Tesla Solar Roof Review: Was it Worth It?

Hello, my name is Márquez Brownlee and I haven't paid my electricity bill in a year. I have a ton of appliances, computers, game consoles, TVs, air conditioning and I drive an electric car to and from work every day and charge it at home with a zero dollar bill. I know I had a lot of questions about how this thing worked, how much it cost, how much it generated a lot of things before I started and now I finally have all the answers let's get into it so I've had

solar

panels on. my

roof

at home for the last 12 months and I waited so long specifically because I've now watched all four seasons and seen a wide range of performance and run all the numbers and have a lot of ideas. about them, so I want to share them, first of all for those who are familiar, there are many options for

solar

home systems.

I like that they are also called solar systems, but there are many different companies that make solar power systems. all the electrical needs of a home including an electric car so I know I wanted to do this for a while as the goal for me was to be able to drive electric vehicles for the foreseeable future and be able to know the power is coming. from a sustainable source, the Sun, but first it is important to understand that a large part of this solar system is also batteries, so a normal house is connected to the electrical grid and as long as there is something in the house, whether it is a light bulb or a computer or appliance requests electricity that it draws from the grid and spins a meter on the side of the house that counts how much you have consumed and then, at the end of the month, bills you for the amount of electricity you have consumed.

It is used very well now if you just add solar panels to this house when the sun shines during the day on those tiles you can use that electricity to directly power things in the house now of course if it is cloudy or if you have a lot of things everywhere. at a time and the demand is greater than what the Sun's energy provides, then it will draw the rest of what it needs from the grid and also spin the meter, but most importantly, as soon as the sun goes down, the electricity generated goes to zero and it just so happens that most people come home from work when the sun is setting and that's when they turn on all the lights, do the laundry and charge the car, etc., so you will still be off the grid for most things now are fine for most people because if the goal of many people is to have a zero dollar electric bill then this can be achieved because hopefully the company Electricity will depend on where you live, but ideally you will be running something.

It's called net metering, so what this means is that when the sun shines on the

roof

and excess electricity is generated because no one is home, the house actually turns the electric meter backwards to send extra electricity to the grid and then when the sun goes down you get home and it uses a lot of electricity from the grid, the meter turns back and so ideally the total usage is zero net zero, that's how you end up with the Zero dollar electric bill, which is great, but what if you want to graduate? The next level of sustainability, what if you want to be completely independent of the grid and totally off the grid?

That's when the batteries come in, so add battery storage to this system and now the circuit is complete, when the sun shines during the day and you. You're not at home, fill up the batteries by effectively storing the sun's energy and then when you get home and the sun goes down, you can continue using that extra solar energy that you stored with all the electrical needs you have until the next morning when it rises. Sun. it turns off again and starts filling those batteries again, so with a system like this, in theory, not only can you have a zero dollar energy bill, but you can never go off the grid, it's completely self-sustaining, you never You will have to worry about an electrical supply.

Never again will you even know if a power outage occurs; that is, in theory, the off grid dream anyway, at the beginning of this process that was my goal, so there are many different options for solar system setups with different solar shingle manufacturers and different battery manufacturers and different companies that will install all of these things and there are 1000 different combinations that you can put together with different companies with different offerings in your area to make something that works. I went with something a little crazy but also made sensible solution which is just one company for everything that would be Tesla, so it's a Tesla solar roof, Tesla electric walls for batteries and then the Tesla app to monitor and control everything and really the main reason I went this route was for simplicity and integration.

I paid a premium price for this, this was not the cheapest option. You can specify a much cheaper combination of solar panels and batteries and things like that, but having everything on the same page and having everything communicate with each other seamlessly, was the most So, once I decided to go with Tesla, the other option of the one you may have heard of are solar panels bolted to the roof or these actual solar shingles, which are new shingles that are actually hundreds of small solar panels, all interconnected to make a normal looking roof that is actually one giant solar panel and that's the one I chose and that's why I say this was a crazy option because I didn't really need a new roof for most people who go with the solar shingle option. you would have an old roof that needs to be replaced soon or they are about to build a new house and this will be the new roof they put on it.

I wasn't in any of those situations, but this was also the way to get it. By far the largest overall set with the most coverage with as many pitches as my roof and also aesthetically it looks great. I must say there is an appeal to carbs either way. I make my decision. I'm going with the sunroof. Tesla's fully integrated setup from there not going to lie, it's quite a process, there's a lot of paperwork and hurdles to jump through, also with Tesla they've gone in and out of reliability over the years they've been on And that's it. to make this product, they paused the facility for a while, briefly shut down and then came back and there were supply chain issues.

I remember reading about all this and was a little worried but for some reason when I placed the order. which was in 2021, basically everything went perfectly well and could have gone. They assigned you a Tesla advisor, just like for your project, for your solar project, they will guide you through the entire process, from the paperwork with the city, from start to finish. it was an ordering process, inspection, a measuring process, quoting, you know, filling out paperwork with the city, actually when you first try to get a quote you submit your address and they look on Google Images and look at your roof with satellite images and give you an initial quote and then once you're made up and you decide you want to go ahead, they will come to your house with professionals and measure it and then give you an actual accurate quote and then they'll start putting everything together. with the materials, you eventually get to the point where you get an installation date, you start scheduling things and then they show up with all the boxes of solar panels and they took up my entire driveway for a couple of days, there are people who have really passed by there.

This entire process in great detail. I'll try to link a good one below on YouTube, but at the end of the day, for me, the process I started when I signed the purchase agreement that was in November 2021 and ended with the activation of the system. in July 2022, so eight months, but now that it's done, we're nerding out on numbers, sorry in advance to anyone who doesn't like numbers. I feel like that's really the only way to explain how good he is and what's going on with them. so there's going to be a lot of them let's get into it so first of all the right specs so this is a 29,313 kilowatt solar panel size.

His son has a large roof and then there are three electric walls of three that total 40 and a half kilowatts. hours and then this is the Tesla app where all the learning and all the numbers happen when the system was first activated. I just remember seeing it light up on the app for the first time, the numbers jumping and just, just, nice. from get, I was able to look at the app for a while like I could really get lost in the numbers, maybe it's just because I'm a numbers person, but there's a lot going on and it was exciting to see it all in real time and learn.

There's a lot of stuff, so I think the app is very well made and allows you to visualize how much energy the solar panel is currently capturing, how much energy the house is using and the state of charge and power output or input of the Powerwall batteries and Then Of course, whatever happens with the power grid, so you can see at this exact moment on a sunny July morning, the panels are generating seven kilowatts of energy, five of which power the house and the last two go to energy. walls that are full at 38 and don't touch the net at all, there are already a lot of terms being used around here.

Here's a good way to think about it: kilowatts is a measure of power, so a kilowatt is a thousand watts per kilowatt hour, although it is a unit of harvested energy, so a Tesla Model S battery, for example, is 100 about 100 kilowatt hours, so if that battery produced a hundred kilowatts for an hour, then it would be at zero, so for my setup, power wall three each is about 13 kilowatt hours and a half each, which It adds up to a total of forty kilowatt hours and a half, since I have three and they support a maximum power output of 15 and a half kilowatts and then the solar system being 29.3 kilowatts means that it basically looks like For example, the theoretical maximum of electricity that can be collected at any time is 29.3 kilowatts, but as you'll see a little later, that number may or may not be accurate either way by just hanging out on the Tesla app for a while. which you do a lot during the first few weeks.

I learned a lot. I learned a lot about what requires a lot of energy. Which requires a little energy. Something that surprised me. I also learned that kind of basic level of existence. for this house there's like 4,100 watts of power just because things are plugged in, even if all the lights are off, it's about 400 watts, but you know, charging a phone or turning on a light or something basically doesn't make a dent in Absolutely, it doesn't appear in the app, turning on a TV may require only about 100 watts, or 0.1 kilowatts, a computer can consume three to 500 watts if it's a big power hog, but surprisingly the big spikes come from the microwave and the toaster, no doubt, but the two biggest electricity consumers in this house, by far, and I think probably along with many others, are air conditioning number two, and number one, buying a rural mile, is charging the electric car , I think the best.

The way to look at this is actually seasonal, so like I said, this system went live in July, so in the middle of summer, a typical summer day in New Jersey is pretty impressive for a solar customer, the The days are long and we get a lot of sun. it's cool this is what a summer day looks like in the app and this is a pretty good day for solar so you can see sunrise is around 6am peak is around noon and then this fall until sunset around 8 to 9 p.m. lots of sun and on this day it generated a ridiculous 260 kilowatt hours of electricity, by the way not every day will look like perfect curves like this, in fact the day before was quite cloudy so you can see it only generated 65 kilowatt hours. the next one above was better again, but yeah, a typical summer day, you know, it gets about 200 kilowatt hours from the Sun and then I think this view is the most useful, it looks a little wild at first, but you can quickly tell how read it, it's basically how much energy the house is consuming and then where it's getting that energy from, so during the night you can see these spikes from the house, it's where I'm drawing from the grid, this is actually just air conditioning at night and then when the sun comes out and the day gets hot and the air conditioner turns on the lights and the appliances, everything turns on, it starts to consume more energy, but it is totally covered by solar energy, as you can see here, and it is also filling the electric walls with additional solar energy, as this happens later.

On the day the sun sets, that power consumption is also supplemented by the wall batteries. There were many summer days like this on the best day of this season. I think I generated almost 300 kilowatt hours of electricity, but because of the quantity. the house uses air conditioning toto charge the car. Another fun fact about winter in the Northeast, you probably already know we have. snow and apparently the surface of the solar shingles, the solar roof stays just above freezing, a little warmer than a roof, which has some interesting side effects, especially when it snows a little, the snow just hits the roof and melts. it never actually builds up on the roof and then the solar energy can continue to work.

I mean, if it's cloudy, you get a little bit of solar energy but it still works and then you're the only house that doesn't have a white roof because there's no snow, but when it snows a lot, which happens a few times, what happens is that it snows a ton and it actually accumulates and then as it accumulates the outer layer insulates the bottom so the bottom now has room to warm up again and then it warms up and creates a thin layer of water and then everything just melts away. slides off the roof like a sheet of ice as the entire layer of buildup slides on water so I couldn't actually video of this happening with my own roof but there are some YouTube videos of this happening on YouTube it's a bit crazy, literally the entire roof section slides off in sheets and actually lands in piles around the house, sometimes blocking a door or driveway, doesn't it. a little bit, it was a little scary the first time it happened because I didn't realize what that loud rumbling noise was that was like there was thunder in a blizzard, that's a little strange, but then I like to see it in the window seems to slide off the ceiling which is crazy, then it piles up around the door and then I have to shovel it off, but last but not least the fun fact, I lied to everyone, the silly sounding zero, the zero.

The dollar energy bill is actually kind of a lie because my electric company blew it every month for the last 12 months. My electric bill has been 5.75, that's only because I zeroed out all the charges thanks to that metering, but they charge 575 every month. have an account so thank you all so let's wrap things up here my wrap up of a year. uh, this is an incredible piece of cutting-edge technology. You can say it's cutting edge because it's still evolving rapidly over time and it's still very expensive, so for early adopters like me who are willing to take the plunge and take that risk a little bit, it can be really fantastic.

It reminds me a little of electric cars. There are much more affordable solar setups out there. making a significant difference for many people in many different situations around the world, there are also much more massive solar installations, but I believe we can all get behind a technology that makes more sustainable energy more useful, more efficient and more beautiful with the time I definitely learned a lot from this process, mainly about how much electricity certain things specifically use, but also how much electricity a roof with solar panels can collect at different times of the year, different seasons, and different situations, but I didn't.

Honestly, I don't think I would change anything. I don't think I would change anything about what I did. I've probably been waiting like six months to get a little more federal tax credit, but I'll get it. One last thing that was mentioned briefly like on a Tesla earnings call. I think it was that, or maybe Elon just said it randomly, but that Tesla vehicles in a year or two to 2025 would all support bi-directional charging, which would be amazing. I don't know if that's actually going to happen, but having cars not only be able to charge other cars but even serve as your home's backup battery would be pretty awesome.

As we are learning, these car batteries are already much larger and can handle a lot. more power output than any electric wall, any home battery, one Model S battery is equivalent to seven or eight electric walls, so who knows if Tesla actually does it or not, but as of today, with the right box in the wall with the right inverter, the F- 150 Lightning, which has an even larger battery, can be your home backup battery, so I think the number of EVS that support this feature should slowly increase, but I think it will Ideally there is a world in the future where, instead of needing a huge no. what you currently need is a large solar installation and all these fancy batteries, all you really need is a small solar OA, an inverter and your car battery, and it has the ability to be fully functional during any long power outage or any emergency because we live in a world where there is another news story every week about grid taxes and how these heat waves are ruining people's grids and air conditioners and a large portion of them are causing blackouts and literally deaths, so any strain we can take off the grid is a win and anything we can do to run on clean, sustainable energy is a win for everyone, so thanks for watching.

I'll be in the comments for a while, but feel free to subscribe if you liked videos like this and the amount. of the work that goes into these videos on any kind of cutting-edge technology and things like this in the future and let me know what you're interested in seeing next in the comments. Well, I'll see you in the next foreigner.