Tesla Troubles and Solar Struggles: Navigating the Complexities of Modern Energy Solutions

Can you hear me? Good morning. It's a great and glorious day here in the hinterlands of Missouri. I tend to judge the days these days by how much solar irradiance we have, and it's a great and glorious morning because we've got a lot of it.

We've got more sunshine than we know what to do with. I'd like to talk for a few minutes about solar energy and photovoltaics specifically. I'm not really a newbie to this.

I installed, and I have mentioned on several occasions, a photovoltaic array in my home in Morrison, Colorado in 1998. That's 21 years ago. At the time, it was the largest residential photovoltaic array in the world, and it cost $275,000.

I didn't precisely put it in with my own two hands. I worked with a solar energy lab in the state of Colorado, and in fact, we had the first net metering agreement in Colorado. But this was a today quaint and tiny 15 kilowatt array with 50 kilowatt hours of trojan lead-acid batteries.

I had a huge deck on the back of the house, and this was what I called the half acre of batteries underneath the deck. It lasted about five years, and that was our system. Today, things have become more affordable, but I'm embarrassed to report I'm coming up on the same total for here at EVTV, and we do get a little bit more for our money at this point.

I've got a 38 kilowatt array and several hundred kilowatt hours of lithium batteries and a dozen or so various inverters that we test and play with. But that's the state of the situation. I believe, and I truly believe, that this technology offers some solutions to some problems, and I'm pretty excited about it.

I'm an advocate for it. I would like you to share with me, and I will share with you, my awe and ongoing fascination with the twin magic rocks of the silicon photovoltaic cell and the nickel carbon lithium ionic battery cell, and how they can work together in the future. Now, by advocate, I don't mean I'm trying to get FaceTime on MSNBC and CBS, and I'm not truly calling for other people to join me in forcing people to spend other people's money.

And it's not a political movement. It's, I want you to go in your workshop and actually work on the significant problems of gaining personal independence and control of your energy system by actually doing that, using the available tools and components, and perhaps suggesting and participating in the development of new tools and components to actually make that happen. We don't want to get too far out over our skis.

There is a public perception that photovoltaics can cure our energy needs across the land, and we have well-intentioned, cranially challenged people such as Oreo Cookie Cortez and Nancy Pelusa and Chuck Schummerman, who believes somehow that they can seize resources and money from the public and apply the vast technical prowess of the United States government and their wisdom in these sorts of things to some good effect. And it's become widely held in the public and the press that solar and wind can save us all. I have to tell you, it's not true.

And it's mostly serves as the condemnation of the fraudulent state of our educational system and the inability of our population to recognize the product of six by nine without resorting to use their fingers. If you have not mastered fourth grade arithmetic, please do not try to calculate energy and power flows on a continental basis in your head. You're not going to be able to do it. Now some of you all can probably do it, but the news is that 20, 21, 22 percent photo efficient photovoltaic arrays and lithium batteries as we have them now, and all the wind on God's green earth cannot really cut the mustard.

Indeed, I get weak in the knees and my stomach churns at age 63 to contemplate how to get to real energy independence in your home, workshop, or garage. It is non-trivial. We have been playing with this $300,000 investment in solar for two years.

And while we're working on it, just to keep from freezing to death, we burned $4,000 worth of natural gas this winter. Most of our personal energy goes to temperature control, but I don't want to freeze to death in the winter, and I don't want to sweat my ass off in Missouri in July. And so this is a real challenge, and I have to tell you, you're gonna wind up with about 20 kilowatt of inverter and about a quarter million watt hours, 250 kilowatt hours of battery storage before it's all over.

The good news is by the time we get all this working, it'll be a lot cheaper. Well, on a national scale, and I'm not dealing with that. I'm talking about you, your family, your shop, your home.

What happens to you after the hurricane, the flood, the fire, and the zombie apocalypse? On an industrial scale, it gets even worse. It takes an incredible amount of energy, and it has to be electrical energy to make aluminum, and it takes an incredible amount of energy to make steel, and basically to bake limestone to make Portland cement so we can make concrete, to fell timber, to build roads, to build dams, and to do all this takes a tremendous amount of energy. And we are not at a state, and will not be while I'm alive, where wind and solar can even knock the edge off of this.

There is a hero arising out of all this, and given my past relationship and history with him, the irony of all is it's Bill Gatess of Borg has emerged, spending his own money, time, and treasure to try to carry a message that nobody wants to hear, and that is that wind and solar will not get us there. And he's absolutely correct. His solution is nuclear power.

Nuclear power? How did George Bush pronounce that? Nuclear power. Now the problem is most of you are horrified by this. I can't express to you my view of that.

There's more people die each year of wasp stings than have been inconvenienced by all of the nuclear power plants built since 1956. You shrink in horror from this, and the radiation, and what we're going to do with the waste, and on and on and on, it's never been a problem. But if it was, everything you know about nuclear power plants is based on 1950s and 1960s technology.

Bill Gatess of Borg has rounded up about a billion dollars in investment, including a significant sum from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, his personal piggy bank, to foster development of nuclear power plant technology circa 2019. And that's going to look very different from what you're accustomed to. Indeed, he appears to have some plans to actually use the nuclear waste we're storing from the previous generation as the fuel for the next.

And he thinks there's enough nuclear fuel stored over here in Paducah, Kentucky, to power the country for about the next hundred years. Unfortunately, he's attacking the most regulated aspect of technology he could have chosen. And I don't really know how he's going to do that.

I know how I would. Bill, go up to Wyoming, pass the tourist areas into the really ugly outback of Wyoming, build about a 15,000 square foot facility, and just do it in secret, and let the devil take the high and low side. Start with a small little one megawatt thing in a shop about the size of EVTVs.

If you can get that to work, then you can put it in a little baggies and sell it on the rack, like you did Microsoft Basic. It worked once, huh? Instead, what I think he's going to do is take it to China, where they'll let him build it. So within just a few years, I should be able to order a desk-sized nuclear power plant on Alibaba.

Now the radiation will not kill me, but the shipping charges, as always, just might. So that's where we're going to be. But let me put to rest the dreams of sugar plums that were going to power America on photovoltaics, or wind.

I don't even like wind because the windmills are mechanical and they constantly break down. At least the solar panels don't wear out. Although, as we learned in this episode, you might want to mop them off once in a while.

But in any event, it doesn't change or detract from that there are some curious and really profound advantages we can derive by, in our small scale, at the micro level, in our homes, shops, and barns, we can control and become independent on our personal energy use. And if we can do that on a small scale, I happen to apparently be curiously one of the few aware that this will have a ripple effect throughout the society, and a good effect on the development of the technology. And if you'll join me in that, good things will come of it.

But if you hear from anybody that has a green new deal to power America on photovoltaics, ask for the details. And if they don't involve 35% cell efficiencies, and some pretty serious new technology, you can assume that you're talking to children. And be kind to them and try to get them under the auspices of a mother somewhere who can take care of them and keep them out of your way while you're working.

Let's take a look at what Dano and King James, the King James version, and Dano Slumdog Thousandaire are doing on my roof today. And then we'll go inside and talk about some epiphanies and really kind of startling new things we're learning about the vernal equinox and changing from fighting for every scrap of sunshine to having so much we don't know what to do with it. All because of a weather change.

Stay with us. And now a word about solar feminine hygiene. I know this is a topic you want to discuss, but somebody has to do it.

We had a recent visitor who claimed to be a solar installer of some note for some time, and he criticized this as having probably filthy solar panels. As they've been up there five years, he asked me how often I wash them. I'm like, I don't wash it.

I let the wife take care of that. But after he left, we decided to find out a bit about that, and we're up on the roof repairing a failed in-phase IQ7X, which was failed because it wasn't plugged in. And so the repair was to plug it back in with our brilliant techs, Dan who quickly troubleshot the program by finding the cable laying on the roof not connected to the in-phase.

But anyway, while they were up there, what I had them do was wash 16 of the Renesolar 305 volt panels, and I kind of gave them a little map of which 16, and that corresponds to inverter 5. The other inverters, they didn't wash the panels. We want to find out what difference that makes. They vary anyway.

This one is cranking out 3,700 watts. This one's 3,600 watts, and this one's 3,600 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,600 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one's 3,700 watts, and this one is 3,212, this one's 3,265, number 4 is at 3,373, and number 5 is at 3,944. Now if you'll add all those numbers up, and I have it, and divide by 4, and then compare it to the output of number 5, you'll find about a 15 or 16% increase in power output on number 5 by taking a mop and a bucket to those 16 solar panels and washing them off.

So personal solar hygiene is important. Stay with us. We're inside with our PowerSafe 100, which has sprung a leak.

In fact, our whole thing has sprung a leak. We got panels off, new wires and things going every which direction, a table that's an array of inverters. This is a six kilowatt Cygniere inverter.

This is a 12 kilowatt Cygniere. This is an oscilloscope, if you want. There's a waveform, 60 Hertz. You see, this is our 15 kilowatt, and we take them apart and swap things out, fool with them quite a bit. We shipped a PowerSafe 100 to Walter Crumbly. It should be in Costa Rica by now, I would think.

I haven't heard from Walter recently. We should, by early next week, have our enclosure, which is the stopper for a new build for Wayne Revers of Tuxedo Park, New York, but it's ultimately destined for Antigua, and I've heard from a couple other people in Antigua this week. Apparently, they like to have electricity on the islands down there.

I want to talk about a couple of things. I was stunned and delighted to see a webinar on YouTube by a Mr. Mark Mays of Outback Power, and he had a total of 154 views, so some of you may have seen it, but not very many. And it's kind of got some secret stuff that I'm delighted to see in here, and that is that Outback Power is going to provide AC coupling for their Radeon series.

Now, nothing's really going to change in the product line. You have to download some secret firmware and have a secret installer password and put that on and access the secret installer menu to turn on what they are calling AC coupling. Let's talk about AC coupling a little bit.

There's some confusion. Maybe I should use another term, but that one was out there in handy. But he is using it in exactly the sense we are, and in fact, they have added a feature I wish we could add if I could talk the guy's insignia into adding it, and that is they are feathering the frequency at a much finer granulation than we do.

We can switch to 62.5 hertz, but he can switch in like 2.2 hertz increments in series, and the latest software from Enphase and some of the others adopt some functions that went into effect as requirements in California February 19th under California Rule 21. And of course, our old buddy UL1741 Supplemental Annex that allows him to modulate the power of grid interactive microinverters by feathering the frequency in little micro things. So I like that innovation.

I wish I had it, but I was astonished to see him using the term AC coupling as we do. Turns out there may be a reason. All we have to do is talk about it for two years, and eventually the word does get out.

I also had a visitor who explained to me he'd been doing AC coupling for 10 years. This reminds me of all the people I hear from that were designing HTML pages in the early 80s. Tim Berners-Lee issued the white paper in 1989.

But in this case, what he was referring to is the use of microinverters and solar edge inverters to do AC coupling. They convert the DC to AC and couple it to the grid. And for most of the knowledgeable solar people, that's what AC coupling means.

I use it in a kind of a different sense. And maybe I should come up with another term, but nothing suggests itself unless you have some ideas. That is to use a battery-powered off-grid inverter to tickle these grid interactive inverters and to make them believe there's a grid so they come on, even though there's no grid.

And we accidentally discovered that if you look up an inverter's S end, it looks like it converts DC to AC to power your house. But if you go around and look at it down the throat, it looks a lot like a battery charger and takes AC in the front and rectifies it to DC for the batteries. And you really don't have to change modes.

In fact, you don't have to change anything. It'll just work that way. And this gives us a fortuitous effect in that if we do get the grid interactive or grid-tied inverters too tricked into turning on, that they will power our shop loads and any excess automatically goes into the batteries.

And if they make power, we can use it. But if it's not enough power, we can augment it with the power from the batteries through the off-grid inverter, because that's what they're synced to. So there's no digital mayhem going on here.

It's just the flows of power, ebb and wane, quite naturally, without a change of mode, without going into a charging regime. The inverter thinks it's inverting. The grid interactive inverters think they're interacting with a grid.

And everybody is just as happy as cheese. So this works out pretty well. It sounds like I'm obsessing on this.

There's a reason for that. I'm obsessing on this. Why do I like it so well? Because we don't have to use it.

That's not said right, but it's what I mean. And what I'm talking about is we have a 13.8 kilowatt array over there using in-phase microinverters. And down here, five solar edge inverters with a 25 kilowatt array right over my head.

And they make quite a bit of power. We use a lot of power. We're called EVTV.

We still have EVs, although I talk about solar all the time today. And we still charge them. My Model 3 charges at 12 kilowatts.

It's not that I need a little power. I need a shitload. And so if we're doing two vans with it, it gets up there pretty quickly.

My little 15 kilowatt, much less the 12 or the 6, can't provide that. And it doesn't have to. AC coupled in the sense that I use the word, the microinverters are tied in at the circuit breaker panel.

They're already wired into the house, the shop. And if they make power, the shop gets it first. The only time we put any in the batteries is when we make too much.

And so both those arrays are producing power. They're going into the building wiring as they always do. And they're going into the car at 12 kilowatts.

None of that goes through any of this. It doesn't touch any of this. This makes the waveform they're syncing to.

If we quit making that waveform, they'll quit. But the flow of power doesn't go through even our circuit breaker that we're hooked into the mains panel with, with the power safe. The power is going into the house wiring, the building wiring, from the inverters, the microinverters, just as they always do.

And we're barely in the loop. Power-wise, waveform-wise, we're very much part of it. But as far as the power flows, it doesn't go through us.

In a DC coupled system, battery off-grid system, you have the panels go through a charge controller into the batteries. And the power from the batteries goes out the inverter to the house. All power has to go through that system, the inverters and the battery.

No free lunch. If you got a 15 kilowatt inverter, how much do you get? 15. If your panels make 28, I'm sorry, they can fill up the batteries.

But when they're full, you just have to shut them off. Because you can't make more than 15, except for 20 seconds or so. This will actually do 45 kilowatts for 20 seconds, ostensibly.

So I'm obsessing on what I call AC coupled, largely because it's not DC coupled, where the other inverters have direct access to the house wiring around us. They don't go through us. They go through the house wiring to whatever the load is.

In our case, some pretty significant loads. 3 kilowatt chargers, 12 kilowatt chargers, etc. And so that's kind of a big deal to be driving on sunshine, but you're not even really handling the power.

And so that's the AC coupling I'm talking about. And this is specifically what Outback is now doing. If you have the secret software and the secret installer code and access the secret menu, and it all works fine.

Let's talk a little bit about some oddities we found here recently. Okay. When we got all this together, fortunately, it was November and we're running out of sun.

Dark gloomy days leading up to, of course, the winter solstice, December 22nd, which is the shortest day of the year and one with ostensibly the minimal solar irradiance. There is a dirty little secret about solar. A couple of them, really.

The one most obvious was that in the creation of the planet to be suitable for life, they had to do two things. One was rotated on its axis, the 24 hour day. And so the sun would shine on the just and the unjust, and the rain would fall on the good and evil.

They also put a little precess in it, a wobble. And that wobble combined with our orbit around the sun and a tilt on our axis, it gives us seasons. Everybody's pretty well aware of this.

I'm telling you stuff you already know, except you don't. And it's a matter of degree. The amount of solar irradiance we receive in December is, let's say, one.

And the amount we receive in June would be four and a half. We get four and a half times more sunshine on June 22nd than we do on December 22nd. So we've been fighting for the last four or five months to get enough power out of this photovoltaic array of 38 kilowatts to keep that battery charged.

And we can go about a day and a half or two days on batteries. If we get a little bit through the clouds, we can go two days. But we've regularly had stretches of five or even seven days of miserable weather, on top of it being the short part of the year.

So we've been fighting for sunlight for months. And it's working pretty well. We have to deal with the extremes.

Sometimes our array, the sun pops out and makes more power than we can store in the batteries. And sometimes we just don't get enough. And the result has been a manually operated solar system.

Not only do I have to do it, but I usually have two assistants. And we're running from one switch to the other, putting it in warp factor nine, firing up the deflectors. And of course, when we really get in trouble and only have five minutes left in the show, we have to come up with a tachyon beam strategy.

And we're flipping switches and turning on solar edges and turning off solar edges and turning on the end phases and turning off the end phases and powering up the power safe and powering it back down and switching inverters. Because this one's doing magic stuff that this one doesn't do. And it's like three monkeys trying to fuck a football on a wax tile floor.

This is not what Walter Crumbly is after with his solar system. And it's not what most people want. They want a system that'll run itself.

And so gradually over the winter, we keep making software changes to handle more and more edge cases. And this is one of the reasons why I have a 38 kilowatt array for a 15 kilowatt inverter. We need to be able to overpower it.

And we need to be able to test those cases. The theory of selfish solar went like this. We're going to run off this inverter and these batteries.

And we're going to try to recharge the batteries with the solar and run it completely independently from and disconnected from the grid. And so they have two modes of operation. And one of them is battery priority.

And that is the mode that we've been using. And that's selectable using one of these little dip switches here. And in that mode, we will operate off the battery until it gets down to a certain level.

Which effectively given the clumsiness they use to check the voltages, winds up being about 40 volts, 40 to 41 volts. It'll switch over. There's some relays on a control board in there that switch on and apply the grid power.

And that's passed through the inverter to the output to run our shop. And then the inverter goes into a battery charge situation where it kind of does the same thing we do but in a more controlled fashion at about five kilowatts maximum, about 100 amps into our 48 volt battery pack. And it gradually recharges the batteries while powering the shop.

When it gets up to a certain level, it cuts off the charger and it flips back to running in battery priority mode. And this works pretty well. We had them add a couple of contacts.

There's another switch, 50 to 60 hertz. We had to modify the software where that 60 and 62 and a half hertz, we don't need 50 hertz. And some contacts that basically wire around that dip switch so we can switch between 60 and 62 and a half hertz.

The reason for that is we have the case of a diminished battery covered. We're only going to switch on the grid in that event. But there's another event that happens and that is that we have too much sunshine and we do not want to overfill our batteries.

There's really two cases we have to handle and we do that in software. One is in the event of the batteries becoming full. But the other one is if we get too much solar power at any one time, we overpower the inverter.

And what that does is it does a thermal overpower and it shuts itself off. The problem with that is someone has to manually restart the inverter or we just simply don't have power in the shops. And many times I'll come in the next day and there's no power here because the inverter has shut itself off.

Not because the batteries were full, but because we simply made too much current because we have too big an array. And so then we get into the situation of on sunny days, should we have all five solar edges on or just three of them? And this sort of thing happens particularly over the weekend because we have sunlight on Saturday and Sunday and it tends to shut things down. So we can't put more than about 15 kilowatts in there and our array can often make 20 or even 25 in the winter and 30 pretty easily right now.

Well then this leads to our 60 hertz shift and that was designed to handle the case of the batteries being full. So starting in the morning when the sun comes up, we're charging our batteries and powering the shop from our photovoltaic array. This is all good.

If the batteries get full say at 2 30 in the afternoon, we will shift the frequency for 500 milliseconds which turns off our microinverters for five minutes. So for five minutes we're taking energy out of the batteries. And so they come down a little bit and then the microinverters time out, this is automatic, and they come back up.

But they're making a little less power now because it's a little later in the afternoon and so they gradually fill the batteries back up. When it hits that point again, we again shift the frequency and do it again. And so that might realistically happen three or four times towards the end of the day as long as we're in December or January.

Happens somewhat earlier in the day at this time of the year. As we started to get more sun approaching the Vernal Equinox, March 22nd, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. We would power up the array and it would produce so much power that we go over the current limits we have in the software now in addition to the voltage limit, we put in a current limit where if it goes over 250 amps for 90 seconds or 300 amps for 30 seconds or 350 amps at all, maybe it's five seconds, then it shuts off the array.

So what started happening with more sunshine is the array comes on for four minutes and it's overpowering things, putting too much current in, and so we kick it off for five minutes. And then it comes on for three minutes and we kick it again. So we're not really recharging the batteries at all.

We're doing it a little bit, but because of the overcurrent situation, we're simply overpowering our batteries. I mean our inverter. And so our software does the shift and they're just kind of in a hysteresis mode almost that's very ineffectual for battery charging.

The other issue we had was when we have the grid connected to the inverters, again they go through a circuit breaker to these relays on a control board. Do I have a control board here? We've been burning up control boards too. Here is these relays and we have our control boards right on the board.

Now they're open and so the grid is not connected to anything, but they're making some sort of noise on our boards. And so at some times, and this is kind of irregular, we would mysteriously have error 40s and 39s on the solar edges. Not so much the end phases, but the solar edges are very twitchy and it would shut them down.

So that was a problem. This is the control board inside the signal air inverter. As we approach the Vernal Equinox, this got to be kind of a huge problem.

Now, Walter's not going to have that problem and Wayne's not going to have that problem because they're not going to have a 38 kilowatt array. We have one to find these kind of problems. They have a 15 or 20 kilowatt array, kind of properly sized, and this works out great for them.

They're much further south. They have a longer solar day, so they can have less power for more hours. This will work fine

That's not what we're about. We're about finding where this thing breaks and man are we good at it. And so what we did was, this is our input, our grid input, and we have a midnight solar surge suppressor on it and we added two gigavatt contactors and an LED in there and we use the heat enable output of our controller.

If you set your high temperature configuration value equal to your low temperature value, you obviously aren't too concerned about heating or cooling, but we use that configuration setting. If they equal each other, then we're going to do something else. And what we do is put this in AC priority mode, where it runs from the grid all the time, except it doesn't have any grid to run from.

The contactors have it shut off. And so it's running off the batteries in AC priority mode, and if we switch those contactors on, it will 15 seconds later switch over to the grid. And we've tied that into the same limits and the same checks for current and maximum battery voltage.

And so in AC priority mode, we have control of the grid over here. The grid's never on the box until we turn it on to be on the grid. Now, this is a philosophical change.

We're not going to use the grid to charge the batteries per se, although it will charge them in a very controlled fashion in AC mode if they're low, and that's an advantage. Instead, we're going to use the grid for load management. When we have too much power, we're going to dump it on them.

And so as the sun riseth in the east and before it setteth in the west and shines on the just and the unjust all day long, if it gets above our current limits of 250 amps for more than 90 seconds or 120 seconds or 300 amps for 30 seconds or 350 amps at all, we're going to turn on the grid, and 15 seconds later, it's going to switch to AC priority mode. And at that point, we're passing the solar energy to the grid and kind of bypassing the batteries, except in AC priority mode, if our batteries happen to be low, now we're charging them at 5 kilowatts, 4 kilowatts or 5 kilowatts. And we take that out of the solar and pass what's not needed to the grid.

And that's counterintuitive to me, and it doesn't really go with my selfish solar concept. Some of you on net metering might like that because we get paid for the overage, but we're using it as a way to keep the solar on, not do the frequency shift at all. Actually, we do the frequency shift when we transfer over, but that's to take the load off while we switch so we don't blow up the relays.

And so then we're in AC priority mode, the solar comes back up and it both charges the batteries, powers the loads in the shop. Remember, we're not using power from the grid, we're putting it out. We're using them as a dump, a place to dump our excess.

And without shutting down the solar panels every three minutes. So they can be on for hours, overproducing more power than the shop needs or the batteries need. We can charge the batteries in a controlled fashion, and everything else goes through to the grid.

So this is a horrendous change in thinking. Again, an epiphany on a Sunday afternoon while I'm here fighting for my life, trying to turn things on and turn things off. And change to this, and all of a sudden things got better.

And we had a very controlled situation. And I have a clock, of course, we get our NTP time from the internet when we power up our controller. And so at seven o'clock at night, whatever is happening, and I can change that value, we turn the grid off again and go back on the battery.

And we run on the battery all night, we're not going to use any power from the grid at night, we're going to use our battery power. And at seven o'clock in the morning, I don't turn it back on. What I kind of do, I set it to where it would be, it's off, but it could be triggered by an overcurrent or overvoltage.

I turn the grid back on, but it doesn't go on until it trips one of those overages. And so we're using the solar, excess solar, starting at seven or eight o'clock in the morning to recharge the batteries. And if they get up to full, I'll trip and go back on the grid.

So this is, it's taken me, this is going to be a four-hour video to explain this, but it's kind of an important concept. We're not using the grid as a backup, we're using it as a dump. And so when the sun gets up high enough, instead of shifting the frequency and turning off our solar, we turn on the grid and let any excess flow through.

And as a byproduct, get a controlled charge on the batteries, again from the sun, but instead of trying to put 17 kilowatts into the batteries, we're putting four or five and passing the remainder through to the grid. So it's a little bit of a forfeiture of the selfish solar concept, but it works extremely well. And it simply, we're in a different phase of the year, instead of fighting for sunlight, we got too much.

And we have to be able to deal with that. And we're trying to get it to where we don't have to have three monkeys in here flipping switches simultaneously trying to operate a nuclear power plant as if we were a bunch of eight-year-olds that knew how. And which would take us back to the Oreo cookie Cortez type mode.

So that's where we're at. And I wanted to explain that, and I've been struggling how to. I don't mind falling on my sword, it's how do I explain it where it makes any sense.

And that's probably the best I can do. It works extremely well. We're not really using the frequency shift at this point.

We're actually cutting on and off the grid with some relays remote from the inverter, our own relays. And that is working extremely well. So we're in AC priority mode, but working off the batteries is our normal operation.

And so at any moment, if we're overpowered with sunlight, either because of a full battery or too much current, we can simply turn on the grid and start dumping our excess overboard. And they've been a pretty good battery. They can take as much as we can give out.

And so that's where we're at. This is five Tesla Model 3 batteries. And a guy sent them to me.

Asking me to test them to see if they're any different. Because he sent them, I guess I have to. I happen to know it's not going to be any different.

He thinks they will be because he obtained them out the back door of Tesla. He's got a box of brand new Tesla 2170 cells that he bought from a Tesla employee. Elon, you need to lay off more of these people.

You're not laying off enough, clearly. I would never purchase batteries from a Tesla employee. I don't need them that bad.

But this guy did. And he sent them to me. So I didn't purchase anything.

I'm not too sure what my role is. But it was interesting. He sent me a photo of the box.

And it's labeled NCR2170B. As many of you know, Panasonic has model numbers on their batteries. And most of them, not all of them, but a significant number of them in this kind of chemistry are labeled NCR.

And they simply added the 2170 and a B, designating that it's not an A, I guess. And so I thought that was interesting. I will, at some point, do some more battery porn.

And we'll do a side-by-side comparison of a brand new, never-used cell and a slightly used cell. I already know the outcome. So I'm not really charged up to do that.

But we may do it. And I may be surprised. So here we have our grid shut off.

As you can see over here, our little LED is off. And we're actually charging the batteries at about 2 kilowatts on our power-safe screen. That is the end phase.

Inverters are already up. They're powering the entire shop and providing us about 2 kilowatts of electrical power. In just a few seconds, we're going to have, we're at 98%, so we won't have any battery charging when we go into AC priority.

We're in AC priority mode, but we're about to kick in the solar edge inverters and overpower this with current. We're not exactly fully charged. Right now we're charging at 42 amps, 43 amps, about 2 kilowatts, and we're 98% there.

Well, we just jumped up to 3.99 and there to 747, 159 amps. Let's see if we get to our overcurrent situation here. And we're at 10 kilowatts, 200 amps.

As the solar edges come up, there's 290 amps. And we're actually starting to get an alarm on the inverter. And there we switch on the grid, as you can see, and we have a 15-second delay until that switch is over.

And there we're showing no charging and no output. What's happened is we have changed over to the AC grid as our dump. Do we have our LED on? Yes, indeed.

Our 15-second stabilization timeout has completed, and we have switched over to running off the grid. And we did that by turning on those relays. When we're in AC priority mode, if it has a grid, it will prefer to run off the grid.

So our software in our controller noted we went over 300 amps there, actually, and when the solar edges came up, and so we switched over to the grid. When we do that, we lose the solar edges for five minutes, and often some of the end phases, but they will come back up within five minutes, as I say, and we'll be doing full solar power from then on and charging our batteries if necessary. In this case, not necessary.

It has to be below a certain voltage value for that to occur, and it's simply not there. And so our solar will power our shop and put power out to the grid. If we plug into a car, it'll simply use the solar to charge the car and make up any deficiency from the grid but in most cases we have so much photovoltaic array that it actually pushes it out even in that event.

We'll make 25 or 30 kilowatts sometimes, maybe a little late in the day for that, but we'll get 20 for sure. We were seeing about 14 there briefly just as they came up. And so that'll go out to power our shop and go out to the grid, and then at seven o'clock, when we're losing our solar and starting to use from the grid, we will automatically by time turn off that relay and go back to battery operation until tomorrow morning, and we won't come back on.

We'll be able to come back on after 7 a.m., but we won't actually come back on until we have another overvoltage or overcurrent event, which right now that's happening about which by 11.30 we're fully charged and having so much power from the photovoltaic array that it's kind of taken over. So that is a demonstration. I manually turned off the grid and let the photovoltaic array do its five-minute timeout and come back up and overpower the system, causing us to trip in the software in the battery controller.

And we use the heat enable output to close those contactors, like that LED, applying grid power to the inverter. Then the inverter applies a 15-second stabilization period before it actually does the cutover. At that point, we lose our photovoltaics for five minutes, then they come back up and we're powering the shop with the solar and sending our excess out to the grids, if any, or making up any deficiencies from the grids.

But that's actually not our problem at that point. We usually have too much even charging three or four cars at the same time. And let's take a look at that.

We kind of had a rodeo where we were charging cars and just having, partying like rock stars, with a lot of solar coming in. Let's take a look at that. We're having a solar moment here.

On my, we have installed Enphase's Envoy, where I can monitor what it's putting out. Right now, it looks like 11.5 kilowatts from our Enphase 13.8 kilowatt array. And I'm doing 18 kilowatts from the solar edge, for a total of 29.5 kilowatts.

We're running that into our 15 kilowatt power safe. But the miracle of AC coupling is it doesn't really go through there. I'm charging the power safe at seven and a half kilowatts.

We're charging the Tesla Model 3, conversely, at about 12 kilowatts, 40 units. And two other EVs at the same time, at about three kilowatts each. So we're doing about 18 kilowatts, or about the output of our solar edges in the cars, driving out in the sunshine, while charging our power safe 100 at seven and a half kilowatts.

And so it's a pretty good solar day here. Right now, it's 12.11. We're gonna peak in our solar day about 1.06, 1.05 today. And so we're going full scale here.

It's kind of out of hand, but I wanted to share that. We've got a Model 3 charging at 12 kilowatts, two bands at 3.3 kilowatts, and about three kilowatts each, really. We're doing 11.7 on the end phases, and 18,100 watts on the solar edge

Part of this is some new metering we've done. We've added a solar edge, a SIT system, to this side with the power safe and solar edge solar. And on the other side, we have installed a in-phase invoi. It's like a monitor for the 40 in-phase IQ7X microinverters that work with our Panasonic HIT-320s. This side has Winosolar's 305 watts. And so we're cranking pretty good here.

We're running about 29 kilowatts, 30 kilowatts at this point, of solar in here, charging our power safe at 7.5, Model 3 at 12, two bands at 3 each, and running the shop. And so we're kind of partying like rock stars with solar on March 26th, after a number of months of fighting for any ray of sunlight we could get, which was mostly during the daytime, mostly not very much, for months. We're partying like rock stars today on the solar, and things are going very well.

Okay, we're gonna talk a little bit. We've kind of been metering up around here, so we can do more measurements of just what's going on between our two solar arrays, our PowerSafe 100, the different inverters we're testing. This is our account at sense.com. And we have a OneSense system.

It's their large one that measures both solar and your use, and it transmits that data wirelessly to a website online. I'm accessing it on a browser at home.sense.com, and we'll log into our account. I'm going to go to meters, and here we have a meter of our actual use.

The red part here is we have two current sensors coming from the PowerSafe. This is how much power we're using right now. The whole shop's running on the PowerSafe, and so you can see we're using 11,802 watts here where I've got it defined at the end.

Where we're at right now is about 11,417, and we're making about 16,400. The red part here is our use. You can see different appliances, refrigerators, coffee makers, drink coolers, furnaces, and so forth coming on.

And I can actually, my trackpad, I can spread this out. This is at 207, and this is at 224, and we can see our usage here. The yellow part defines our solar input, and up here you see them.

This is our actual power usage at the moment. We're charging a Tesla Model 3, a couple of little vans, and so forth, and here is our solar power being made, and that is as of right now. I can also scroll this left and right to look at that, and I can, using two fingers on the trackpad, I can shrink or expand that, showing it over time.

Here's where we fired up, 11 47 a.m. You can see here we're making nothing, and here our solar radius came online. You can hear they're climbing, and again the yellow part is the solar, and the red part is the, so this is the view I'm interested in. Synths let you try to identify different appliances by their signature, and that is very interesting information for not very long.

But this power meter has some ongoing application for us. I can pick any point in here and read that right here I'm making 11,651 watts, and I'm using, I'm making 14,258 and using 12,170, and I can do that all the way through, and of course I can expand that and contract it, and I can also slide it. So this gives us a very good view of our synths meter that's installed in our main panel here at the entrance from the grid and the power safe and so forth.

It's done with four current sensors, one for each phase of the solar, and one for each phase of the power from the power safe, and then it's wired in for voltage as well. There's some other things where you can play with your devices and do, you know, costs and things. I, you know, I don't really have a whole lot of use for that.

Here's a whole bunch of stuff it hasn't identified, including a Model 3. I don't think much of all that, but this meter is excellent, and I can use my normal screen zoom to blow it up, but also there are some things in the browser page where I can very nicely expand and contract these things or slide them along the timeline. And so that's our current view. We're making 16,250 about.

11,094 is what we're using, and that's pretty much what the synths is about. We're about to install a second one on our Enphase system. Let's take a look at our Enphase Energy display, and we use a device called an Enphase Envoy that is connected in the other room to another panel.

Here's what I don't like about this. It doesn't update very well. It kind of updates every 15 minutes, I think, on the browser.

I've got a phone app that does a little better than that, but it's like every minute. But it's kind of interesting, even then, what you can do. Let's go to view again.

This thing is really slow, but this is our array of microinverters. There is a way to zoom out and bring this in. Let's see here.

This is our 40 Panasonic HIT panels on the roof with Enphases on each of them. And what it's showing me is kind of a static display, but reasonably recent, of how much power each panel is producing. And so we can take a look at that.

Status. Energy. This is 40 microinverters. System's normal. It's 56 degrees. We can go look at a graph of the system.

Actually, we're looking at power today, but we're looking at one of the inverters. And that's the first one here. We can pick others if we want.

And this is playing a little movie of their output up to this point. And then this is the point. Let's go look at this one.

And this is an interesting graph. Right now I'm showing AC frequency in purple and AC voltage in brown. And this lets us kind of see the output, but also the input really from our power safe.

And here we've had some cutouts of frequency, not so much voltage, where we switched it off earlier. And then here we had it come back on at 1131 AM. Our graph's going here to 230.

And the blue is our power output from that inverter, that microinverter. And so here it's putting out close to 300 watts from that 320 watt panel. What's interesting across the bottom, let's turn on our power produced, turn off our AC voltage and our frequency, and we can turn on the DC voltage and current.

And you can see the current tracks fairly closely. But this is the DC voltage from the panel and the DC current. And again, we can even graph temperature here.

And when I put them all on, it just makes kind of a mess. But this is a very interesting system. I don't like it as well because it's not really real time.

It updates every 15 minutes or so. So we're going to put a sense, a second sense on the end phase. But I'm going to keep this.

This is the invoice. It's actually quite good for troubleshooting. We can see all 40 of them.

This one that we're looking at here, there's the serial number of it. And there it is. And we can check its status.

And there's no current issues. And its energy is today we made 1.13 kilowatt hours out of that one panel. And now I'm playing a little movie of its production today.

And in this way, we can check all our panels and see if we have any really weak ones or really strong ones or any of that are inoperable. And in fact, we use this to locate a bad end phase IQ 7 plus. The end phase microinverters kind of have a bad reputation among installers

And I've been kind of puzzling through why this is and what it is. And I'll tell you, well, there's a lot of failures. Well, there's some failures.

In the earlier model, we've had these up a year. And we did have a failure in this one. When we went to replace it, we found the AC power cable was unplugged from it.

And that was the failure. So we're not seeing the failures. What I can gather from conversations I've had with installers in the conversation always goes the same way.

Well, they have a high failure rate, and they're not very good with the warning. Well, so they don't replace failed microinverters. Well, yeah, they'll replace them.

But what they won't do is pay for the labor to go up on the roof and replace them. And so the homeowner, we can get them a free microinverter, but then they don't want to pay us $200 or $300 to get up there and change them out. Well, yeah, I understand that.

It's kind of... So the Enphase has failed to suck up to installers and make it a cash cow for them to maintain them. And so they're getting badmouthed by the installers, basically. This is kind of the way to do grid-tied power, I think, is AC coupling and using these Enphase microinverters.

They have some excellent from Hoi Mili's in China, and there are others out there that work fine. They're small devices. They're subject to temperature and weather, and you're going to have failures of them, but it sure makes it easier to expand or install an array.

And you simply bring cables down at 240 volts, very low currents, typically 12, 15 amps per circuit, and you wire them into a combiner box, and then run that over to your mains panel and run it in through a 50 amp dual 240 breaker. And that's the solar system. And that's why these have caught on so much.

And why we have so many with no battery backup. What we worked out with the PowerSafe is we don't need to go to the PowerSafe. We don't even need to change any of the wiring of this.

You plug the PowerSafe into the same panel, and AC coupling, we can provide power. We can charge the batteries from the solar power, and nothing really needs to change, except we run your grid in one side of the PowerSafe and run the PowerSafe output out to your main hose panel. And so that's the concept.

So I like the Enphase. I find the installer criticism of them very disingenuous, and I like the devices, and particularly for people who are installing their own. It just makes it easier.

The biggest criticism I have of them is their cabling system and the very high cost of the connectors to make the system work. I think that's kind of a scam. They should adopt a common connector or make their connectors available at a reasonable price.

But this is our Enphase interface, and it does let us troubleshoot. We can even, in installing this Envoy and using the software, they have a installer type software app for the phone that connects the Envoy, and we updated the firmware and all of the power phases we had effortlessly. I mean, it was just literally click on it, and it uploaded all of them.

We were able to identify a bad one and repair it kind of by plugging it in, and so all that works. But for our metering purposes, I want a more real-time type situation and one that's a little bit easier and more intuitive interface. So we're not only going have the Envoy, and this Enlighten is their website.

And again, this is just the same Amazon Internet of Things that we use with our display of the battery, but this is for Enphase, and the other one's for Sense and so forth. And so each one has their different ones. One problem with the Sense and the Envoy is a legitimate criticism.

A lot of people do not want to drill a hole into their network and expose it to Amazon and all the people that work at Enphase or at SolarEdge. Those are legitimate security concerns. We decided to avoid it with the battery display and simply let you do your own.

We've got a way for you to do MQTT to Amazon's on service from our display, and you can make your own graphs and so forth there or simply connect it to another display remotely. And we use a Grafana graphing system in the Raspberry Pi display. So that is Sense and Enlighten.

Enphase's thing, their device is called an Envoy, and the service is called Enlighten. And it works, and it's very good for updating the firmware and for troubleshooting the system for real-time monitoring. I prefer the Sense, and so we have the ironic situation of having both an Envoy and a Sense on our Enphase 13.8 kilowatt array.

Stay with us. I am here with Danu the Slumdog Thousandaire and our King James version with our third Model 3 Wreck. Now I understand these were somewhat costly, and I got them to harvest parts off of them that I can peer inside and use for various tests, some of which are destructive.

They're not really designed that way, but it's how they work out often. And that's why I got the cars. Sir Richard the Lionhearted has aspirations of getting the car to work.

Well, it's a wrecked car, but he's been hanging out down in Charleston, Missouri, and all the cars are wrecked cars down there, and they get them working and running pretty well. This one, 2,432 miles on it, and the battery's at about 84 percent. The interesting thing about that is I've got it plugged in charging right now.

Well, I did. We had. What happened, Danu? Oh, we can get it back.

Let's plug it in and make it work. It did not fire up at all when we got it, and so what we want to talk about a little bit is these guys, I don't come in until after they've been here for an hour or two, and Richard keeps having them work on the car. Now, we don't really know what we're doing, but we phone around and do stuff, and we found several things.

So, what's the first thing we did on the car to try to get it to work? We had a coolant flow issue. Indeed. Here's our QA inspector trying to make sure we're doing it right.

You hussy. So, over here we found out that the radiator doesn't exist, so what we had a radiator, it was just all cramped up. Yeah, it just fell off, so we kind of stacked it over to the side, basically.

So, what we found out is the connectors that come out of the coolant reservoir were pretty much the same, so we kind of took it and hooked it back into it. So, the coolant just cycles around the tube. So, we have flow, we just don't have any heat exchanger.

Basically. And that made the coolant message go away? Yes, sir. Except the car still didn't work.

No, it did not. And what did you find this week? So, then while I was looking for something else, I just stumbled upon the emergency responders cut loop that exists right here by the front front. Now, would you believe I didn't even think we had such a thing? And normally that is a cut loop for a big orange cable.

These are smaller wires for, I think, the high-voltage interlock loop and a couple other things. And so, Dan who found this in an online description, I thought we used a pyrofuse. Now, I really don't know what the pyrofuse is for, but he found this.

Let's take a look at his adventure in repairing that. We're back here with our gray Model 3, the wreck, and we're trying to get it back to life again. We've done a couple of things.

If you look here, we don't have a radiator. So, we assumed that was one of the problems. And so, what we've done is simply connected the wires around the coolant reservoir back to itself.

So, we could fill it up with coolant again. And we've tried that and given it 12 volts, which you see the connectors there, and tried to bring it up, but it still wouldn't come alive. So, what we recently stumbled upon is this red-coated wire, which is the emergency response cut by the front trunk.

And you can find this in the emergency response guide. And what we've seen is whenever they had a wreck, whenever they had a crash, some emergency responders had just cut it right in the middle. So, what we're going to try to do in this is try to connect these three wires.

There's a yellow, red, and orange wire in there. I'll connect them to each other and try to see if we can get this car back to life. So, let's get right into it.

So, I'm going to use a simple stripper and strip enough of this wire to where we can get it into this splice. These are small wires, if you look at it. So, I'm presuming it's for communication.

We'll have more information about these wires once we dig into it more, if this works. Splice enough of that, and add some a bit of here, about a 16-gauge wire. And then, I'm going to do that same thing on this side.

So, they did cut quite a bit of it off. That's why it's pretty short. I'm using 22. Strip those. Last one. Let's see what we see here.

So, this does not have a 12-volt battery right now. So, we know it's kind of safe, but it does have a full pack that is about 83% charge. So, we are kind of being somewhat careful here.

So, I'm going to use these simple butt splice to connect the wires to each other, one at a time. Start with the orange. Simply slide it in there.

Clip it. Tight. Let's cut back a little more so we can work with this better.

I'm cutting the red-coated blue, basically. Oh, yeah. So, we are hoping that this is going to work because when you look in the emergency response guide, you can see there is the cut loop over here, and then the other cut loop back here by the rear passenger door.

And as we look back there, we know there is no gaping hole. So, I'm pretty sure it's this that's disabling the battery. So, once we have this connected, we can have a good answer for sure.

Let's do the next one. So, I offered James to put the camera on a tripod, but he insisted to hold it. So, that's why you might see some shaking cameras.

Turbulence. Make sure that the wire color is in one. I don't want to mess that up.

So, a good point is when you can hear the wires move inside the red. That's good. Last one, please.

The yellow one. James, are you ready for any explosions? Mm-hmm. Are you going to help me if I get in trouble? I got to film it.

Thanks, James. I'll try. The viewers want to see everything we do.

And that's a pretty decent job if you look at that. Orange, red, and yellow is all crimped in. So, now what we'll do is plug the 12-volt battery into this car and see if we can bring it back up.

And we'll get Jack here so I don't accidentally mess up this rack. So, stay with us. So, okay.

What was your indication then when you got the first responders safety disconnect repaired? So, after we put those butt splices in, we wired it in, and then we tried switching it on. We still didn't hear the contactors, but we're starting to hear the coolant flowing through the battery. So, it was trying to get the air bubbles out, and we could hear the air bubbles flow through the coolant pipes, but still no contactors.

No contactors. So, we talked to Dennis Holt of Main Street Body Works in North Hickory, North Carolina. And Dennis has one he picked up for $15,000 and has just about got going and was telling us fantastic tales of being able to order Tesla parts.

And he ordered about $9,000 worth of parts, and he's down to taking it to Tesla and getting the inspection done. But he said along the way, the airbags had been blown, and that the airbag controller, once it's been used, it's out of the picture. And he said, as soon as we put an airbag control module, a restraint controller module in the car and replaced it, he said, we put it in gear, and it almost jumped off the rack.

So, we said, man, we got something going on here. We had one out in the parking lot, the first one we had bought. And so, James changed the airbags and the airbag controller.

Let's take a look at that. So, here we are trying to take out the steering wheel airbag out of the salvaged Tesla we got, the gray one. And I looked it up, and all I saw was you need two Allen wrenches, and you put it right here in these holes.

And there's a little metal, kind of like a spring mechanism or pressure mechanism. You put one on each side, one on this side, and one on the other side. I don't know if Daniel can see in here.

I'll probably get a better shot. But you hit both those at the same time, the airbag pops out, and you just have to disconnect this connector here, the yellow one, which is on the right side. And we did that to our other one.

Got a fresh one here, so we're going to put it in and hopefully nothing bad happens. Seems pretty easy, pretty straightforward. Yeah, we'll probably play action.

There she is. Now we're going to work on the floorboard airbag, so stay with us. How we get to the module for the... The restraint control module.

Restraint control module. There are six... Okay, three eight bolts that were holding right one here, and on one other side, and all the way down. Once we disconnect this module, if you look inside, that's the unit right there with all the pins, and that's the module we're trying to get off.

And we have one screw removed, and then we have two screws in the front, which I'm going to remove here soon. And this is all in the center console, which James has... One, two, three screws. There we go.

So let's go ahead and replace it. So was that kind of a Texas goat rodeo, James? The steering wheel was relatively easy. The restraint module was a little harder to get to.

Daniel helped out with that. He was actually the one down there. I was holding the control center console up.

So it's actually bolted to the floor directly beneath the cup holders, but all the way on the floor under the console. So you either have to take the console completely out, or there's three bolts on each side. You kind of lift it up a couple inches and gain access.

So we changed it. And what was the result? We had a new airbag light notification that came on, and then also a software update. Required software update.

Turns out the one we pulled out was a B model, a part number yada yada dash B. And the one we got out of the other wreck was a dash C. And so we thought we had it. We just called Tesla and ordered a brand new one. And they told us, you can't have one unless you're a certified Tesla auto body repair center and have a $20,000 frame straightening machine from Tesla and have been to the Tesla class.

Another $20,000, I think. And they just can't sell it to you, which sounds very strange. Airbags are at this point a common and not very complicated process.

In fact, James changed. We had the steering wheel airbag and the knee airbag for the driver. He changed both those in a few minutes.

But we can't buy the module. So we called Dennis back, and he said, no problem. I got one from him.

I'll just call and order one, and I'll ship it right to you. And then he calls back, and they won't sell it to him, even though they just sold him one a month ago. We got some problems with Tesla.

So we called Yarrow in Sacramento, where we get batteries quite a bit. I just got a full Model 3 slab from him and a bunch of Model S modules. And he said, no, you don't have to get it at all.

In fact, it's kind of keyed into the software of the car. What you have to do is take the one out of the car and get it reset. And I've got a guy that does that.

So we sent that off to him. But that wasn't what was stopping us. So then what did you find out? So Yarrow actually mentioned that there are a couple bolts right by the BMS connector on the penthouse lid, five bolts to be exact.

And he said that without those bolts, the car would not come on. This is kind of strange. Last thing I told them to try yesterday was put the penthouse lid, make sure there's not some sort of lid switch.

Well, there really isn't. And they did put the penthouse lid on to no effect. And then Yarrow told them which special, special five bolts they had to have in.

They just had a couple of bolts on. You have to have all the bolts or at least these five around the control connectors under the rear right passenger seats. Drilled them.

And we drilled that down. And bada boom, bada bang, the car fired up. And they could go forwards and backwards.

And so we're gradually getting the car to operate. And in fact, I said, well, let's try it on the charger. And we're at 84% right now.

I don't think I have my phone. We'll do a shot of that and show you we're only charging at about five amps because it's a grim solar day today. And so we can charge and we can roll.

And we've got kind of a lot of stuff up front. The problem is now Richard wants to fix both cars. I don't know where I'm going to get parts, but we're going to try Tesla and see if we can get unrestricted parts anyway, um, from them and, uh, and try to finish this front end up a little bit.

Um, at least now I don't really know how to deal with this and there's not a nice way. Tesla is in kind of a coronary fibrillation state right now. Elon Musk is laying people off, but no, wait a minute.

Let's have everybody deliver cars. Let's close our stores. No, let's don't close all the stores.

Let's lower the price. Well, since we're keeping some of the stores open, we got to raise the price first to April. Um, he's out of control, man.

Um, I fear for his mental state, but I'm going to offer some unsolicited advice. General Motors has 5,000 dealerships across the United States. I'm very impressed with Tesla's service so far, but they don't have 5,000 service centers in the United States.

And a lot of people don't want to pay $18,000 to get their car fixed. The high cost of repair, particularly as we go into a $35,000 Model 3, if you're going to have 10 and 15 and $20,000 repair bills, this dog isn't going to hunt for a lot of reasons. And the biggest one is insurance.

The Hartford company has already redlined Tesla's. You can't get insurance on Tesla's. And other insurance companies are reviewing their experience with the Tesla automobile.

I had a guy from Kansas City come down and show me his hail damage, which he was having repaired under insurance at $18,000 for some dimples in his Model S. And so, uh, this is a problem. And then when it go, what they totaled the car and it goes to copart, they're not getting anything for the cars because nobody can repair them. And of course the batteries, there's no market for them other than a solar guys, because all the batteries in the whole fleet that Tesla sold are still under warranty.

My 2013 still under battery warranty. I've got 21,000 miles on that car and the warranty didn't run out till February, 2021. I'll be lucky to live that long, but I sure am not going to need to buy a battery from a salvage yard for that car.

And the net result is that the insurance companies are taking a bath on this. And it's all about the repairability of the car. What we're finding is they're not that hard to repair.

We need knowledge and we need parts. Kudos. They have recently opened up an illustrated parts breakdown online where you can get the part numbers for the parts they won't sell you.

And now the Massachusetts only online service with the schematic diagrams and, and procedures and my favorite, the connector cross index is available to all. Open for business and has schematics for the model three. It's $3,000 a year, or I don't know, two or $300 a month or something and, or a Brazilian dollars an hour, which doesn't make much sense.

So we paid the $3,000. I don't mind them making their costs on something like that. But it needs to be available.

I would offer that everyone believes Volkswagen, who are the largest car company in the world, they have eaten Porsche and Audi and retain their own Volkswagen brand. They are the largest automaker in the world. I don't think they can catch Tesla in the electric car space.

And they recently had a meeting with the chancellor of Germany and the heads of BMW at Daimler and Volkswagen and citing the Paris Climate Change Accords and the Tesla developments. They're all planning on going whole hog into electric cars. The most Tesla has in battery technology and costing and the superchargers and the cult following and the enormous brand recognition.

There now isn't anybody in the United States that doesn't know not only about Tesla, but fairly specifically what their car is like. That's going to be hard to compete with. But I would offer the advice that what got Volkswagen there was the micro bus and the 67 Beetle.

And the reason is the tribal knowledge necessary to work on it became ubiquitous. And you could work on them with a crescent wrench and a screwdriver. And people did all sorts of third party aftermarket parts.

They started making dune buggies and rails and everything out of the Beetle. And the micro bus went to Woodstock and became famous. So I would shoot for that, Elon, and you're not shooting very straight right now.

You're underwater in the number of places where it can be repaired. You have a tremendous number of complaints about your authorized body shops. By the time they pay all the money you want to be an authorized body shop, they've got to make double on a Tesla what they do on a regular car.

Or it was not worthwhile. And most of the things on the cars are simply changing parts. You need to eliminate this reprogramming of the software for the parts that require that and open this thing up and let people buy the parts.

If they buy a rear quarter panel or something that you don't think they're qualified to install, hell, you don't know the guy may be making a guess for his office out of this. It's none of your business what we do with the parts. Just open them up and sell them and make them widely available and try to enlist the do-it-yourselfers and so forth in the effort and the small garages in the effort to repair these automobiles because there's going to be a lot of them out of warranty shortly.

And they're not going to pay $20,000 to repair a car that isn't worth $20,000 anymore. And so this is something that the extant automotive market has had to deal with. And so they have an uneasy coexistence between the dealers and the independent mechanics and body shops.

And that's the system. And I don't mind you trying to change it, but you ought to be changing it to an improvement, not making it impossible to work on the cars. So good job, guys.

This one rolls and charges now. And we can piece together some pieces here, order some from Tesla, some from eBay, and some from Yarrow, and some from Dennis, and get it kind of pieced together into a car. It won't get over-the-air updates.

You'll be able to supercharge. But Richard put nine miles on his car this week. Cape Girardeau's not that big a place.

He went right up and down the road in this thing. He thinks he can get it licensed with a salvaged title and without any inspection from Tesla or any of that. Not all of us need supercharging, and not all of us care about software updates.

But all that could change, too, going into the future. So you guys seem to be interested in this. Yes, sir.

I like to peer into the entrails. I don't care much about the car, but that's easy for me to say I've got one. So we're going to pursue some of this, at least for a while.

But I think this one needs a door and a quarter panel, that front member. I think we've got that heat exchanger laying around here already from the first one. Needs a battery, some things like that, obviously a wheel, a front sensor.

But we have brought it to life. It will start now. The contactor's closed.

We can go forward. We can go backwards. And we can plug it into a standard Tesla wall charger and charge the car.

And so we're making some progress here. That's about it for this week's show. Although I guess I do them about twice a month now.

That's about it for this show. God willing, the creek don't rise, I don't fall over dead. We'll do another one later.

Stay with us. Good job, guys.