Massive house, but not massive lot. A quick gemini chat states i would need more like 1200sq ft and specific clearance. I would not have on my inclined lot. It is moot since the project would cost at minimum $500k, probably closer to $1M. Possibly more. Too much. My electric bill is currently negative annually. I also don't want to have that much battery at home due to fire risk. I live fire risk area, and fire department is at least 10 mins away. I don't think off grid is practical unless you live way south where days equalize in winter and summer.

Also, we use more in winter due to heat, especially for the EVs.

Our massive home is also quite efficient. 2200 kWh for a 4600 sq ft home that includes 2 central ACs, a sauna, a hot tub, and 2 EVs, is actually very spartan considering all the loads. GP states the average US home uses 1000 kWh, and the average US home is about half the size, and does not include any EV.

To fully cover the average home's 1000 kWh usage, you would need to be in my sunny Norcal climate, with my 70-panel 23.2 kw PV system that wouldn't fit on the average home's roof. You would also need a couple days worth of battery still. Even here, I have seen 7 consecutive days of rain certain El Nino years. Very few consecutive ones this winter, though. That PV system produces 31 MWh a year, also, where the average home only uses 12 MWh a year. So, what would you do with the excess 19 MWh, if you are off-grid ? Mine bitcoin ?

Off-grid might really work near the equator, where the days are approximately constant year round. Not so much at US latitudes.

Forgiven. I'm in Norcal also, so less sun in winter. I have seen as low as 4 kWh produced on rainy winter days, and as high as 145 kWh produced on peak summer days. But no battery. Last year, I had net grid exports of 6030 kWh. But actually imported 17200 kWh, and exported 23200 kWh.

Of course, PG&E punishes us now by paying much less for exports than charging for imports. I just setup with 2 OpenEVSE to do load following from my Rainforeast Eagle with an HA automation and MQTT. I also got a local LLM running to use that excess power doing the day. Hoping to reduce both imports and exports by a few MWh a year this way. We just replace one furnace with a heat pump though, so winter overnight use might cancel all of it. Once we are forced onto NEM3 in about 5 years, we will probably put batteries then. Hopefully the cost is more reasonable than right now. We would want at least 100 kWh to get through one cold winter day when we turn on our 8 kW sauna.

I have a massive 23 kW PV in California. It generates about 1000 kWh in low winter motnhs, and over 4000 kWh in peak spring/summer months. The storage that would be required to fully go off grid with my massive home with 2 EVs that consumes 2200 kWh/month just doesn't exist. It wouldn't be just for rainy days. It would need to work across seasons. We are talking at least 3 MWh worth of batteries to support winter. Even if cost was no object, it wouldn't be physically possible to have that much on my lot.

You can. I have been experimenting with some this week. Claude code running locally against qwen3.5-35b. And GLM-4.7 flash. It is very slow on my 3060Ti/8GB. Though i have a 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM. However, it is actually very capable, if you can tolerate the wait. Still much faster tham i could be at writing code by hand, tests, running them, even collecting logs and reverse engineeromg payloads from my IOT sensors. If it was paid work, it could never compete with the cloud offerings. Waiting 5 mins between prompts is common. Chatgpt codex 5.3 is about 100x faster - I'm doing a free monthly trial right now. Not sure how luch better the local models will get. Qwen3 coder next exceeds both the vram and ram capacity of my system. It is however possible for mw to upgrade to a 16GB vram GPU and 128GB RAM. But prices are way too high, and I may not pull the trigger on a $1200 upgrade to maybe at beast get 2x token speed.

Yes, this is crazy talk. My 2025 Equinox EV is my first car with OTA updates. I keep declining them. Software regressiosn are a thing. If it's going to get bricked, I would rather it happen at the service dept. Of course, if all features just worked in the first place, there would be no need for updates. New features on a car ? No.

Paid $7 for premium in my Volt on a road trip in 2022 when the Ukraine war started.

I read there was a station charging $8.21 in LA this week. It will get worse.

I got rid of the Volt last year before the EV tax credit expired. We now have 2 EVs and solar. Our net grid exports were 6 MWh last year. My gas furnace gave up the ghost in January. I just put in a heat pump, installed days before the subsidies also expired. It is incredibly efficient.

I still have 2 nat gas water heaters, and one furnace. But expect in 5-10 years they will all be heat pumps too. Probably much sooner for the water heaters.

We live in an idiocracy.

No, the high sulfur, heavy crude oil from Venezuela is too expensive to process, not to mention more damaging to the environment. It was rightly left in the ground.
We could have stopped oil subsidies a long time ago, though, to favor cleaner tech.

Electric buses have been around for a while.

No worry. Trump can invoke the Defense production act, and stop all those oil exports. Might not turn out well at election time, though.

Absolutely.

A lot of people are not registered to vote. Many that are registered don't vote.

Costco announced that they will. If they ever get the refund.

A 1000 Ah battery would be massive, also not for cabin. Maybe mAh ?