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Comment by garciasn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Unfortunately, that 'sell back to grid' price is often only a small fraction of the ~17 cent/kWh purchase price from the grid. The battery is less for backup but is instead to help make economic sense for your home, by storing the excess you produce when it is sunny...

When I had solar, ~10 years ago, it was similar. We had net metering, no batteries, and zero backup if the grid went down. This was in an area where that rarely happened anyway, so I didn't really care. It'd be easy to add batteries, though.

But net metering is becoming less common, and if you can't sell to the grid at retail, then it'd make sense to store it locally. In some cases, it can also make sense to use batteries even without solar. A good sized battery can keep your refrigerator running for days, which is useful for areas prone to weather related outages. It can also easily fully power the electronics on a gas oven for a long time. And honestly, a big battery these days isn't even that expensive.

And if that isn't enough, some batteries can be topped up with the power from a large battery EV. DCFC tends to come back before a lot of residential power, so this can be really useful.

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