Recent content by lodar

How much power does your home use? To be useful as a backup, you need enough Powerwalls to last through from peak power time until the next morning. Do you have any high current draw appliances like an Air Conditioner that you want to keep using during an outage?

I’ll be keeping a close eye on this thread. My UPS regularly reports over-voltage around 5:00a in the morning. It should be too early for solar, and I’m usually not up yet to investigate. The alert goes away after a few minutes. 🤷🏻

In fact, the most optimal algorithm for maximizing income is neither all TBC nor all Self Powered. The best algorithm is to use TBC during peak and Self Power off-peak. With this algorithm, fine-tuning utility rate settings is moot. During peak, you ideally want every Wh of solar to be going to...

Search these forums, there’s plenty of discussions on Powerwall battery wear. Factors like state-of-charge, temperature, charge rate, chemistry, etc… The same way a car’s odometer is an approximation on its relative wear, you can look at how much your Powerwall charges every day. It’s harder to...

Overall, PG&E are incentivized to downplay NBCs except where legally required to disclose. Search the following PG&E files for “bypass” to see how little is described. https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/billing-and-assistance/vnem-brochure.pdf...

PG&E has “non-bypassable charges” that breaks the 1:1 nature of their so called “net metering”. It is better for your home to directly consume its own power, rather than “banking” it with the grid. Ideally, solar energy should go directly into powering the home. Excess goes to battery, and...

Yup. Been running “Self Powered” for this past week. Probably could have started earlier. Still sending excess power to the grid during peak. We just had a cloudy period and had only one day where the batteries didn’t fully charge.

The Powerwall is not computer UPS grade. Depending on how the grid goes out, you (and your electronics) may or may not notice the switch. If you have sensitive electronics, then you should still protect them with a UPS battery. I’ve had outages that knocked me off of a Zoom call. Other times...

This goes back to my “balancing a broomstick on your hand” analogy. While connected to the grid, the CTs monitor energy flow in / out from the grid. The TEG sends commands to adjust the PWs output voltage to push just hard enough against the grid to maintain a zero current. But it takes time to...

Yup! My TEG and Solar Combiners are all wired Ethernet. A shame the Wall Connectors don’t have that option.

Caveat: I am not an electrician! A 7V drop out of 240V is about 2.9%, right at the limit (3%) of acceptable loss for a branch circuit. Overall end-to-end drop should not exceed 5%, so it doesn’t leave much room to work with. The total distance between the grid meter and the batteries is also a...

This is why CT placement is important. When the CTs are placed on the left side of your diagram, the batteries will output whatever it takes to balance a net zero current to the grid. If the CT measures power leaking to the grid, then the battery voltage is too high. If there is current coming...

Update: WPA2/WPA3 transition mode doesn’t work with the Wall Connectors. I did an AP firmware update and the Wall Connectors dropped off. I now have to create a dedicated WPA2-Personal SSID for the Wall Connectors. 😡

Just to make things more confusing… I shifted my IoT SSID (2.4 GHz only) to WPA2/WPA3 transition mode and all my Wall Connectors dropped. Doing the whole 5-second button press, local WiFi to change the WiFi settings didn’t work. Then… I switched the Wall Connectors to my Guest SSID (2.4 GHz + 5...

The combined view appeared automatically. I don’t recall if there was any need to pair the wall connectors with the Powerwalls. Somehow Tesla needs to know that the Powerwall and Wall Connectors are at the same house. You can try messing with the settings. The Powerwall Settings page has a...