Last week, my Powerwall 2 turned seven.
To celebrate, I stumped up $10 for a 1-month subscription to the excellent, third-party, NetZero Powerwall monitoring app and ran some diagnostics.
The results: just 6.4% degradation after seven years, averaging 0.7 cycles per day. I reckon that’s excellent.
Not Even Halfway Through Warranty
I’m also part of Tesla’s VPP, which (although winding up) came with a nice sign-up bonus: a warranty extension from 10 years to 15. I’m not even halfway through the warranty period – yay!
Powerwall 3 Home Gateway (Image: Tesla)
Honestly, if a meteorite flattened my battery tomorrow and I had to buy another, I’d go Tesla again. Two reasons:
1. Proven quality over time
Most battery hardware on the market looks solid when it’s new. But the truth shows in the long term. In that sense, my Powerwall 2 is performing far better than I expected.
Granted, you can’t buy a Powerwall 2 anymore, and the Powerwall 3 uses a different chemistry, but Tesla has earned confidence in its manufacturing quality and warranty support.
2. The app
Once the white boxes are on the wall, you’ll likely never physically interact with them again. The app is where almost all the product experience lies. It’s the interface between you and your energy system, the thing you check weekly, daily, or obsessively throughout the day. It’s what you must configure when you change electricity tariffs, need to change backup settings, or ensure your EV is not gonna guzzle expensive peak grid electricity.
The Tesla Powerwall app is, bluntly, a nine-and-a-half out of ten. Intuitive to configure, so the battery control software can get on with minimising your bills, while the interface is clear, responsive, and beautiful. It makes sense of what’s happening in your home at a glance. It shows solar generation, household load, battery state, and – if you have a Tesla car – EV charging in one tidy view.
Compare that to many other brands. Yes, they’ll have all that data, and if you look hard enough, you’ll find plenty of configuration settings, but the app feels like a teenager made it in their bedroom between Fortnite sessions.
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