Recent content by fresnoboy

Not at $0.55/kWh. Just think about how painful it would be to heat a pool with electricity... We need much cheaper electric power if we want to remove nat gas from the ecosystem.

I don't understand this. If you have a gas boiler, why not have it do all the DHW and bypass the heat pump water heater completely? If it's a modulating burner it's already super efficient, or are you using the heat pump heater just as a storage tank?

In that case, I would definitely use a computer style UPS to protect that system. Given some of the recent stories about PW's not kicking in properly during an outage, I don't think I would depend on them for such a critical task when a UPS can give you much more assurance. I got a large...

The problem is you paid a lot of money for those powerwalls. Based on your configuration, when do you hit breakeven for the cost of the PW's and gateway? Also, SRP prices seem a fraction of what we pay in PGE land. I'm envious!

All panels, though we do have some glass panels on a pergola like structure that allow light to shine through them around the cells so it's not completely shaded below.

I wonder if the vendors at CES would have more info on this. I usually go but skipped again this year because of all the COVID fun. :(

Where do you see this? It's true the Pro doesn't come with the 80 Amp charger, but that can be bought separately. From what I understand the vehicle doesn't come with an inverter for V2G, it routes DC out through the 80 amp charger to the Sunrun inverter. So there should not be a difference...

Well, I think solar battery storage is in the news, and even the PUC is talking it up in the NEM 3.0 discussion. Tesla is the leader in battery storage by far, so people must think it makes sense somehow, but the math isn't that complicated. I am a techie, and would love to install...

This is a key thing for folks to understand. batteries are not a viable substitute for a generator. And if you buy a generator and have the backup functionality paid for, then acquiring powerwalls just for peak demand load shifting doesn't make any financial sense, even in PG&E land's...

The new Ford Lightnings would seem to be ideal for this, though prices keep going up. However the base config is 98 kWh, and the extended range is 131 kWh! The latter is like 10 powerwalls. Obviously, you don't get 70 kW inverter output, but for backup or load shifting, you don't need that...

Indeed. This is why Powerwalls are not really an alternative to a generator. They might be able to help (if they acted like the enphase system you outlined), but they are not a substitute, as this weather is showing everyone. I'm not sure why people ever thought they would be. Massive is...

The cheaper home "backup" NG generators really aren't designed for this kind of use anyway. You'd end up having to service them fairly often, and maybe it would not be there for an outage when they were really needed. The industrial units are a whole different animal though. We got a 30KW...

I wanted to go do a whole-house powerwall installation at our new home, and had a 400A feed as well. Because of the issues with having to do split feeds it ended up being too complicated. I would up going with a generator backup instead. We did wire in a bunch of cabling for a future...

It's hard to make the economics for Powerwalls work, even with usurious PG&E rates here in NorCal. And for backup power, it's hard to beat a generator for whole house backup. Obviously if you have a blackout and it's been smoky and you don't have much power stored, it's an issue. But it's...

PS The key point the video makes is that you can use historical data on ACTUAL load, so that can be used to size the generator adequately. You can get that from the electric utility, so that probably is pretty easy to do. For a large genset like mine, that works fine, but I don't know how many...