Like many of its experimental products, Tesla’s Solar Roof — a solar panel array engineered to look like discreet roof tiles — has been a stunning failure. Nowhere is that flop more apparent than on the roof of Ambrose Conroy, a California homeowner who’s spent over six years battling with Tesla over the solar installation from hell.
According to Electrek, the whole saga began back in 2020, when Conroy entered an agreement to buy a 13.1 kW photovoltaic system from Tesla. Though the process was supposed to take a few weeks, it ran years late, as compounding errors and logistical disasters threw the project into chaos.
Even older ones have longer lasting batteries than we expected, it turns out.
But the reason this makes sense is because it’s not easy to “repair” a battery back to 100% and that’s what you would want in your car, but that massive battery pack at 80% SoC works pretty well for a house battery.
40kWh is like the minimum you’d want in a fully electric car but a typical household only needs like 1/3 of that.