How are Tesla’s solar roof tiles now? | Hacker News Reader

How are Tesla’s solar roof tiles now?

sustineri.life

16 pointsZeljkoS31 comments

This website seems super sketchy. Many of the links in the footer 404, most of the posts are tagged "filler", and they seem to be copied from other websites and slightly modified, e.g. [1] comes from [2], [3] from [4], etc. Even the linked article is copied from CNBC [5].

[1]: https://sustineri.life/las-vegas-is-currently-fully-powered-...

[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/las-vegas-...

[3]: https://sustineri.life/a-bladeless-wind-turbine-but-still-cr...

[4]: https://www.herox.com/crowdsourcing-news/354-the-vortex-blad...

[5]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/24/tesla-solar-roof-tiles-where...

I am not sure this is the right approach to the problem, from the article:

- While traditional solar panels can be installed in a day, it took a team of 10 to 15 workers two weeks to install this roof.

- Winds roofs cost him about $100,000, though he didn't need to replace his roof anyway: I don't think it will ever pay itself, honestly.

- Tesla's goal is to make the tiles a cost-effective option. Partly by ensuring they're more durable than other rooftops. Tesla's promising 30 years of solar power generation.

Yeah, the solar roof tiles look great. Yet, why wouldn't you go for solar panels instead?

The Tesla solar roof looks fantastic compared to sun panels. For the aesthetics you pay a large premium and take a hit in efficiency compared to normal panels.

The photograph doesn't look that good. His whole roof isn't even covered, just a section in the middle that clashes with the border! If that's the aesthetic 'improvement' offered then give me regular large slab panels please.

It comes in a number of versions and some of them fit in with the American McMansion style.

There are a lot of examples in this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVIf8UMg7Zg

If the guy in the linked article's install cost $100k, I can't imagine how much the house shown in that video cost.

Elon truly is the pied piper.

That seems to be a different problem.

It seems some of the trouble and cost is with the size (miniaturization, electronic component duplication for each tile...).

Why not simply create larger "tiles", a la sheeted roofs? If aesthetics is the only goal, you can take a bit more hit on efficiency and have different patterns on them that are not necessarily energy-producing (eg. you take a current-tech solar panel and paint and perhaps even sculpt anything on parts of it to make it look better).

Since the efficiency hit is generally pretty big (your roof is unlikely to be inclined and pointed in a way to get the most of sun rays in your area), they need to be much cheaper than traditional panels per unit of coverage to be even cost-comparable.

FWIW, I like this and would gladly install them on my roof. I've actually searched for "solar roof tiles" long before this was announced (didn't come up with anything :)).

But perhaps this project needs a stepping stone to regular-looking tiles first (as I said, larger, sheeting-like solar panels for installation on commercial roofs, if designed in a nice way, perhaps even for residential use).

Larger tiles would probably help a bit. And to be honest, at the beginning I liked the idea of solar roof tiles. The more I think of it the more it seems as a not-so-good idea. You are solving some problems in a very inefficient manner.

Exactly, that was my point. I don't know if it makes sense to pay a large premium for the roof aesthetics. From my point of view, it is just a bad design of the product. Maybe it will change in the future, but for now, I wouldn't put those tiles on my roof.

A hundred thousand dollars to be a beta tester. Indeed why wouldn't you let form follow function and just get regular panels?

The most reasonable application for the solar roof tiles is when a roof is beeing built or renewed. I wouldn't expect them to be cost efficient when replacing an existing roof in good shape. As with electric cars, you buy them, when you would buy a new car anyway.

And of course, they are great whereever people are hesitant to put solar panels onto their roof for esthetic reasons. What else is keeping people away from putting solar onto their roofs?

The answer to your last question still is, unfortunately, costs and return-of-investment. When we built our house a couple of years back the ROI would have been around the 10 year mark, not too great at that particular moment.

The ROI can either be improved by subsidies or if you factor in EVs. In the latter case, assuming there is enough cash available, the investment improves a lot.

In the photovoltaics market it doesn't count as something ready for production use unless it's scaled up, and intercompatible with other industry standard stuff.

I can take out my Visa card right now, or send a purchase order and get a pallet of twenty, 72-cell 370W panels delivered to my doorstep or loading dock. They're really nice panels made from 156mm mono Si cells.

Their specs are well known, and they confirm to standard dimensions with their aluminum frame (1.99 x 0.99 meters), so I can mount them on a dozen different vendors' aluminum rails or other mounting systems.

I don't need any special weird connectors to wire them up in various possible configurations of series and parallel.

I can buy competing 360 to 370W panels made by ten different companies.

My skepticism of the solar tiles comes from the concept that they're very labor intensive to install, available only as a proprietary solution from one vendor, I've never seen detailed schematics of them showing exactly how they mount and interconnect, etc. If you've ever seen a consumer electronics device that is glued shut at the factory and ifixit gives it a 1 out of 10 repairability score, this is the same thing.

10-15 workers and two weeks? In a normal residential roof pv install, something has gone very wrong if three workers can't get all of the mounting and panels installed and wired in one to two days.

$100,000? I really hope that's a translation error or something, or a misunderstanding on the part of the person who wrote the article. Because I could build a truly ridiculously sized ground mount pv system for $100,000.

The question isn't how the solar tiles compete against adding panels to an existing roof - the panels are not going to be beaten in this comparison. The question is, how do the tiles compare to building a roof from scratch. And then possibly adding solar panels to the roof in addition. And of course, for all the cases where people don't want (or even are not allowed) to put panels onto their roof.

And, at least in Germany, most home owners wouldn't be able to put solar onto the ground for a lack of real estate.

Another question where space is at a premium would be the STC W per square meter. I think these tiles might fare a lot worse than a dozen typical 72-cell 370W panels, nevermind a 22.5%+ sunpower ultra high efficiency panel.

I think the solar tiles only make sense, when you are not able to install solar panels. Be it for geometry or optical reasons.

They’re still worse.

The bit I don't understand is how the tiles are reliably connected electrically?

Making the tiles is one thing, but unlike the larger panels (which are now translucent so can kickout ~500watts in place of 330) they 10x the number of external connections.

That must have a large impact on efficiency

I hope that somebody here can provide a URL and prove I'm wrong, but I've never seen a photo of the under side of these or any real schematic/technical diagram showing how they interconnect. It seems to be some sort of trade secret at present.

Aren't waterproof installation techniques quite common for things like outdoor lighting already?

There's lots of things on the market that are electrical and ip65 through ip68 rated, but none that I know of which are so flat and interlocking.

I would take a guess that one part of the back of the tile is much thicker (where not overlapping with other tiles), and regular waterproof connectors connect to it, and short lengths of wire connect to the next tile.

That means they don't have to design new connectors, the connectors stay mostly dry and are shaded from the sun, and the tiles can flex/move without breaking anything.

Here's some info, https://electrek.co/2017/08/30/tesla-solar-roof-tile-system-...

Patents: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9748434B1/en , https://patents.google.com/patent/US9966898B1/en

Hmm, to me that looks like how they join the individual cells, not the slates/shingles/tiles.

I could be wrong though.

Electrical connectors don't really have any significant efficiency hit.

They do have a complexity/reliability/cost hit though.

Sorry, I should have been more clear.

When you look at a large panel, the cells are joined by a busbar that is the shortest it can be.

These tiles have between 1-5 cells in them, so for a given cell number the total distance of wire joining a telsa roof is far higher.

But yeah, the secondary is the number and spec of those connectors.

This article has more than a few issues. I believe I've seen recently that Tesla is now on Version 3 of the these tile's mounting and interconnecting hardware. Tesla really wants to be sure their tech is bullet proof before they start rolling it out in volume because reworking a lot of roofs five years down the road would be a huge liability.

On the other hand there's still a lot of interest in this because it really does look much better. All things come to those who wait.

This stuff is vaporware and will never see widespread use.

The title should read "How are" not "How is" because the subject ("roof tiles") is a plural.

I'm aware that American English has slightly different rules here than English English; iirc in the case of collective nouns (e.g. family, fleet, set).

It isn't a case of American vs British English; the article is full of spelling and grammatical mistakes. I expect the journalist is not a native speaker and did not have the article proof-read.

Is the article from 2018 or 2019? It's dated yesterday, but everything seems to be have been written in Sep 2018 or so.

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