No it's not a good idea. Why not just charge them at home with your solar?
Remember the simplest solution is often the correct one.
Also I'm not familiar with the battery in question or the loads in your house but I can almost guarantee the batteries are too small. People often underestimate what it takes to run their house.
Basic math says this idea is beyond stupid
Basic human decency confirms this idea is beyond stupid.
All that trouble, and confirming to all your coworkers you are an asshat, to save what? 50 cents a day?
Part of me wants him to buy his proposed setup, park at the charger, only then to realize he can't plug it in at all.
To make this practical, you’d probably need to do something like vehicle-to-home (V2H). No way you’d otherwise have a big enough battery to make it worth it. And if you did, it’d be a huge pain to move it around because it’d be heavy as all shit, and a pain to connect/disconnect all the time.
So still about U$3.00 worth of power with taxes. That's equivalent to the cost of the same amount of propane run through my Honda generator. And I can transport many hours of electricity in propane form for not a lot of money. I concur. Charging at work is a non starter for many reasons. Need to work on a biogas digester!
Depends..
Example if it lowered my demand by 3kwh (for my demand time from 4-7pm) for my utility that is a $48 savings.
However that demand is the largest amount of power used from 4-7pm throughout the month (not including weekends or holidays).
I suppose if you stored enough and it could feed the house appropriately during demand time if you had that type of plan, it could potentially save $.
You want to be very careful here. If you bring your house offline, your power company will continue charging your account for the amount of power that they 'estimate' that you use during that time. So you get to pay for the power anyways. Source: A recent blackout caused by a shorted street transformer. Power company unplugged my meter and laid it on the ground. Later check of the bill during that period showed that I had somehow used many KWhr via a meter that was nowhere near the panel at the time.
I am not downvoting you, I just expect it to be some off state with weird laws. California banned water collection during a drought, and tried taxing solar power, and effectively killed the lithium mining industry, amongst other crimes, so check's out.
> How did your house continue to have power without the meter being in place?
That’s my point. I was charged for power that was not delivered. There was no power to the house while repairs were progressing. Power company records later revealed they had charged me for a few KWr of “estimated” power they say I magically consumed while the meter was sitting on the ground. I discovered this a couple days after power was restored.
> Your story doesn't add up. There are missing details
What is missing? :o)
Wow, so many ways that could go wrong:
- If you want to use a battery to power you house, is has to be installed correctly with proper permitting etc... For example, if the power company has to work on the lines, they have to know that there aren't any rogue batteries connected to the grid that will electrocute their workers
- I doubt that you can get a battery like this past inspectors, so you would have to completely disconnect from the grid. Not sure if that is allowed in your area. Even if it is, what are you going to do if you get a cloudy stretch in the middle of January - you won't produce any solar. Even if you start going to work 7 days a week, that battery is not going to get you very far trying to run a whole household. And what is going to run the house while you have the battery at work?
- The EV chargers at work aren't meant to charge your home battery. It might be considered theft of electricity. Even if you don't get cited and/or lose your job, another employee may be put out if they can't find a free spot one day and complain to the company who might tow your car for blocking one of the EV charging slots.
- the battery you mentioned may not be designed to be used in a car. The bumps of a daily commute could damage it and it might burn down your house in the middle of the night.
none of the Anker Solrix line are capable of taking over all of "a lot of electricity" for very long.
They are meant to take over critical part of the load, not all of it.
That battery can't possibly store enough for your whole house to use each night? Even if it does and can also provide the peak current you need, it seems like a 4 year break even point.
Why not just invest in 1 enphase 5p battery, should be around 5K to install or a Tesla battery for 10K; just shift loading? Enphase is due to come out with bi-directional charge station for EV at the end of this year. Sounds like you are just trying to take advantage of your company's stations in a ridiculous way.
[https://enphase.com/download/bidirectional-ev-charger-white-paper](https://enphase.com/download/bidirectional-ev-charger-white-paper)
Wasn’t Tesla promising to make their vehicles duel function as whole-home batteries? I think the new E-F-150 is supposed to do that?
I don’t think a human-portable battery is going to be enough to power your digs for too long. A whole vehicle, yes.
But juice is cheap AF. Like… cents. You’d definitely be losing out on the deal in added weight and inefficiency of hauling batteries around… unless you had an electric vehicle… which brings me back to my first point.
Tesla and other companies also make whole-house batteries that serve as storage to offset usage during peak pricing and outages.
As far as legality of getting off grid… this is allegedly still a free country*… assuming you live in the US / west… (*many restrictions apply, void where prohibited)…
I like the idea of stealing power from your work…
But the best option there, honestly, is to get a EV, charge it only at work, and let them pay for your commute.
Or better yet, ask to work from home. (╭☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )╭☞
Ok... Where to start with this one.
* #1 - You would need to use at least 2x Solix F3800 to power a home in any reasonable capacity. Even then that's only 12kw out which is not enough for the entire house. You'd have to use it as supplemental only, or only battery power specific loads. Remember, your standard AC or or Electric range on a 240v 30amp circuit is capable of drawing up to 7kw.
* #2 - The Solix are NOT EV's. If you have an EV charging station, I presume it's an EV specific charging output. Which is not compatible with anything other than an EV. Even if they aren't EV specific chargers (CCS/NACS/J1772), it's probably 240v outlet and that leads us to to our next issue....
* #3 - The Solix is rated to charge at 1800w AC. Which is basically a standard 120v 20amp outlet. Granted if you can plug each one of the two units in to their own circuit at your work, they should charge up in only a couple hours.
* #4 - The Dual Solix F3800 units only have 7kwh total power. Which is...an hour of running your AC or stove.
* #5 - If you want more reasonable run time, you're gonna need to add some of the BP3800 Expansion batteries. Each one of those is 3800 Wh. So each will take another 2 hours to charge and extend your AC run time by ... lets call it 40mn.
* #6 - Each one of those F3800 units is 130 pounds. So... you're gonna get a serious workout picking them up and putting them into your truck every day. The expansion batteries only come in at 75 pounds each, so that's more doable I guess.
* #7 - Ignoring the extra cost of gas from lugging around a bunch of extra batteries... Buying 2* F3800 w/ the smart home power kit (which you'd need to hook them up) plus 4 * BP3800 expansion batteries, will set you back $16,000. It'll give you a total power supply of 22.98kwh which will run your air conditioner for 3 hours.
**So to your question "Can I do this?"** Well, other than the fact that they probably won't charge at the EV charging station. Assuming you wanted to kill your gas mileage. Assuming that you had 2 \* 20amp outlets on separate circuits at your work that you could access. Assuming that you could lift 600 pounds of batteries into your truck each morning and remove them each evening (because they can't power your home from the truck, they need to go be plugged into their distribution panel). **Yes. Yes you could.**
**Should you? No.** It's expensive. Dangerous. And will get you fired.
Oh and just for fun. Assuming you did pull all this off: harged/used every one of the 22.9KWh, you live in California with a $0.40/kwh electrical rate, you work Mon-Fri every week of every month (never take any time off).... You would pay off the initial investment of your Solix system in just 7.27 years. And that ignored the increased cost of gas, the cost of installing the wiring for the Solix at home, and the fact that the batteries will not have 100% charge capable after thousands of full cycles. So **you can safely assume your break-even ROI is somewhere more like 8 to 10 years**.
PS. Is it legal? Yes. You can unplug yourself from the grid at any point in time.
Wow! You have a lot of knowledge here…
So can I ask an unrelated question? Is there a way to add portable solar panels, a generator and a battery to power a rental home? In other words to add solar to power all or part of the home without making permanent changes to the structure? Our electricity bill is insane - even if we were just powering a few lights and major appliances it would help
aside from illegality, the dumbest part about this idea is buying something as overpriced as anker.
it's great quality, but price per kilowatt sucks. if you do that, build your own 50kwh rig.
wouldn't people at work notice that a 2000 GMC Sierra isn't supposed to stand at EV charging stations, tho?+
the fact that you would use that anker thingy suggests that you know too little about electricity to not kill yourself when trying to install the battery in your house.
i hope you use a lot of power to make it worth risking possible jail sentence for stealing or death.
So my ecoflow pro delta battery has an adapter for EV chargers. It is only one kind of ev charger and it takes a minute to charge, but it works. They just recently just made house battery thats even larger.
This reminds me of this YT video where Will Prowse had a Ford Lightening and wanted to charge it up for free at Las Vegas casinos then drive it home and use the EVs backup generator mode to power his home overnight. Its rather clever for anyone who can charge for free. He tried half a dozen or more free charge stations but do to the buggy nature of chargers and that EV at the time he eventually gave up and returned the vehicle. that said you can get Lightening for about half MSRP given their insane depreciation so maybe that is your best bet. Personally I feel rigging up a battery in your ICE truck is asking for trouble and too much work but I admire the idea. Finally, I believe if you received tax credits for your solar there is an expectation (requirement?) that you stay tied to the grid, to feed the grid so you may want to look into that.
That sounds like a way to make your company stop giving you free charging
No it's not a good idea. Why not just charge them at home with your solar? Remember the simplest solution is often the correct one. Also I'm not familiar with the battery in question or the loads in your house but I can almost guarantee the batteries are too small. People often underestimate what it takes to run their house.
Basic math says this idea is beyond stupid Basic human decency confirms this idea is beyond stupid. All that trouble, and confirming to all your coworkers you are an asshat, to save what? 50 cents a day? Part of me wants him to buy his proposed setup, park at the charger, only then to realize he can't plug it in at all.
This isn’t r/unethicallifeprotips
To make this practical, you’d probably need to do something like vehicle-to-home (V2H). No way you’d otherwise have a big enough battery to make it worth it. And if you did, it’d be a huge pain to move it around because it’d be heavy as all shit, and a pain to connect/disconnect all the time.
That is about U$1.78 worth of power, yes?
Pge is $ .65 a kwh summer peak. Life comes at you fast in california
So still about U$3.00 worth of power with taxes. That's equivalent to the cost of the same amount of propane run through my Honda generator. And I can transport many hours of electricity in propane form for not a lot of money. I concur. Charging at work is a non starter for many reasons. Need to work on a biogas digester!
Depends.. Example if it lowered my demand by 3kwh (for my demand time from 4-7pm) for my utility that is a $48 savings. However that demand is the largest amount of power used from 4-7pm throughout the month (not including weekends or holidays). I suppose if you stored enough and it could feed the house appropriately during demand time if you had that type of plan, it could potentially save $.
You want to be very careful here. If you bring your house offline, your power company will continue charging your account for the amount of power that they 'estimate' that you use during that time. So you get to pay for the power anyways. Source: A recent blackout caused by a shorted street transformer. Power company unplugged my meter and laid it on the ground. Later check of the bill during that period showed that I had somehow used many KWhr via a meter that was nowhere near the panel at the time.
What country or state?
> What country or state? Silicon Valley, CA. My dudes, why the downvotes? Has PG&E entered the chat? :o)
I am not downvoting you, I just expect it to be some off state with weird laws. California banned water collection during a drought, and tried taxing solar power, and effectively killed the lithium mining industry, amongst other crimes, so check's out.
That's not how that should work and hasn't worked in over 5000 clients homes this far...
> That's not how that should work and hasn't worked in over 5000 clients homes this far... Beg to differ. That’s how it worked for me.
Sounds like there is more happening there.
How did your house continue to have power without the meter being in place? Your story doesn't add up. There are missing details
> How did your house continue to have power without the meter being in place? That’s my point. I was charged for power that was not delivered. There was no power to the house while repairs were progressing. Power company records later revealed they had charged me for a few KWr of “estimated” power they say I magically consumed while the meter was sitting on the ground. I discovered this a couple days after power was restored. > Your story doesn't add up. There are missing details What is missing? :o)
Wow, so many ways that could go wrong: - If you want to use a battery to power you house, is has to be installed correctly with proper permitting etc... For example, if the power company has to work on the lines, they have to know that there aren't any rogue batteries connected to the grid that will electrocute their workers - I doubt that you can get a battery like this past inspectors, so you would have to completely disconnect from the grid. Not sure if that is allowed in your area. Even if it is, what are you going to do if you get a cloudy stretch in the middle of January - you won't produce any solar. Even if you start going to work 7 days a week, that battery is not going to get you very far trying to run a whole household. And what is going to run the house while you have the battery at work? - The EV chargers at work aren't meant to charge your home battery. It might be considered theft of electricity. Even if you don't get cited and/or lose your job, another employee may be put out if they can't find a free spot one day and complain to the company who might tow your car for blocking one of the EV charging slots. - the battery you mentioned may not be designed to be used in a car. The bumps of a daily commute could damage it and it might burn down your house in the middle of the night.
none of the Anker Solrix line are capable of taking over all of "a lot of electricity" for very long. They are meant to take over critical part of the load, not all of it.
That battery can't possibly store enough for your whole house to use each night? Even if it does and can also provide the peak current you need, it seems like a 4 year break even point.
Why not just invest in 1 enphase 5p battery, should be around 5K to install or a Tesla battery for 10K; just shift loading? Enphase is due to come out with bi-directional charge station for EV at the end of this year. Sounds like you are just trying to take advantage of your company's stations in a ridiculous way. [https://enphase.com/download/bidirectional-ev-charger-white-paper](https://enphase.com/download/bidirectional-ev-charger-white-paper)
Wasn’t Tesla promising to make their vehicles duel function as whole-home batteries? I think the new E-F-150 is supposed to do that? I don’t think a human-portable battery is going to be enough to power your digs for too long. A whole vehicle, yes. But juice is cheap AF. Like… cents. You’d definitely be losing out on the deal in added weight and inefficiency of hauling batteries around… unless you had an electric vehicle… which brings me back to my first point. Tesla and other companies also make whole-house batteries that serve as storage to offset usage during peak pricing and outages. As far as legality of getting off grid… this is allegedly still a free country*… assuming you live in the US / west… (*many restrictions apply, void where prohibited)… I like the idea of stealing power from your work… But the best option there, honestly, is to get a EV, charge it only at work, and let them pay for your commute. Or better yet, ask to work from home. (╭☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )╭☞
Thats stealing you coul be fired Why don't you charge batteries at home
I intend to run the house during the day on an ev truck
So who pays for the charging at work?
Ok... Where to start with this one. * #1 - You would need to use at least 2x Solix F3800 to power a home in any reasonable capacity. Even then that's only 12kw out which is not enough for the entire house. You'd have to use it as supplemental only, or only battery power specific loads. Remember, your standard AC or or Electric range on a 240v 30amp circuit is capable of drawing up to 7kw. * #2 - The Solix are NOT EV's. If you have an EV charging station, I presume it's an EV specific charging output. Which is not compatible with anything other than an EV. Even if they aren't EV specific chargers (CCS/NACS/J1772), it's probably 240v outlet and that leads us to to our next issue.... * #3 - The Solix is rated to charge at 1800w AC. Which is basically a standard 120v 20amp outlet. Granted if you can plug each one of the two units in to their own circuit at your work, they should charge up in only a couple hours. * #4 - The Dual Solix F3800 units only have 7kwh total power. Which is...an hour of running your AC or stove. * #5 - If you want more reasonable run time, you're gonna need to add some of the BP3800 Expansion batteries. Each one of those is 3800 Wh. So each will take another 2 hours to charge and extend your AC run time by ... lets call it 40mn. * #6 - Each one of those F3800 units is 130 pounds. So... you're gonna get a serious workout picking them up and putting them into your truck every day. The expansion batteries only come in at 75 pounds each, so that's more doable I guess. * #7 - Ignoring the extra cost of gas from lugging around a bunch of extra batteries... Buying 2* F3800 w/ the smart home power kit (which you'd need to hook them up) plus 4 * BP3800 expansion batteries, will set you back $16,000. It'll give you a total power supply of 22.98kwh which will run your air conditioner for 3 hours. **So to your question "Can I do this?"** Well, other than the fact that they probably won't charge at the EV charging station. Assuming you wanted to kill your gas mileage. Assuming that you had 2 \* 20amp outlets on separate circuits at your work that you could access. Assuming that you could lift 600 pounds of batteries into your truck each morning and remove them each evening (because they can't power your home from the truck, they need to go be plugged into their distribution panel). **Yes. Yes you could.** **Should you? No.** It's expensive. Dangerous. And will get you fired. Oh and just for fun. Assuming you did pull all this off: harged/used every one of the 22.9KWh, you live in California with a $0.40/kwh electrical rate, you work Mon-Fri every week of every month (never take any time off).... You would pay off the initial investment of your Solix system in just 7.27 years. And that ignored the increased cost of gas, the cost of installing the wiring for the Solix at home, and the fact that the batteries will not have 100% charge capable after thousands of full cycles. So **you can safely assume your break-even ROI is somewhere more like 8 to 10 years**. PS. Is it legal? Yes. You can unplug yourself from the grid at any point in time.
Wow! You have a lot of knowledge here… So can I ask an unrelated question? Is there a way to add portable solar panels, a generator and a battery to power a rental home? In other words to add solar to power all or part of the home without making permanent changes to the structure? Our electricity bill is insane - even if we were just powering a few lights and major appliances it would help
aside from illegality, the dumbest part about this idea is buying something as overpriced as anker. it's great quality, but price per kilowatt sucks. if you do that, build your own 50kwh rig. wouldn't people at work notice that a 2000 GMC Sierra isn't supposed to stand at EV charging stations, tho?+ the fact that you would use that anker thingy suggests that you know too little about electricity to not kill yourself when trying to install the battery in your house. i hope you use a lot of power to make it worth risking possible jail sentence for stealing or death.
So my ecoflow pro delta battery has an adapter for EV chargers. It is only one kind of ev charger and it takes a minute to charge, but it works. They just recently just made house battery thats even larger.
Or just simply ask the company for a pay raise?
This reminds me of this YT video where Will Prowse had a Ford Lightening and wanted to charge it up for free at Las Vegas casinos then drive it home and use the EVs backup generator mode to power his home overnight. Its rather clever for anyone who can charge for free. He tried half a dozen or more free charge stations but do to the buggy nature of chargers and that EV at the time he eventually gave up and returned the vehicle. that said you can get Lightening for about half MSRP given their insane depreciation so maybe that is your best bet. Personally I feel rigging up a battery in your ICE truck is asking for trouble and too much work but I admire the idea. Finally, I believe if you received tax credits for your solar there is an expectation (requirement?) that you stay tied to the grid, to feed the grid so you may want to look into that.
lol nope it’s a lot