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Comment by newnewpdro | Hacker News Reader

Or Tesla is going to sell heaps of Powerwalls and solar panels

Having looked at all of these options recently, I can say very few people would chose Powerwalls and solar over a standby generator. A whole house generator capable of running everything in your home, including HVAC, for many days on end will run ~$10-14k installed. A single Powerwall alone costs about that much and can't distribute nearly as much power as the generator.

How much fuel does the generator consume? What is the switch-over time?

Would it be useful for service interruptions or only full blackouts?

The switch over time is around 30 seconds. When your power is restored from the grid, it switched back seamlessly.

Fuel is a great question. I have never looked at the consumption. Mine runs off the natural gas line, so I have no tank to fill. With this setup I feel I am in good shape for short and extended outages.

> Mine runs off the natural gas line

This has always felt risky to me. Sure, your setup will work for a garden-variety power outage, but not when it really matters like an earthquake or other natural disaster.

My uncle lives in a place that loses power often. His system is propane. When the power goes out you might notice the lights flicker. I don't know how much fuel it consumes.

What state are you in?

My impression of wealthy Californians is that they'd rather not have a noisy stinky polluting generator running for days requiring fuel deliveries, and if there's a "green" option that requires zero fuel, makes no noise or pollution, and is within their means, they'll prefer it.

Not to mention generators are a bit of a maintenance and operational nuisance in my experience, at least the diesel piston motor kind I've used in the past as power backup in datacenters. Most households would rather not have yet another piston engine to keep in good working order.

The majority of solar panel systems that allow feeding excessive energy back into the grid won't work in a blackout to allow line workers to completely isolate a section for line maintenance, in addition to phase synchronization issues on some of the cheaper systems too. As 99% of home IC generators are designed to function only when whatever they are powering is completely disconnected from the grid they don't have this issue.

Isn't that the whole point of having the Powerwall in the system?

You're describing conventional battery-less residential grid-tied solar installations.

I specifically described Tesla Powerwall + solar.

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