Glubux's Powerwall (2016)

>Glubux even began disassembling entire laptop batteries, removing individual cells and organizing them into custom racks. This task, which likely required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge, was key to making the system work effectively and sustainably.

This kind of thing is cool as a passion project, but it really just highlights how efficient the modern supply chain is. If you have the skills of a professional electrician, you too can spend hundreds of hours building a home battery system you could just buy for $20k, but is less reliable.

Reuse of vehicle sized packs seems to be pretty common, though. I'd guess that a DIY home backup could be built pretty easily from used vehicle batteries.

Give me an array and battery system that can pull off the grid and/or array and power most of my home without me having to think a whole lot or pay a vendor thousands to install while making the total cost under $1000 and I’ll do it.

Until then, it just isn’t financially viable when my electricity costs are well under $70/month average across the year.

Recouping the costs for install of solar systems are estimated at 30-40 years as of 4 years ago when I researched it. I’m sorry, but that’s just not worth it for me and most others.

Cost is always an issue. These rarely make sense from a pure $$ sense, as everything in electrical is expensive. You could burn up that $1000 budget just to get a subpanel installed.

Usually the value proposition is some combination of savings, combined with the ability to backup critical loads. A generator could do that too, but a proper generator setup isn't cheap either, and it wouldn't save $$ at all. Battery solutions sometimes beat that.