Charging Surprise from Florida Power and Light

[tommy542]

I just got an interesting surprise. My power bill, which normally runs about $50 just arrived and it is $480.

It seems that if you pull 21 KW from the mains for a period of 15 minutes or more during the month the FPL computer automatically changes your account to a business account instead of a personal account. I use a wall mounted Tesla charger which can pull 12 KW when the battery is well down on charge. During the previous month I turned on the electric heat while the car was on charge. It is a 10KW electric heater. Total 22 KW.

The FPL people were quite nice about it. The engineer I talked to said that he could grant forgiveness once in a 12 month period if it was only one instance. The bill went back to the sixty some bucks it was expected to be. I would be willing to guess that Florida is not the only state that has this kind of billing structure. Before planning on putting in a 100 amp sub-panel (Which could potentially draw 22KW) you guys investigate just what the local power company thinks about the situation.

 

[TheDom]

Wowza, thanks for the heads up. Is this a residential or commercial account with FPL that you had this surprise charge on? EDIT: my bad, you said it got changed from a personal to a business account. Missed that on the first read through.

 

[mattnis]

I just got an interesting surprise. My power bill, which normally runs about $50 just arrived and it is $480.

It seems that if you pull 21 KW from the mains for a period of 15 minutes or more during the month the FPL computer automatically changes your account to a business account instead of a personal account. I use a wall mounted Tesla charger which can pull 12 KW when the battery is well down on charge. During the previous month I turned on the electric heat while the car was on charge. It is a 10KW electric heater. Total 22 KW.

The FPL people were quite nice about it. The engineer I talked to said that he could grant forgiveness once in a 12 month period if it was only one instance. The bill went back to the sixty some bucks it was expected to be. I would be willing to guess that Florida is not the only state that has this kind of billing structure. Before planning on putting in a 100 amp sub-panel (Which could potentially draw 22KW) you guys investigate just what the local power company thinks about the situation.

That’s horrible. You have a 100amp or more panel in the house but they assume that you can’t use all of it?

 

[Gulfcoaster]

Uhh….. should I be canceling my M3P order?! We live in Naples and planned on using the wall mounted Tesla charger in the garage every night.

 

[gearchruncher]

Uhh….. should I be canceling my M3P order?! We live in Naples and planned on using the wall mounted Tesla charger in the garage every night.

No.
First, the M3 can "only" charge at 12kw. So you'd need 10kW of additional load on your house to trigger that. That is massive, but possible if you have electric heat.
Second, you can tell a Tesla to not pull that much power. You can say "at my house, never pull more than 5kW". So if you do peak at 12kW with the rest of your house, just set it to 8kW. You can do this in the charger or the car.