Comment by jsight
3 days ago
From what I've heard, it is more economical to recycle the raw materials than to reuse small packs.
Reuse of vehicle sized packs seems to be pretty common, though. I'd guess that a DIY home backup could be built pretty easily from used vehicle batteries.
The dude has a warehouse/workshop to do this work and house the system. I’m super impressed by what he’s accomplished, don’t get me wrong; but, what he’s done just isn’t viable for 99.99999999999% of people.
Give me an array and battery system that can pull off the grid and/or array and power most of my home without me having to think a whole lot or pay a vendor thousands to install while making the total cost under $1000 and I’ll do it.
Until then, it just isn’t financially viable when my electricity costs are well under $70/month average across the year.
Recouping the costs for install of solar systems are estimated at 30-40 years as of 4 years ago when I researched it. I’m sorry, but that’s just not worth it for me and most others.
I enjoyed noticing that your percentage (1×10⁻¹³) was so precise that it excluded the man himself (he is 1 in 8×10⁹).
I don't want to detract from your point. I just wanted to appreciate the hyperbole.
It's April Fools, so you have to pay close attention today; glad you caught my hilarious joke.
Sure, but it does get a lot simpler if you start from modules instead of cells. Nothing will get around the requirement to have electrical knowledge.
Cost is always an issue. These rarely make sense from a pure $$ sense, as everything in electrical is expensive. You could burn up that $1000 budget just to get a subpanel installed.
Usually the value proposition is some combination of savings, combined with the ability to backup critical loads. A generator could do that too, but a proper generator setup isn't cheap either, and it wouldn't save $$ at all. Battery solutions sometimes beat that.
When I priced out solar, it was never sold as a backup solution; it was apparently intended as a 'sell back to grid' solution. To add a battery effectively doubled the cost.
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