# Living off the grid with Model S battery pack



## Mosess (Sep 13, 2018)

Just came across this tweet from a congressman from Kentucky. Thomas Massie lives off grid using a Model S battery pack and solar panels to power his home and he says it's been 100% reliable for 4 years now. 
This is a awesome case study into how far ahead of its time Tesla's battery systems have been since the original Model S.

I do wish Tesla would sell the Powerwall and solar panels for off-grid and custom solutions. I would buy it immediately.

I do think Elon Must has just enough of a libertarian mindset to, hopefully, open up the powerwall and solar panels to off-grid buyers. Of course, when the batteries and solar panels aren't already sold out years before they're even manufactured as is the case for now With all Tesla products.


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1510772590108893197


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## shareef777 (Mar 10, 2019)

Wondering, what would happen if someone decided to cancel utility service after getting Tesla solar/PW installed? On a technical side, the system would just register it as a "utility outage".


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## lance.bailey (Apr 1, 2019)

heck, i'd just be happy if they sold powerwalls in Canada.


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## Bigriver (Jan 26, 2018)

I'm guessing that his statement that Tesla won't sell Powerwalls for off-grid applications probably means that there is an upper limit on how many Powerwalls they will sell to a single residential customer.

Going off grid sounds nice but the practicalities confuse me. He notes that this is not a backup but is his primary system. What he's not saying here is that he still needs a backup. I watched something about his setup a few years ago and I recall he had diesel generators as a backup. There will be times when solar is not enough, even with 100 kWh storage. I would need about 1000 kWh storage to make it through the winter on solar only.

On the other side of the coin, there are times when solar makes far more energy than you need, that if you don't have the grid to send it back to, the system will have to shut down, which is a waste of its capacity. Case in point, we recently had 5 days in a row where my 12 kW system averaged 75 kWh per day. Scaling that up to his 17 kW system, that would be over 100 kWh per day, or 530 kWh in that 5 day period. I think in the Kentucky situation, he misses out on much of that production because he has no where to store/use that much. For me, most of my solar production for those 5 days went to the grid. I am a strong producer for the grid this time of year while production is high and home use is low.

Nevertheless I have always thought the application of used Tesla batteries is a neat and economical method to get a large home battery backup. Wish I had the technical prowess to do this.


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## $ Trillion Musk (Nov 5, 2016)

Found Thomas Massie's technical videos on the tweet thread:

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1510780762248732675


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