Tesla Powerwall vs 51 Hour Blackout: Who Wins?

right now over 600 000 people in the state of michigan are without power because of some extreme storms that just rolled through and i'm sitting here in the light of my tesla model y to talk to you about something pretty interesting i actually don't need the light of my tesla model y because my house despite the grid outages still has electricity and that's happening thanks to tesla's powerwall which is an amazing amazing product that i just had installed about a month ago a little less than a month ago actually and has saved me from three separate power outages now that have been longer than five minutes anyway there have been some other power outages that have been less than five minutes or you know maybe ten minutes or five minutes that it's also prevented so i wanted to share my experience with you right now about my tesla power wall and how it's powering these lights and we'll continue to do so throughout the night and tomorrow and pretty much indefinitely while the power's out until they fix the grid all right so i've switched over to my gopro so that i can screen record my phone and show you my tesla app so this is my tesla app showing my powerwall it shows that the grid is currently out you see at the top of the screen here it says backup and the orange border kind of shows you that the grid is down you can also see that on the left the grid with the orange x through it so the power went out at exactly 3 30 p.m eastern today so that's uh seven almost seven hours now that we've been without power you can see that our power wall is currently at seventy nine percent and we have two power walls so each powerwall is 13.5 kilowatt hours so we have about 27 kilowatt hours that we can use while the grid is down now how long this will last really depends on a lot of factors and you just have to know how much energy you use two power walls may be way more than the amount of energy you need or two power walls may be nowhere near enough energy depending on what you do in your home and the different things that are using energy so when the power went out our power walls were actually at 100 percent at that time and the sun of course when the power went out was not shining because there was a storm shortly after the clouds cleared and the sun was out so our house was being powered by solar and the power wall we were able to cook dinner on our electric stove that was used from the again the power wall and the solar was powering that and when we had lower draw like you see now half a kilowatt that was pretty much all powered by the sun until closer to maybe 7 30 p.m or so when i got home i did charge my model y for about a half hour i wanted to use some of the battery because we definitely don't need a hundred percent uh we only use about 20 to 25 overnight so since it's getting late i have actually some video editing to do now i still have internet i still have pretty much everything that i need to do whatever i want because of the power walls i'm going to get working on that and i'm going to check in with you tomorrow and we'll see how we're going so again we're almost at hour seven our longest power outage so far was over 15 hours and we didn't lose power that entire time so let's check in tomorrow and we'll talk about how these two power walls could technically power us indefinitely if the grid never came back uh now we'd run into troubles probably eventually in the winter but during the summer spring or fall we should be okay for a really long time okay so it's currently our about 16 just a quick update we're waking up i've used the microwave already for some breakfast obviously the fridge has been running all night we have a freezer in the basement you can see we're at 62 percent uh we're currently using 0.7 kilowatts we have a one tv on and some kitchen lights the fridge is running right now i can hear it um so that's that's the update for now i'll do a more extensive update as soon as you get some time i hear you but a little busy over here all right i also wanted to add to this update you can see no solar production quite yet uh it's still pretty cloudy out there normally at this time we'd be producing uh you know maybe 0.3 or 0.2 kilowatts and then slowly increasing from there so the clouds i think are supposed to go away um you know despite that we still will get of course some solar energy today but we're being a little conservative in the battery usage but i am not worried at all about running out of battery for today all right so we're just out here surveying some of the aftermath i've synced up my phone app recording so you can see our current power uh we're fluctuating between like 3.5 and up to uh six kilowatts uh depending if you look up there you can see still pretty cloudy uh but still generating more than enough energy for what we need to do we could use the clothes dryer use the stove any one of those single appliances would be totally covered um of course we have enough energy in the power wall to do whatever we want but if we needed to do some more um we could and if we needed just one of those but for right now we're just charging up the battery we did have power or trees down on our power lines on our private drive and considering that at this point there's 800 000 people in michigan without power our neighborhood is probably low on the priority list of getting those trees removed and the lines fixed up so it's going to be at least a few days i would expect until we get power back you can hear generators our neighbors are using their gas power generators to get through the storm so yeah or get through the outage i should say also my wife stephanie took the model y because i mean we're just really not concerned about the power by the time she gets back we will probably plug the car in and start charging it to be totally honest the clouds are really starting to break up here um and well maybe not but it's getting a lot brighter we're gonna have way more than enough energy for today so we'll put some of that extra energy into that huge battery in the car all right i'm currently home alone with toddler so i don't have a whole lot of time to be filming right now it's 11 30 a.m whatever i'll start putting the hours on the screen so you can see kind of you know what uh what we're at last updates are that there's over 800 000 people in michigan without power so i think it's going to be a while i wanted to show you the sun is out now we're at 9.2 kilowatts out of my solar capacity the maximum it can make is 11.4 sometimes the app reads 11.7 or something but the power walls at 77 it's almost full once it gets full the solar panels will just turn off uh the model y still is not home once the model y gets home then we're gonna start charging that and all that you know juice we can fill up that battery as well um but of course the powerwall is getting to 100 is no big deal it's all handled automatically it'll just cut the solar panels off then once it gets to i don't know maybe 95 percent it'll turn it back on you know and that'll go until uh the sun either gets cloudy again or or the sun starts to go down or we use more energy in the house okay so everybody in the house is sleeping so i have a little bit of time here to sit down and really tell you about what is tesla power wall really quickly a lot of people probably are familiar and then talk about how it works and and really dig into the experience so far so power walls are just basically giant batteries for your house i mean it's as simple as that and a lot more can can be said but it can be found on tesla's website but that's really the main thing you need to know it's a big battery and it pretty much only charges via solar energy so getting power walls without solar is not really an option while technically possible most utilities worldwide but at least i'm going to talk from my experience here in michigan will not allow you to charge the batteries from the grid you can only charge them via solar except for in one specific instance the batteries have a storm watch mode where it will you know kind of detect that bad weather is coming switch into this mode and then it will charge from the grid if it needs to if it can't get enough power from solar it'll charge all the way to 100 by any means that that's possible and then it'll just sit there at 100 waiting for the storm to pass if power goes out obviously it'll back you up if the power does not go out then it'll resume you know normal operation when that's over now i have never seen storm watch mode activate even with these crazy storms last night there was at least 12 hours of warning that they were coming so i don't know what it takes to activate stormwatch mode but haven't really needed it you can also of course go in the app and set up you know how much energy it should save for you and everything so i have mine for daily use set up to only hold 20 percent charge and so what that what that means is during the day while the sun's out of course everything is as much as possible as powered by the sun any extra energy that's produced by the sun that i don't use in the home goes into the batteries once then the solar cannot meet the demands of my home my power wall will power everything up to uh 10 kilowatts continuous power and after that it'll pull from the grid which we very rarely go above that that 10 kilowatt threshold but it does happen sometimes and the batteries will draw all the way down to 20 if they go down to 20 and there's not enough solar then it'll pull from the grid it'll hold on to that 20 in case of you know what we're experiencing now um you know a power outage and that percentage is customizable you could have them just sit at 100 all the time you could have them sit at 50 whatever you want so looking at the app now you can see the batteries are at 96 percent so they're almost full and earlier the batteries were sorry the solar was actually turned off so what happens once the batteries are full at 100 the energy has nowhere to go so the solar since there's no grid normally once the batteries are full the solar energy will go out to the grid since that's not an option the power walls all this is all automatic i don't have to do anything cut off the solar panels they they stop uh accepting energy from there so the solar panels are disconnected or turned off and then everything is powered from your power wall so this 8.6 kilowatts if my solar panels get get cut off will all come from the power wall and then it checks um once they're full it checks i believe uh every 10 minutes or maybe after it's down five percent or so then the power walls will kick back on or sorry the the solar panels will kick back on and you'll get what you're seeing here energy coming from the solar panels and the battery as needed or energy going to your home and to charge up the solar panels now another interesting thing is each powerwall can provide five kilowatts of energy and that stacks you can get up to ten powerwalls installed at home but i currently have two so that means my power walls can accept or deliver 10 kilowatts of continuous power so my solar system as you can see actually supplies more than 10 kilowatts it can go to 11.4 kilowatts a little more than that the apple show sometimes and so if the solar is is coming into the home and i'm not using you know pretty much anything let's say i'm using zero for the home of course that doesn't happen but theoretically and 11 kilowatts is coming from solar since the batteries cannot accept 11 kilowatts that's another situation where the solar will be cut off and the battery will operate everything for you all automatic you don't even know if it's happening or not unless you're looking at the app and that for sure every five minutes will then check how much solar energy is coming in can the batteries accept it if they can then it will resume no more operation with the the solar bringing the energy in if it can't except the power it'll again just clip them off so i've had that happen once so far today before the the car the model y was back home and charging it was just producing full power too much energy so the power walls just you know cancel the solar i think it lasted 10 minutes and then it brought them back so overall um again we're in our 22 i believe right now of this power outage and you can see we're not wanting for power um so if i go over and look at my model y if we go into the charging screen here you can see it needs to load uh but we're at 194 miles we're charging at 25 26 miles an hour that's because i'm sitting in the car using the ac and i'm sitting in the car so i can use the ac which we'll talk about in a minute um and so the car is charging pretty much full speed it has four hours left and after that four hours it would be at ninety percent charge to be totally honest i don't think we'll make it to ninety percent uh but it's thursday i'm going to work tomorrow and to go to work and back i only use maybe 20 to 30 percent of my model y battery so even right now i could just stop the charging or not charge it if i didn't have enough power i'd easily make it to working back and not not an issue at all and then it's the weekend so we can kind of charge over the weekend as well um assuming the grid is still out but so i'll probably get this up to maybe 80 and then and then it just depends on how much sun we get and how much energy we use on other things so at this point we can do anything in our house we can use our whole house is electrical we have no gas so we could use our stove we could use the dryer dishwasher i mean we've microwaved things we made coffee today it's been pretty much a normal day and in the beginning of the day as i showed in some of the earlier clips it was really cloudy and we weren't generating like almost any solar energy but we still had so much power we were kind of being conservative like maybe leaving a couple lights off that we didn't need and like if if nobody's using something we'll turn it off but other than that it like was not a worry at all i looked at the forecast i saw it was going to be sunny later so the experience so far has just been magical and as long as we get even partly cloudy days like if it's super dark all day of course we really won't make enough energy unless we really cut back but even if it's partly cloudy we would have enough energy pretty much indefinitely at least in the summer to to go just off the battery in the solar now in the winter different story of course it's not winter so i can't really talk about that but you know maybe check back in a few months and i'll try to make a video about off-grid in the winter when michigan has much less hours of sunlight and a lot of our winter days are just really gray anyway even when the sun is up so i do also want to talk about our cooling solutions at home because it is a little bit unique we use geothermal heating and cooling and it's on a separate panel from the main panel because it uses a lot of energy and actually the power company gives you a special rate that's that's severely reduced so it costs much less to use you know the same amount of energy on this other panel and so it's not connected to the solar so in our home right now we cannot use the air conditioning now if you have a traditional air conditioning unit like the thing on the outside of the house or whatever that works fine with power walls can definitely power that you need to check you know how much power it uses and some people i know have big houses with multiple of those you'd have to you know tailor the power walls to your situation you might need three you might need five power walls whatever but they can easily power everything as long as you have enough of them so the other thing i guess i should mention if you do come into a situation where again i said earlier my power walls can supply 10 kilowatts continuous they can spike a little bit more than that and there is actually a software update coming you know whenever tesla gets it out that will allow the continuous power to go up i don't remember uh what the new cap will be but but either way right now my my power walls can supply 10 kilowatts so right now charging my car oh i should have switched this back i wanted to keep this solar thing on here um so right now charging my car the home is using 8.5 kilowatts and uh 8.7 whatever and 10.8 of that comes from solar or sorry all of it comes from solar and then the rest is going to the power wall let's say there was no solar i'm only using my power wall so we'd have 8.6 kilowatts coming from the power wall if we were to you know turn the dryer on which uses another four kilowatts that would put us at 12 kilowatts which would be over the uh limit of the power wall the the 10 kilowatt limit and then it would just shut everything off kind of like a breaker you know if you trip a breaker it'll be like that now i'm not sure if it's physical where actually that switch gets turned off or the power wall just manages it itself and turns everything off and then kind of you know starts operation again but as long as you're at least a little bit mindful of the energy you're using then this shouldn't be a problem it's not dangerous at all it's just you know you might turn the lights off for a few minutes until you get everything situated again so it hasn't been a problem and then in the situation we're in right now where you can see the 10.8 kilowatts of solar of course we could go well over 10 kilowatts because most of it's coming from solar you know i suppose we could use 20-ish kilowatts right now and half would come from solar half would come from the power wall and it would work now then if a cloud came over and we dropped to 5 kilowatts it would probably trip you know and and turn off one more thing i should mention about money because of course everyone you know let's know how much they cost so for me two power walls was about uh 15 000 after federal tax credit um and power walls will not uh sometimes they will but for pretty much anyone else strictly financially power walls will not pay themselves off in extreme situations maybe eventually they could whereas when you talk about solar panels if you just put solar on your house they will pay themselves off almost always again it depends on the situation within anywhere from four to eight years it depends like if you install them yourself they'll pay themselves off in like two to four years if you have someone install them like we did it takes seven eight years or so for them to get paid off so the power walls will not in my situation ever pay for themselves i did the calculation it'll take it would take like 25 years for them to pay for themselves and and they may technically still be functional at that time i can't imagine they wouldn't get replaced by then but the warranty is only 10 years so within the warranty unlike solar which does pay itself off the batteries will not now in practicality they've already paid themselves off so let's look at this section of the app the backup history and you can see here 11 events already now some of these were when some work was being done and stuff so they're not all real but you can see this july 24th right here 14 hours and 48 minutes i thought that was over 15 hours but whatever we'll say 15 hours uh again we had some storms roll through the power went out we didn't lose power the entire 15 hours that the grid was down we had power the whole time because of the power walls then a few days later we expect they were working on the the power line so they shut us off we didn't get any notice but it was four hours and 20 minutes um in the middle of the day it was like a nice sunny day so again during the four hours and 20 minutes of no grid we had power the whole time uh these other ones these july 29th august 1st august 2nd i don't even remember those sometimes you don't even notice when the power goes out sometimes the lights will flicker sometimes they don't like so you don't always even know until you get a notification from the app and it'll say you know power walls at this percent and it's powering your home like whatever so this is by far the longest outage we've had and again it uh in in my sense has paid for itself in the practicality i'm getting out of it the uh how much better it's kind of made my life we i mean we have a toddler and then like a three-month-old and like going this long without power of course you can do it it's just man it would be so much more difficult you know we have the fridge full of food and stuff i mean it's crazy so you know i think of it in terms you know i've got a lot of comments online when i talk about the power walls like oh they're a waste of money they're too expensive i agree they're very expensive in my situation they are 100 not a waste of money no they do not pay for themselves but neither does my car neither do oreos when i eat them neither does my galaxy fold 2 phone that i really like it doesn't pay for itself but you buy those things because you want them and you like them and this for me is in that camp if you have a really stable grid um of course you don't need these power walls but it's such a cool feeling like to know that i don't need the grid most of the time so one last thing let's look at i'm gonna need some time stamps and this video is a long one um if we look at i think it's energy oh performance so you can see today we're 100 self-powered which obviously because the grid is down but if i go to the week you can see for the week we are 100 self-powered so from august 9th to august 12th we have not used the grid one time at all for charging my car i drive about 350 miles a week for cooking our meals for using the microwave for drying our clothes in the dryer 100 powered by solar because uh solar made you know 151 kilowatt hours but a lot of that might have been when we weren't using it so that extra energy goes to the battery and we can use it at night or later in the day and it's just it's such a cool feeling i mean that's like a big part of the the enjoyment of the product is like i'm using it and it's it's cool to know that i'm so sufficient we can go back another week just to show you i think this week we did use a little bit of grid yeah so 92 percent self-powered that week we had some cloudy days or something or some storms though that week too we go back one more i think this is 100 week so 99 you know without the grid um and it's just it's cool it's it's very cool so um if you want to know the specs of my you know solar or all that i have video i'll link to all my solar videos above you click the i in the top right of the video um but yeah so that's kind of the big the big meaty part where you can know all my you know stats and info and stuff um yeah so you know our bill for july our electric bill was 17 like it's just crazy so it's very cool um so i will keep checking in with you over the duration of this power outage but i mean so far this is it's so easy and works so well i am just really enjoying it my wife is like really happy and you know like tomorrow if the grid's still down i can just go to work everybody here's fine they got their fridge and their food and like who cares they're good to go so um yeah it's it's a really really great experience all right and just as i finished up talking you can see here the solar has been cut off and all charging is being done right now from the battery so that's most likely because the battery is just getting full and it's not ready to really accept any more charge i would expect in about five minutes again it's kind of a guess but i'm pretty sure every five minutes it'll check and then it'll say okay i have a good good percentage has been used up let me turn the solar back on and charge back up and you know charge the car with the solar and all that kind of stuff so this is kind of what you'll see again all automatic i had no idea the car continued to charge i don't know any of this is happening unless i'm looking at the app it all just happens nicely and then the other thing i'll mention is i probably put this somewhere in the beginning but if you're interested in solar i have a referral for tesla you should use that you'll get 100 bucks back if you get tesla installed but if you're in michigan like i am and you're like this outage was an awful terrible experience tesla doesn't do power walls in michigan but you can contact the green panel and i have a referral for them as well down in the description or something below i'll put an email just tell them chris from dirty tesla sent you and that'll be your referral and they can you know get you a quote for some solar and some power walls or just power walls if you already have solar so yeah highly recommended by me i mean you can probably clearly tell that from from the video we're at the 24 hour mark you can see i'm still charging the car the power wall is at 95 solar is at 5.6 kilowatts and if i can kind of point this camera behind me you can see the sun is getting close to the trees there um it'll probably start to go behind those trees in another hour-ish or so so i've set up my car we can just look at it really quick to charge for the next 10 minutes which would get it to 80 charge again more than enough for me to do uh all the driving i want plus some tomorrow and then i'll charge it some more over the weekend whether the grid is back or not it doesn't really matter um we will you know be fine there so that's uh great yeah so here's where we're at 24 hour mark with no grid uh still lots of sun more than enough energy all right so real quick my buddy nathan is here he's a master electrician and like i told you we have the two panels so right now he's on my residential panel and to the his left there is our geothermal panel and right now the geothermal panel has our water heaters on it because it's a cheaper rate and everything well i've been wanting to put the water heaters on the uh the residential panels to take advantage of the solar and the power walls and everything and so since the power's out the geometer is gone it doesn't it's not connected to the power walls or anything the residential panel the whole thing is working so once he switches this over which for him is super simple um and and safe i don't know how to do any of that then our hot water heaters will also be working off the power walls we won't need the grid for those as well so that's amazing and then this is also the dude that's gonna come we're gonna make a video installing the tesla wall connector to charge the cars when for when we get our model x but that's still gone oh thank you thank you giant baby uh so delivering my hat so um yeah this will be sweet we'll have our water heaters back uh we still had hot water but you know if the power's out for another day or two then it'll get cold by then all right so hour 30 of this grid outage uh i am exhausted it was a really hot day it was in the 90s super humid and again we don't have any air conditioning so i mean not that big of a deal but it's really hot the kids were were crazy today it's just just a hard day but i keep imagining how much worse this would all be if we didn't have the power walls you know running and we our whole house was out of power i mean all our food would what be in coolers or we'd be using a generator for some of it or we'd go to a hotel or someone else's house but even like my in-laws their power is out too uh my mom still has her power so that's i'm glad that she has that uh so yeah it's pretty crazy i don't know the stats of how many people have been restored our estimation for uh restoration on the electricity on the grid is undetermined so they still don't know there is still no estimate for us so unfortunate but uh you know with the power walls it's not as big of a deal we have uh 69 left to go for the rest of the night we're on hour 30 this is actually hour 30 which is so crazy um and you know my buddy was over earlier he switched over the hot water tank so we got to use you know hot water for the baths and stuff for the kids so that was great if we look at energy usage you can see here in the house so the big peak in the middle of the day this was me charging the car so i got to do all that today here is after he my buddy turned on or put our hot water heater onto the power walls and you know this is after the hot water heaters uh haven't turned on and we did take showers this morning we did use hot water they hadn't turned on for you know over 24 hours at that point uh they didn't have power and so for them to run for let's see 5 30 you know to 5 45 for 15 minutes to get the water heated up again uh that's not bad at all it didn't use much energy and then here was bath time so we're actively using a lot of hot water to put in the bath and and boom like it just doesn't use that much energy so um i'm glad that the hot water heater is on there now now it'll be you know next to free uh as as opposed to before where it costs a little bit of money um and we have it even with the grid out so that's the end of this day uh for the video anyway i still have a lot of work to do so i'm gonna be on the computer for a while luckily uh we still have power here so let this refresh you can see yes we're at 69 percent uh obviously 100 self-powered today we didn't really have a choice so um anyway yeah i'll check in uh i don't know tomorrow there's not much not much more to say until the power comes back on all right so it's our 41 approximately of grid outage grid is still out and some interesting things are now happening uh with the power for for everybody um people using generators you know of course there's a lot of that around and so they're using gas for their generators well now uh my wife saw a post on facebook in the local the local group where um people are running out of gas at the gas station so they're going to the gas station and all right beta calm it down they're going uh they're going for gas at the gas station and the gas stations are out of gas and so the in the comments they're all listing these different gas stations in the local area that are out and nobody's exactly sure why that's happening i assume it's a combination of demand for gas because power's been out for you know almost two days straight now um and also there's all the stuff with the trucker shortage too there's like this has been going on for a while but um across the whole country and probably the whole world there's like a shortage of truckers to transport especially uh gasoline to the gas station so it's craziness i mean we also had a generator before that we relied on um and it wasn't all it's a pretty big generator it made a lot of energy but it wasn't like integrated with the house or anything um it was a portable generator a big one but still portable and so you know i can't imagine you know relying on that and then you go to get some more gas because it goes through a lot of gas um and this they're empty there's just none there so you have to hunt around drive farther and then that's just gonna get worse and worse because a lot of the state is out of gas so um that's kind of the update uh for you all right so this seems like as good a place as any to end the video these are my two tesla power walls they're stacked one here one right behind and these ran the show for the past let's see how long the power was out this is what the power wall app looks like when the grid is operational you can go to power flow and we'll look at that in a minute but we can go to backup history and we'll see 51 hours and three minutes so over 51 hours the grid was down and that entire time we did not lose power for a second the power walls backed up the entire time i was able to charge my car we did laundry we had pretty much everything uh fully operational besides our air conditioning and that again is just the way my system is set up if we had a traditional ac we may have had to maybe turn it off at night or for a few hours a day to save some of the battery but we definitely could use a traditional air conditioning system with the setup we have here so moving into the power flow let's see where we ended up at so we're at 62 battery even though the grid is back on we still have not used it yet the power came back a few hours ago but we're still operating as if it's not there because we really don't need it most of the time or almost ever in the summer anyway i think in the winter might be a different story but if we go into power flow you can see here quite a lot is going on so it just went down a bit we have the dishwasher running and that's using some of the hot water from the water heater so it's been interesting to see how the water heater kind of gets into that so you can see the day's usage here the power came back on it was about 6 30 yeah p.m somewhere around there so our house has already cooled down it's 10 o'clock at night so we are all set with the grid back on some final thoughts on the system i mean insanely insanely impressive we haven't even had it i believe installed for a month maybe right around a month ago it got installed we've already had three power outages this is a very extreme example of course and didn't expect it but the storms we had put uh the the highest numbers i heard were somewhere around a million people without power the crews are still working to get people up and running there were grocery stores without power for several days so they're going to have some bad product and everything but as far as here in this home the power walls powered us the whole time the 10 kilowatts was enough to do any single thing and while the sun is shining you know getting up to those 11 kilowatts from my solar setup anyway we could charge the car we could use the dishwasher or the dryer at the same time and really have no problem now if you look at the solar throughout the day today you can see it peaks really high if we move to right here about 10 50 a.m that's around the time a little earlier we start getting full sun of course if there's no clouds or anything and you can see it sharply drops off after that well what was happening is we were getting the full power from the solar system the home at that time was not using much energy so the power walls were shutting off the solar panels are disconnected in solar panels because they can't accept the full charge so one improvement to my situation it's different for everybody if we had three power walls then our solar system could not overwhelm those no matter even if they're at full capacity and they would never have to turn them off but again it's not something we noticed or had to interact with it just happened automatically and it all got taken care of so really not a big deal but i i was noticing that throughout the day you'll see later in the day too where the solar just kind of cuts off you see all those dips that's either probably around this area that's probably clouds but when you look here that's when the power wall was getting full so right around 1 pm we had zero kilowatts going in or coming from the solar and so that meant the power wall was full it was just cutting off the batteries and as i was kind of checking it throughout the day i would see that the power wall was powering the house you know with maybe 0.3 kilowatts or something and the solar panels are off and then the system will check every five minutes or so to see what it needs to do maybe turn the panels back on or whatever and it'll do all of that automatically for you so over two and a half days i was able to charge my car i didn't have to miss work the day i was home i actually already had that day off anyway so it just kind of worked out nicely i went to work the next day i haven't charged my car yet it's in the garage it's plugged in but i'll just wait until it's sunny tomorrow and i'll charge it up at that point but even if we didn't have power it wouldn't really matter i could still charge it tomorrow while it's sunny i could charge it some tonight i could probably charge it another uh 20 or so if i needed to do that with just the batteries so final impressions i am insanely happy with this system if you couldn't tell i mean throughout the whole journey i've just been blown away it's worked so well so flawlessly never came anywhere near running out of energy and we acted pretty normally in the beginning we were conservative and we would turn stuff off and especially at night i always made sure everything was off that we didn't need but i didn't even need to do that we could have acted completely normally with our house sands maybe not charging the car fully all the time um and everything would have been powered the whole time we went never would have ran out anyway now where this won't be as easy as if we had a similar type of power outage in the winter especially in maybe december or january those are the lowest producing months so when it comes to winter i'd probably up that buffer to maybe 50 maybe even more than that we'll have to see kind of how the winter goes and how much energy we're producing but the winter months produce a lot less energy so it wouldn't be as simple and as kind of like oh who cares we have tons of energy do whatever you want but still the power walls would be able to get us through a long time especially if we are being very careful with the energy that we're using so overall despite the expense highly recommended for me you do get a tax credit if you're interested in power walls for yourself check out my referrals in the comments down below it'll be in a pinned comment but i would highly recommend i mean they're not going to pay themselves off strictly from a financial perspective but this experience i've had so far in this month i'm worth every penny there is no regret at all spending any dollar on these things i mean this was definitely the right decision for me and my family of course is different for everybody so you'll have to look at your own usage and needs if you have any questions feel free to leave those in the comments down below i'll do my best to answer those for you about solar and battery energy how much you would need is pretty personal to the energy you use but i will talk to you down in the comments feel free to email me too happy to talk to you there so i hope you enjoyed this video any questions again leave them down below i'll answer those and you will see me in the next one

Channel: Dirty Tesla

Views: 74,489

Keywords: tesla, model, elon, musk, electric, car, ev, phev, truck, review, autopilot, auto, pilot, self, driving, selfdriving, enhanced, eap, full, fsd, accident, super, charger, supercharger, service, center, dealer, battery, degredation, uber, lyft, rideshare, rural, off, road, offroad, awd, all, wheel, drive, performance, dirty, dirtytesla, regen, regenerative, brake, braking, tech, update, accessories, cyber, cybertruck, pickup, software, sentry, rivian, smart, summon, model y

Id: DA3fRMm3a0c

Length: 33min 49sec (2029 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021