[lerouxb]

I'm really interested in how much this will cost.

In South Africa we're having rolling blackouts called "load shedding" because we don't have enough power. Exactly why is a long and obviously controversial story, but in short: Mega projects that were supposed to fill in the gaps are being delayed, maintenance on existing infrastructure was delayed in the hope that the new projects would come online in time, but that's now causing cascading failures and maintenance cannot be avoided any longer, causing even more outages..

The blackouts are zoned and 2.5 hours at a time. Here's Cape Town's map, for example: http://ewn.co.za/assets/loadshedding/capetown.html

So we don't have grid power 24/7 anymore and our electricity prices (that used to be some of the cheapest in the world) are now skyrocketing. So I would imagine that many many people here might be in the market for something like this at the right price.

[delta1]

2.5 hours is extremely lucky, in my experience. Normally at least 4 hours and often more like 6 - 8. One of my friends has been without electricity for the past 5 days!

Totally agree that there is a big market here for the Tesla home batteries, depending on the cost vs capacity. I am definitely in the market.

[lerouxb]

I think we're lucky in Cape Town, yes. "Maintenance festival" coming up, though! http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/79d21000481a5710803fc078423ca9a...

I've actually been looking into playing with some LiFePO4 batteries and trying to see how big of a UPS you can build for, say, R5000 or R10000. LiFe batteries have longer lifetimes, are safer (less likely to catch fire or explode), are less finicky about how they get charged (more like lead-acid), seem to be potentially a bit cheaper, easier to use in multi-cell configurations (cell-balancing issue related), etc. You can also source or sink more current, so faster to charge/discharge. Downside is 14% less energy density which is why they don't get used in laptops or smartphones and (in Tesla's case) sometimes also not in cars. But that's not much of a downside for (off-)grid storage..

Pretty sure there's a gap in the market there just waiting for someone to jump into. And once you already have a giant battery it is probably that much easier to convince yourself of covering your roof in solar panels, getting a gas stove and disconnecting yourself from the grid entirely :)