I can go to Home Depot or Lowe's, right now, and walk out with a breaker box, conduit, a bag of breakers, a couple hundred pounds of copper, and install my own household 220V/150A electric service. Local codes or the electric company may require an electrician to sign off on my work before I grid tie, but the companies who make the stuff aren't going to refuse to sell to me. Nobody seems to think me killing myself by making mistakes with that would be the fault of Home Depot or the manufacturers, and I'm reasonably confident that is more dangerous than installing a battery box (unless Tesla has built an inherently dangerous device, in which case it won't matter who installs it).

I can also go to the same store and walk out with a roof-sized pile of roofing tiles. No one will stop me from putting on my own roof.

Hell, Tesla sells cars. The single most deadly consumer product, by far, in the world. Admittedly, people have tried to sue them about their autonomous features, but still, cars are really deadly and no one blames manufacturers for those deaths (though, we do, as a nation, impose some safety standards...but, it doesn't stop tens of thousands of deaths every year). Tesla is arguably much better about not killing their customers than some other manufacturers, but they already operate in the most deadly industry (aside from, say, coal or fossil fuels, but the deaths caused by those industries are generally an amorphous statistical blob of health problems rather than distinct deadly events).

My point is: Unless Tesla has built a dangerous product, there's no safety-related reason it should be treated differently than other home improvement items that require the same types of skills to safely install them. Electrical and solar power are well-understood by plenty of non-professionals. I do see the appeal of making it turn-key; they're aiming for average home owners, particularly at the time of construction or roof replacement, when there are already contractors involved and a mortgage to pay for everything. A large-scale solar power installation is expensive, and it makes sense for most people to work it into their mortgage.

But, it's frustrating for me; when I build a house (and I'm kinda shopping for land now in a casual way), I plan to self-fund it and do a lot of the work myself because I enjoy that sort of thing. There won't be a mortgage, and I won't be paying for contractors to do things I can do myself. Electrical work is well within my comfort zone. So, it's frustrating that when I install solar, it'll have to be the somewhat less attractive panels rather than nice-looking tiles.

It's certainly Tesla's right to sell their product however they like. But, I reckon I can complain about it, too.

Humans are bad at separating novel risks from familiar likely ones. News is what's novel - not what's likely, so we have this horrible situation of putting our attention and efforts on the wrong thing.

Everything you said is 100% correct, but just look at all the extra news and scrutiny that's given to every Tesla crash. Or the people warning of the dangers of fidget spinners:

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/news/a44415/m...

Unless you're an EE and an expert in power supplies, this is way more dangerous than splicing some copper wires and following some building codes.

Which ppl manage to f. up all the time anyway (missing ground, neutral and live swapped, splices used in lieu of a longer length of cable, improper gauge, poor cabling technique)

This community takes it as a given that "email is too hard" for an amateur to do right. Then how is wiring a house considered easy when the electrical code books are thick as bricks?

"This community takes it as a given that "email is too hard" for an amateur to do right."

I don't.

I work on software (http://www.virtualmin.com) that helps over 100,000 people manage mail servers (and web servers, and databases, etc.) for themselves. So, I disagree with the premise that email is too hard.

"Unless you're an EE and an expert in power supplies, this is way more dangerous than splicing some copper wires and following some building codes."

Is it? I don't understand how. It is a battery bank. You hook up your charge controller (two wires) and your inverter (again, two wires). Same as you would for any battery bank...it's just a better battery bank, and battery installation aint rocket surgery. (Here's a diagram: http://i.imgur.com/jXuag5l.jpg )

If one can understand a solar panel installation in the general case, it seems pretty clear that one can understand Powerwall installation. In fact, building your own battery bank is more complicated than the Powerwall, since you have to wire up all of the batteries, and figure out how to protect them from over-charging and over-discharging. Tesla provides the smarts and bundles up all of the batteries for you.

Some people like to be self-reliant and understand how things work.

Again, I can't stop Tesla from selling their products this way. It's certainly their right, and I'm still pleased with Tesla's existence (and I have a standing buy order for TSLA if it ever drops low enough, as I regret selling the TSLA I was holding a few years ago). I believe in Tesla. I just wish I could buy Tesla products and use them the way I want to.

If you know what you're doing go ahead. I certainly won't stop a hacker from hacking. Don't expect your insurance company to share my general liberalism towards DIY.

If you don't know what you're doing, go right ahead anyways. It's not my house and my family in there.

But this is hard.

Did you know that DC can't use AC switches rated for the same voltage?

How about cooling the packs? whats the appropriate distance between the packs as the geometry of the heat dissipation changes from 1D to 2D to 3D?

Are you going to cool with forced air or passively? If forced, what if there's a power outage during battery bank failure (highly correlated know that you wired the bank to the mains). If passive, how do you ensure that the environment is always providing suitable cooling?

That's a bit of domain knowledge that most ppl who know how to wire a socket don't know. That's also a house fire type mistake when your dealing with a battery bank.

You're talking about building a Powerwall from scratch. I'm talking about installing a pre-fab Powerwall as sold by Tesla.

Difference between messing with mains wiring and messing with high capacity batteries and/or solar panels is that mains always has some kind of fuse somewhere on the power company side and thus you will not see circuit that is completely unfused and will supply high currents until something blows up spectacularly and dangerously. This holds for significantly smaller things than DIY powerwall, eg. car batteries and even batteries for desktop UPSes.

Edit: for instance accidently shorting net 30 to ground when working on car electrics might well end in the car being completely destroyed by ensuing fire (I have friend who totalled his car in this way, he is licensed electrician). On new cars the fuse between 30 and 30a is usually placed directly on the battery to prevent exactly this issue, but even 30a will supply enough current to wreak havoc.

I can't imagine Tesla would ship that battery bank without fuse protection inside (and I imagine it is a "no user serviceable parts inside" kind of design...it looks like a black box device). Every solar deployment design has fuses on either side of the batteries.

One neat engineering trick in tesla battery packs is that the last resort fusing is part of the battery pack construction itself (the spot-welded connection to the actual cell is intentionaly surprisingly weak to act as a last resort fuse)

On the other hand, the difference is in that for the mains there is always going to be some kind of fusing, that is not part of what the tinkerer owns and probably does not even know where it is located. For solar and huge battery packs you own the whole thing and can mess with anything in the system, even more so when you build the thing from individual cells instead of buying COTS solution with bunch of "no user servicable parts inside" labels.

>tesla sells cars

and its headline news whenever their cars kill someone

The other car manufacturers seem to cope, it's not particularly obvious why Tesla should be unique in that respect and why they need to lock everything down to such an extent.

I've heard way too many Volt-on-fire related jokes to agree, unfortunately. Tesla had a very aggressive response to the Tesla accident a few years back, and still suffered as a result of it.

Big retailers like Lowes cultivate a reputation of catering to construction workers while also being approachable to weekend warriors, which insulates them from the downside of product safety issues, somewhat.