Tesla Motors Announces A New Home Battery; Living Off The Grid Will Soon Be Status Quo

I'll keep paying my power bill and keep the Kerosine lamps around. I can build an ice house and have very cold storage for half the summer. I can buy more mason jars for putting up food too in case something happens. Having about twenty pounds of salt is necessary too.

All that cost to do that will cost me less than a 200 watt solar panel. I think fishing, hunting, and growing a garden is fun. I must be crazy liking to make firewood and burn the kitchen wood cookstove in the winter.

But it would be sort of boring if I did not have the net. I could get used to it again though, only had the internet for about twenty years

I didn't know about that, thanks for the heads up.

Here's to hoping it's affordable efficient and safe.

I wonder if a set-up like this would be more usable if we started using a separate circuit for ceiling lights and running battery voltage DC bulbs

For economic reasons, I think this will be the same type of battery technology (if not exact same batteries even) used in Tesla cars. (As mentioned before, a way to scale production to make battery manufacture cheaper.) Likely packaged in a way to make hook-up easy. Exterior case providing weather protection & containment, inverter + power management computer, visibly labeled and standardized tie-ins, etc. Likely something that will be "yard furniture" and have about the same footprint as a central air conditioning unit, and plopped near your exterior grid (or off grid?) connection to your house. Doing it that way also makes servicing or relocating rather easy. Tesla is still rather up-scale, so this thing is likely a couple grand but also to a standard with available support service that makes it worth it. If marketed to same niche as current Tesla owners, most early adopters will see this as a UPS + power conditioner for an entire house rather than a completely off-grid living solution. (Think of those nice looking suburbs in California still subject to brown outs, rather than some cabin in the woods. But if you have the money and a cabin in the woods, then that's great too!)

originally posted by: babybunnies
If the battery can be recharged with solar or wind power, living off the grid is about to become exceptionally easy.

If this is only a few hundred dollars, I suspect a large portion of the population will invest in one of these and sell their excess energy back to the grid they once paid into.

You are very naive. Run the numbers.. all of them..

originally posted by: stirling
A guy I know up here in Canada has solar power and an electric car he built out of a chev geo
His power bills are around the one dollar mark or less every month....His solar array tracks the sun throughout the day.....
he runs his whole operation on solar and batteries.....and his chevy Geo really kicks ass on acceleration.....

..and the setup and maintenance cost is more than what he's saved in utility bills?

No doubt. The only way to really SAVE money doing solar is to lease it, and then only if producing enough to make up more than the leasing fee. Previously though, there was a pretty nice tax credit for doing so....(which doesn't go to leasing folks).....

Of course, in many places (like here), the utility companies own the government, so not really making it practical for solar leasing companies in the area.

Propane with a generator still seems the most economical and reliable solution so far. Of course, you always have to pay to refill the tank, but with solar, you'll constantly pay for batteries and replacing solar cells too, so you know....

This is a lot more affordable than I had thought. A10 KWH is going for about $3500 which is more than enough for a home with solar.

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