Thomas Massie runs off-grid home using wrecked Tesla Model S battery | Hacker News Reader

Thomas Massie runs off-grid home using wrecked Tesla Model S battery

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36 pointsdrak0n1c12 comments

Would a DIY solution like this run afoul of building codes? How about insurance coverage if something happens? On one end of the spectrum you can have say a Powerwall system wired by a electrician and with all work signed off by a city inspector. On the other end you have something like this which could possibly be safe if properly deployed, but might not be considered so legally.

I'm so glad no one said that to Nicola Tesla or Thomas Edison. I wonder if they were aware that they might have injured themselves!

Gotta love how an objectively cool project is taken down because some people here disagree with his politics.

There’s a lot of DIY power wall info out there if you want to replicate something like this, w/ or w/o Tesla car battery packs.

If your metro area has been blighted by e-scooter rental companies littering the sidewalk with scooters, you can likely also find them super cheap on your local government/police auction site. The rental companies seldom claim them back after they get impounded. They are a great source of cheap cells for diy powerwalls

Anyone have more technical details, as well as what his typical load is, how long the panels will/are lasting, the price for all of this, and what he does when the sun isn't shining in Kentucky, and especially how the controller software works?

If you watch the video(s) he paid ~$15k for the battery, and had to drive ~900mi to get it from a salvage business.

Here's the first one: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qpPYkqpe-Ms

I don't know if he mentioned how much it cost to get the conversion kit stuff, but looking at the site (evtv.me) makes me think it was several thousand dollars. It looks like 'standard electrical stuff' controlled by an arduino.

He has a propane-fueled generator for when the battery system is offline. He shows it and you can hear it running when he swaps out the old lead-acid battery system.

He's hoping to get 20 years out of the batteries. At several points you see the power draw on the system. At the end of the second video he did some verbal napkin math based on the number of cycles he'd already gone through. This was happening during the winter, his assertion being that winter would be the toughest time of the year.

You should watch the video series.

I would be more impressed if this guy wasn't a traitorous anti vaccine disaster of a person.

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie

Only that kind of person would want to live off the grid...

I don't think that is true at all.

Okay, you are more impressed if a person that you like does interesting things than a person that you don't like?

Sorry, but out of a technical perspective that makes absolutely no sense.

This link it taking a cool little tech project and using it to promote an absolutely awful politician. It's cheap PR, meant to distract from the disgusting things this person does.

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