that came from having the car allowance whereas the tesla um as you'll have seen from my other videos if you watch them if not please do um the links i'll put down there um that means that we now pay for about the same uh mileage i think it's about 450. so the saving is about four and a half thousand pounds that much i know it's a massive massive saving because i'm not having to ensure tax service blah blah blah blah and the cost of running it is a fraction of the cost of running a diesel or a petrol so cumulatively that four and a half thousand pound saving i need to take that into account so if i had the four and a half thousand which is all part of because it was all part of our mission to move to be more sustainable so we changed the car we did the sole we did the battery so our savings now therefore are more like five and a half thousand pounds a year now suddenly when you look at the 16 000 yet pound cost we break even in three years or just over which is fantastic and that is the logic i've applied um call it slightly twisted logic to suit my objectives but um i think it's realistic those are actual savings we're making and then once you pass the three years that's just ongoing saving money we are we are that much better off every year um so therefore in conclusion should you or shouldn't you um honestly if you're thinking of solar i wouldn't dream of getting solar without batteries there's just no point unless you know you're going to use every single bit of it and then you're really going to be like oh sun's out i'll put the washing machine on i suspect not in which case you really do need to think okay with a battery at least i can use it all there are a lot of batteries some are cheap some are expensive the tesla one is relatively expensive but per kilowatt because most aren't 13.5 they're like five per kilowatt hour it's actually one of the better value batteries combined with the gateway that can isolate you from the grid that means it's actually um completely safe to use in the case of a power cut most are not so you know don't be fooled by kind of the just looking at the price and thinking that's a no it could be a false economy if you save money by buying something that simply doesn't last as long and isn't useful in the situations you might actually need it so don't shut it off quite so soon but if you're thinking about solar yes i would absolutely get a battery i think it'd be semi-nuts not too if i'm honest if you've already got solar and you're on a tariff that pays you very little then the battery is well worth thinking about you just need to think about that breakeven point if you're in our situation you're thinking do you know what i'm going all in i'm going to sell the petrol diesel i'm going to get some panels i'm getting a battery then absolutely you should do it because your breakeven point will be so so so so much lower than if you weren't doing the whole thing together the car makes a massive difference it does and i can't ignore it because that's our change and that's it um hopefully the information has been useful for you know i kind of go off on tangents a bit rambly apologize that's just um me but yeah if you have any questions please just just put them in the comments below and i'll do my very best to uh to answer because i'd imagine there probably are a few and of course if you enjoyed the video or even found it remotely useful please just hit that like button and it would be great if you could hit the subscribe button as well but uh but thanks so much for your support and hope to see you at my next video alright take care bye

Channel: Paul's Views & Reviews

Views: 33,640

Keywords: Tesla, power wall, uk, powerwall, octopus, Tesla energy plan, solar, home battery, electricity tariff, octopus go, Review, price, solar panels, home

Id: CanApe-oWcQ

Length: 18min 38sec (1118 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021