5 July

One bit of advice I’d give to people as homes and lives become increasingly powered by electricity, is the value of sticking within the one ‘ecosystem’. Sticking to a single brand for your different electrical products, like an EV, home battery and charger. If the brand has those components. Getting gear from multiple brands to play nicely together can be a nightmare. In our case, one reason I picked Tesla is that their ecosystem of car, home battery and charger leads the world in design, as an integrated set of functions. Everything just works, and the software that coordinates it all is without peer. Their newest link is apparently imminent, where you can use your Tesla vehicle also to power your home and even to export to the grid, for money. An EV is a massive battery, much larger than a home battery. Our home battery would become over 100 kWh in size. The way Tesla looks like doing it is more brilliant engineering. Rather than try to connect both the car and the Powerwall to the home and grid, a messy electrical engineering challenge, they’ll leave the Powerwall with that role, it’s already designed for it. And then just use the car to top up the Powerwall as needed.