The Generac PWRcell has Finally Arrived!

There has been a lot of companies talking about entering this market and many of them have finally done it or have plans to and some have even left the battery sector, and I’ll be cover all of them along with other renewable energy products making there way to homeowners.

Todays video is about a company you may already know, because they’ve been around for over sixty years, providing whole home backup to hundreds of thousands of homeowners in the U-S and abroad. Generac, one of the largest generator manufactures, well up until mid 2019, when they acquired Pika Energy and Neurio home link, now they’re one of the largest battery storage manufactures.

Now I’ve covered Pika Energy in previous videos comparing their technology to other solar plus storage solutions. And while they weren’t as well know as the Tesla Powerwall, they were a very competitive and innovative product that we installed in 2019. This new product line up from Generac will be dubbed PWRcell and it lives up to that name.

It’s important for me to inform you about this acquisition by Generac because it means better pricing for you as the consumer if you’ve been holding off on solar and battery storage, but also means you have peace of mind with the product you purchase as the company has been around and is financially stable.

I did mention that Generac also acquired Neurio home link, and this is very important because it’s the monitoring solution all Generac PWRcells will have built into them, and it’s free to customer that have a Generac PWRcell system installed. Or for those of you that own a Pika Energy system, not to worry you can upgrade your Pika monitoring to the new Generac PWRview by installing some additional components.

On a side note, Neurio home link also provided monitoring to Tesla Powerwall customers, nearly a hundred thousand of them. And from my understanding, Generac has no intentions on renewing the contract with Tesla as they’re now a competitor and well, they own the monitoring company they were using.

It’s kind of funny to think that a company as large as Tesla with its vast resources was using a third party monitoring solution for their batteries rather than developing their own. Makes you wonder who else they’re piggy backing off of. But that’s just a side note, and I want us to get back to Generac.

So there has been some changes since the acquisition of Pika Energy. Previously the X7600 inverter under Pika Energy was capable of only 10 kilowatts of DC solar energy, well Generac has adjusted that to a whomping 15kW of DC power! Which is a lot of solar, 50 - 300 watt modules!

That’s just crazy, but it’s good to know because while most of you watching will never need a system of that size, you end up with a future-proof system. Meaning you can add onto your system as your energy demands change.

Maybe you purchase that rad looking electric VW van or a Riven truck. You’re going to need more energy for that, so while you may not need a system that large today, you may in the future and knowing you can add onto your system with ease is very valuable.

Another change is the battery storage cabinets and how many you can connect to the inverter. Pika originally had up-to 4 full cabinets which was 68 kilowatt-hours of battery backup. But if you did this you would use all four 30 amp inputs inside the inverter, leaving you no space for a solar system.