Tesla Solar Roof Review: Was it Worth It?

[Music] hi my name is Marquez brownley and I have not paid for electricity in a year I have a bunch of electrical appliances computers game console TVs air conditioning and I drive an electric car to and from work every single day and charge at home Z bill so I know I had a lot of questions about how this stuff worked how much it cost how much it generated a whole bunch of that stuff before I got started and now I finally have all the answers let's get into it so I have had solar panels on my roof at home for the past 12 months now and I waited this long specifically because now I've seen all four seasons and I've observed a wide variety of performance and I've run all the numbers and I have a lot of thoughts about them so I want to share them so first of all for those familiar there are a lot of options for solar systems at home I like that they're called solar systems too but there are a lot of different companies who make solar systems to power all the electrical needs of a home including an electric car so I know I wanted to do this for a while since the whole point for me was to be able to drive electric for the foreseeable future and actually be able to know that the energy is coming from a sustainable Source the Sun but first it's actually important to understand that a big part a big part of this solar system is batteries as well so a normal house is connected to the electrical grid and whenever something in the house whether it's a light bulb or a computer or an Appliance calls for electricity it pulls from the grid and Spins up a meter on the side of the house that tallies how much you've pulled then at the end of the month you get build for how much electricity you've used great now if you just add solar panels to this house when the sun shines during the day on those tiles it can use that electricity to directly power things in the house of course if it's cloudy or if you have a bunch of stuff on all at once and the demand is more than the power from the Sun is providing then it'll pull the rest of what it needs from the grid and spin the meter as well 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 as the sun is going down and that's when they turn on all the lights and do the laundry and charge the car Etc so you're still going to be pulling from the grid for most stuff now that's actually fine for most people because if the goal which a lot of people's goal is is to have a $0 electricity bill then this can actually be accomplished because the power company will hopefully depending on where you live but ideally be running something called net metering so what this means is when the Sun Shines on the roof and excess electricity is being generated because nobody's home the house actually spins the electrical meter backwards as it sends extra electricity back to the grid then when the Sun goes down and you get home and use a bunch of electricity from the grid the meter spins back forwards and so ideally the total usage is is zero net zero that's how you end up with the 0 electricity bill which is super cool but what if you want to sort of graduate to the next level of sustainability what if you want to be completely independent of the grid totally Off the Grid well that's when batteries come in so add battery storage to this system and now the loop is complete so when the sun shines during the day and you're not home it fills up the batteries effectively storing Sunshine energy and then when you get home and the sun goes down you can keep using that extra solar energy that you stored with all the electrical needs that you have until the next morning when the sun comes out again and starts filling up those batteries again so with a system like this you can theoretically not just have a $0 power bill but never actually pull from the Grid at all you're completely self- sustainable you never have to worry about a power outage ever again you won't even know if a power outage happens that is the off thee grid dream theoretically anyway at the beginning of this process that was my goal so there is a lot of different options for solar system setups with different solar tile manufacturers and different battery manufacturers and different companies that will install all these things and there's a thousand different combos that you could piece together with different companies with different offers in your area to make something that works I kind of went with kind of a crazy but also a made sense solution which is just one company for everything which would be Tesla so it is a Tesla solar roof Tesla power 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 this I I paid a price premium for this this was not the cheapest option you can spec a much cheaper combo of solar panels and batteries and things like that but just to have everything on the same page and have everything talking to each other seamlessly this made the most sense so then once I decided to go with Tesla then the other choice you might have heard about is either solar panels bolted to the roof or these actual solar tiles which are new roof tiles that are actually hundreds of tiny solar panels themselves all interconnected to make a normal looking roof that's actually a giant solar panel and that is the one that I went for and this is why I say this is this was a crazy option because I I did not actually need a new roof most people who go with the solar tiles option would either have an old roof that needs replacing soon or they're like about to build a new house and this will be the new roof that they put on it I wasn't in either of those situations but also this was the way to get by far the largest total array with the most coverage with as many pitches as my roof has and also aesthetically it looks really good too I got to say there's carb appeal either way I make my decision I'm going with the solar roof I'm going Tesla's full integrated setup from there not going to lie it is quite a process there is a lot of uh of paperwork and Hoops to jump through also with Tesla is they've been kind of in and out of reliability like over the years they've been on and off with actually making this product they've paused installations for a while it was briefly cancelled and then it came back and there were supply chain issues I remember reading about all this and I was kind of worried uh but for whatever reason when I ordered which was in 2021 basically everything went perfectly smooth as well as it could have gone you get assigned a a Tesla advisor just like for your project for your solar project they walk you through the whole process from the paper work with the town from beginning to end so there was an ordering process inspection a measuring process quotes you know filling out paperwork with the town you actually when you're first trying to get an estimate you actually submit your address and they go look on Google Images and look at your roof with satellite imagery and give you an initial quote then once you're locked in and you decide you want to go through with it they'll actually come to your home with professionals and actually measure it and then give you a precise real quote and then start to order all the materials you eventually get to the point where you get an install date you start scheduling things out uh and then they come through with all the boxes of solar panels and they took up my whole driveway for a couple days there are people who have actually walked through 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 which was in November 2021 and finished with the activation of the system in July 2022 so 8 months but now that it's done uh we get to nerd out about the numbers sorry in advance to anyone who doesn't like numbers I feel like that's really the only way to explain how good it is and what's happening with them so there's about to be a lot of them let's get into it so first of all the specs right so this is a 29313 KW solar array size your boy's got a big roof and then there are three power wall 3s which totals 40 1/2 kwatt hours and then this this is the Tesla app where all of the learnings and all of the numbers happen when the system first got activated I just remember like seeing it light up in the app for the first time the numbers jump up and just kind of you just kind of get I could stare at the app for a while like I could really get lost in the numbers maybe it's just cuz I'm a numbers person but there's a lot going on and that's it was exciting to see it all in real time and learn a lot of stuff so I think the app is really well done and it lets you visualize how much energy the solar array is currently capturing how much energy the home is using and the state of charge and power output or input of the power wall batteries and then of course anything happening with the electrical grid so you can see at this exact moment in time on a sunny morning in July the panels are bringing in 7 kilow of power five of which are powering the house the last two of which are going into the power walls which are 38% full and it's not touching the Grid at all there's already a lot of terms being thrown around here here's a good way of thinking about it kilowatts is a measure of power hour so 1 kilowatt is 1,000 Watts uh a kilowatt hour though is a unit of energy collected so a Tesla Model S battery for example is 100 roughly 100 kilowatt hours and so if that battery were to Output 100 Kow for an hour then it would be at zero so for my setup the power wall 3 each one is about 13 1/2 kwatt hours each so that totals 40 1/2 kilowatt hours since I have three and they support a maximum power output in or out of 152 KW and then the solar system being 29. 3 KW means that basically it seems like the theoretical maximum of the electricity that can be collected at any one time is 29. 3 kows but as you're about to see a little bit later that number may or may not be accurate either way just hanging out in the Tesla app for a while which you do a lot for the first few weeks I learned a lot I learned a lot about what takes a lot of energy what takes a little bit of energy some of it which did surprise me I I also learned that sort of the basic like existence level for this house is like 400 watts of power just cuz things are plugged in even if every light is off it just sort of sits around 400 WTS but you know charging a phone or turning on a light or something like that basically doesn't make a dent at all it doesn't show up in the app uh turning on a TV might only take about 100 Watts uh or 0.

1 kilow a computer can pull 3 to 500 watts if it's taking a lot of power but surprisingly the big spikes come from the microwave and the toaster for sure but the two absolute biggest draws of electricity in this house by far and I think probably with a lot of others are number two air conditioning and number one by a country mile is charging the electric car I think the best way to look at this is actually by Seasons so like I said the system got activated in July so in the middle of the summer so a typical summer day in New Jersey is pretty awesome for a solar customer the days are long we get a lot of sun it's great this is what a summer day looks like in the app and this is a pretty good day for solar so you can see the sunrise is around 6:00 a. m. the peak is around noon and then this drop off till sunset around 8: to 900 p.

m. it's a lot of sun and on this day it generated a ridiculous 260 kilowatt hours of electricity not all days are going to look like perfect curves like this by the way in fact the previous day was pretty cloudy so you can see it only generated 65 kwatt hours the next previous was better again but yeah a typical summer day you know get around 200 kwatt hours from the Sun and then I think this view is the most helpful it looks kind of wild at first but you can quickly tell how to read it it's basically how much power the house is taking and then where it's getting that power from so overnight you can see these spikes from the house are where I'm pulling from the grid this is actually just air conditioning overnight then when the sun comes out and the day heats up and the air conditioner turns on the lights and the appliances everything comes on it starts drawing more power but it's totally covered by solar as you can see here and it's also filling up the power walls with extra solar as this happens so later in the day when the Sun goes down that power draw is also supplemented by the power wall batteries there were a lot of summer days like this on the absolute best day in this time I think I generated almost 300 KW hours of electricity but because of how much the house is using from the AC to charging the car every single day uh frequently I'd use 200 plus kilowatt hours of electricity during the day so my net grid usage would typically in these summer months be0 to slightly negative maybe up to 50 KW hours on a good day meaning I would generate and sell back to the grid 50 KW hours more than I used solid so after summer there is the fall which you know the days are starting to get a little bit shorter but also notably the temperatures drop off quite a bit so getting less a little bit less Sun but also using a lot less air conditioning so here is a normal fall day in the middle of October production day by day is dropping down now here into the low hundreds uh this is a day that I got just over 120 kwatt hours of solar pretty cloud-free day again as you can tell by the graph and again if you look at the home usage there's even smaller spikes and a smaller curve of air conditioning during the day so The house's needs are actually completely covered by solar and then once the sun goes down and the power wall takes over it actually did not touch the Grid at all which is pretty sick and this was actually very common throughout the fall turns out the fall and the spring are the times where I generated the most excess electricity with basically everyday ending with net negative and then there's winter and it turns out uh winter can be well in the Northeast here is especially brutal on these setups for a couple of reasons like first of all as far as solar these are the days when we're get the days are the shortest like the sun sets at like 400 p. m.

which is insane but that's real but it also turns out that most of the days are cloudy I didn't really realize this like truly until I started looking through all the graphs but it's like one out of every 10 days is actually sunny and I you know I know it's cold and everything but I didn't realize how many days in the winter are just cloud cover all day so then also my home's uh I'm pointing like you can see it my home's air conditioning is electric but my heating is natural gas so my natural gas bill is just going up and there's nothing my solar can do about it but on top of all that you got to think about the car and electric cars are far less efficient in the winter when it's cold than any other time of the year batteries have a certain temperature they like to be at they like to operate at that temperature so they spend more extra energy getting up to and staying at that temperature so a normal drive for me might take say 15% of the battery on a commute during the summer that same Drve during the winter will take 20 25 30% of the battery driving the exact same way just because it's so cold so that is a lot more electrical energy so here's what some typical days in the winter would look like literally only generating 20 to 70 kilowatt hours of electricity in a whole day like cloudy days would literally only be a handful and then for home use so I actually went through this phase of like maybe I should charge my car less often to be off the grid more I was kind of playing around with that so I would charge like every 2 to 3 days but it honestly doesn't really matter you can sort of see which days I actually plug the car in and to be fair the power wall handled it but it did empty it out so the next day I'm pulling from the grid until the sun comes up so it was basically like a lot of days around zero and then every time I had to plug in the car to fill back up there would be a huge dent just a huge positive net use day on the calendar so I actually had positive net grid usage months for all of November December and January so I was pulling from the grid more than I produce solar all of those months but then sure enough when we get to Spring things flip super fast it turns out if you were to guess which month I would generate the most solar or the most excess solar what would you think you'd probably guess like sometime in the peak of the Summer with the longest day June July uh for me it was May in May I used 6500 kwatt hours of electricity but I generated nearly 8,500 kwatt hours of electricity and I didn't even realize this is another thing you don't really know for real until you look at the data and I'm looking at the graphs and may had basically every single day sunny during that month I think I had one cloudy day in May but June and July we do get a lot more thunderstorms out here in the Northeast and that actually does take a real hit on total solar that's that's cloud cover so they didn't generate quite as much solar as May we're just learning weather patterns out here through graphs of solar generation uh this is also around the same month that I got the eight sleep so the eight sleep is a pod cover that fits on a mattress like a fitted sheet but it's temperature controlled so it can heat and cool each side of the bed independently they reached out around May to be sponsor and I said yes so that's when I installed it I wouldn't say it it replaced the need for air conditioning it didn't but it did actually legitimately decrease the total air conditioning you need when the bed is cooled off and the house doesn't have to be as cool so when it literally cools the bed before you get in stays cool the whole night for optimal sleep and then warms you up in the morning on autopilot every single day which is sweet so now that I know that air conditioning is the number two draw of electricity in my entire house and if you don't drive an electric car it's probably your number one draw then it's good to know that you can you can do something like this and obviously it'll take a lot less electricity from the wall than air conditioning wood also if you're curious I talked about this on dope Tech but it's turned out to be pretty awesome obviously sleep is super important and temperature is like top of the list for Sleep Quality falling asleep faster waking up less so investing in your sleep makes a ton of sense on top of maybe cutting into your AC use so if you want to get a pod cover for yourself you can actually use code MKBHD on their site and get $200 off so I'll leave a link in the description and thanks again to eight sleep for sponsoring the video so it's time for the the big summary I've had this solar setup for a full year now all four seasons it's time to run the numbers see if it was really worth it and see if it's actually good so let's start with the money question here the this like I said was nowhere near the cheapest possible option of course going with solar panels and batteries a lot of possible setups so my setup with the solar tiles all of the materials all of the labor installation everything and the three batteries everything together was $12,988 4 but also as you can see there's a federal tax credit down here of nearly $30,000 bringing the total cost to me down to right around $93,000 so the tax credit does fluctuate quite a bit and it's actually gone up like a lot since I ordered like a year and a half ago whatever it was uh it's up to 30% now in New Jersey so it's called the uh New Jersey solar investment tax credit if I ordered today it would have been $8,000 more off but you know it's fine it's fine everything's fine I'm not mad it's fine but the main question you typically see with an investment like this is what is the payoff period how long does it take before that investment pays for itself in saved electricity so that's a good question and I had to do quite a bit of math here because every bill is different every week every month of electricity cost different amounts actually my provider literally has different electricity rates every single hour and there are different averages per day per week per season but if I do a sort of a sweeping average for each month and how much electricity I've been using the 54 megawatt hours of electricity that I've used in the past year uh would have cost about $9,600 this whole time but you know that's where it comes from so if you divide that out uh by the total cost that I paid it comes out to just under 10 years 99. 6 years so if you if you Google like what's a good payback period for a solar setup the answer that the AI pops up with is is like 6 to 10 years which you know if I think about it makes sense obviously and that's great because if the panels are warrantied for 25 years and you pay them off in 10 years then they're just paying you extra for the next 15 years however long you're in that house which is great so mine being on the longer end of that am I mad at that not really I think that's fine um I also do know that there are a couple of things that could that I could that could have been different to make that payback period shorter now actually the number one suggestion typically would be like okay if you want to make the payback period shorter get a less expensive setup and that would make sense but also you have to keep in mind the coverage really matters here so I could have gone with a much less expensive actually a solar panel array from Tesa on this same exact roof and because of all the pitches on the roof they estimated they could have put panels down on certain parts and it would have totaled a smaller 19 kwatt array instead of the 29 KW of the solar tiles I know that because that's actually what I first signed up for an estimate 4 as I was like juggling the idea in my head would that have had a shorter payback period or would that have been offset by much less electricity being produced and taking longer to pay for itself I don't know but the other part of that equation that I'm thinking about now is just like I should just use more electricity so that it pays for itself faster I want to get my values worth I am constantly in net negative so I can afford to use way more electricity and so I thought maybe about switching um you know various appliances that aren't electric yet maybe even switching heating to electrical so that may be in my future um but now for all the miscellaneous weird quirks of having this brand new piece of tech on top of my house cuz believe me there are quite a few so first of all on the uh the $0 electricity bill for the whole year that is real which is pretty awesome but it's also interesting that I was able to achieve the 0 bill monthly but I also used positive net grid energy for those three months during the winter so you might be wondering wait a second how does that work and the answer is net metering credits it turns out they roll over month to month but then they get reset once per year so meaning when it was first activated and in the First full month of August I produced more than I used I ended the month with a credit of the difference which was - 255 kilowatt hours and it says that on the bill so that means the next month even if I used 255 kwatt hours more than I produced with solar I would still have a $0 bill cuz I have that credit to play with but month after month after month during the summer and then the fall I was building up more and more negative credit so that by the time we got to Winter those three months in a row I was eating into the credit but I didn't eat all of it so I didn't get all the way back to zero so the the bill was still $0 every month so then another fun thing uh power outages I have had a few power outages uh since getting the solar system installed most of them just because of thunderstorms and the grid going down for a bit I didn't even notice which was pretty sick I did not notice the lights didn't even flicker I didn't actually know until I got a notification on my phone from the Tesla app saying hey just so you know you're disconnected from the grid right now but you're running off of solar Andor batteries right now so everything is good and you've got you know x amount of hours of backup left and it should get you till the next morning when the sun comes up again and there's even a storm watch feature that will preemptively make sure the power walls are full if it knows a big storm is coming and honestly there is a pretty sweet Peace of Mind knowing for a fact that if I don't charge the car the power walls have more than enough to just use the house like normal until the next morning air conditioning appliances literally whatever and it'll be fine and when the sun comes out again it'll start powering everything I could be completely off the grid for days or weeks at a time if I find somewhere else to charges a car now another fun fact in the winter in the Northeast you probably already know we get snow and apparently the surface of the solar tiles the solar roof uh stays just above freezing just a little bit warmer than a roof would which has some interesting side effects most notably when it snows a little bit uh the snow simply hits the roof and melts so it never actually accumulates on the roof and then the solar can continue to work I mean if it's cloudy you get a little bit of solar but it keeps working and then you're the only house that doesn't have a white roof cuz there's snow no snow on it but when it snows heavy like like a lot uh which it does a few times what happens is it snows a ton and it actually does accumulate and then when it accumulates the outside layer kind of insulates the bottom and so the Bottom now has room to get warm again and so it warms up and creates a thin layer of water and then the whole thing just slides off of the roof like a sheet of ice like the whole accumulated layer slides off on the water so I didn't actually get videos of this happening with my own roof but there are some YouTube videos of this happening on YouTube it's kind of crazy literally the whole roof section slides off in sheets and it actually lands in piles around the house sometimes blocking a door or a driveway it's not a small deal it was a little bit frightening the first time it happened cuz I didn't realize what that loud booming noise was I was like is is there is there thunder in the in a snowstorm that's kind of weird but then I like see it in the window like sliding off of the roof which is crazy then it piles up around the door and then then it I got to shovel it but then last but not least the fun fact uh I like to you all uh the zero that sounds silly the $ Z power bill is actually kind of a lie because my power company ruined it every month for the past 12 months my electricity bill has been $57 .