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Do Powerwalls prevent appliances plugged into surge suppressors from going off?
- Thread starter jblazar
- Start date
Sorry, but I don't understand your answer. Maybe I wasn't clear. We had a power outage and anything connected to an outlet surge suppressor went out. I thought the Powerwall was supposed to act as a seamless backup, taking over during a power outage. Clock on microwave and two clocks plugged directly into the wall also went out. Is this normal?
Surge suppressors just keep voltage spikes from harming your electronics. They have no power backup function.
There are any number of outage scenarios where it can take the Powerwalls a fraction of a second to seconds to respond and take over power delivery.
If you are curious, there are a number of threads here on the specific conditions when Powerwalls are quick, and when they are slower to take over power. It depends on whether they were discharging power and were supply the home load, whether they were being charged, and whether they were idle, but it also depends on how the power went away; brown outs, voltage sags, and rapid small interruptions will take longer before the Gateway switches over, while a complete loss of power is quick.
All the best,
BG
If your PW was full or nearly so at the time of the utility power outage, it may take a second or so to switch to back up power. Once it does, PWs will increase their output frequency from 60Hz to (by default) 65Hz, as a mechanism to curtail solar production. This may flummox digital clocks. (our microwave clock continues to function but beeps constantly.) However, what most of us call a surge protector wouldn't be affected by the frequency change. Perhaps your surge protector is more sophisticated than most or you even have actually a small UPS?
Well actually it could be the surge suppressors. You might have had a short brown out. Some better surge suppressors will shutdown the load during an under voltage event (brown out) or over voltage (surge) to protect the equipment.
I don’t know how fast powerwalls are supposed to switch. Or the exact conditions they switch over. It’s possible for example a surge suppressor shuts down at 90V but the powerwall does not switch over, or switch fast enough if it was a short dip. It might also be settable what the trip points are.
On really fancy power conditioners you can set the trip points. UPS systems allow setting it too.
Some devices can stay running through a quick brown out while others can’t. It is often better a device shutdown during a brownout than to try to keep tuning. Which is what some surge suppressers do.
Powerwalls are not power conditioners.
Interesting; I have never seen a surge suppressor like that. Do you have links to surge suppressors that shutdown their loads?
Thanks!
BG
Whether its "seamless" or not depends on the state of your powerwalls, solar generation, etc. Having or not having surge protectors has nothing to do with whether the powerwalls "seamlessly" take over, or that there is a power "blip".
Here is a long thread on this topic with a lot of discussion about it.
How come power changeover was not seamless during power outage blip?
Well, this is interesting. Am sitting at my computer and the screen glitches. I get a text from my Ting line monitoring device that power has gone out, and then was restored "quickly". Looks like a transformer blew in the area, but we had a quick restore. Others are not without power. But...
teslamotorsclub.com
TL ; DR, there is likely nothing wrong with your system, and whether it is seamless or not depends on PV generation at the time, powerwall state of charge at the time, whether powerwalls are discharging to the house or not, whether PV is covering home load, etc.
Oftentimes I see a sizable gap in time when power goes out up to powerwall's kicking in. Enough seconds that computers and others get shut off. Those UPS batteries are still of value to prevent it. There have been sometimes where it clicked over fast but at least 50% of the time so far it has been too long a time gap in seconds for things to stay on. I have had maybe 5-6 events so far.
I think it depends on how sensitive is your equipment/surge suppressor, current load and how fast is the transfer time of the PW. A good UPS have less than 8ms transfer time and most common equipments will not see a blip. I haven’t experienced any outage yet, so no experience to share, but I owned another solar battery backup which has entry level UPS capability but spec transfer time is around 20-30ms which can cause problems in some equipments.
If you have truly sensitive equipment, you may want/need a double conversion UPS that does AC to DC to AC, constantly running your loads off of batteries that are always being charged.
Like others, our experience with outages is that while there have been a couple of times with a short, three to four second lag, almost all of the rest have been seamless transfers to the Powerwalls and back. (90+%)
All the best,
BG
Like others, our experience with outages is that while there have been a couple of times with a short, three to four second lag, almost all of the rest have been seamless transfers to the Powerwalls and back. (90+%)
All the best,
BG
jrweiss98020
Tessa's Tesla
Went out for how long - a second or 2, or for the entire duration of the outage?
As others have stated, electronics vary in their sensitivity to power surges and outages. The Tesla Gateway is not designed to transfer power as quickly as a UPS, so more sensitive equipment may drop off line. I still use UPSes for my computers, TVs, and stereos. My microwave and oven clocks reset during power outages, and that is sometimes the only indication I have that an outage occurs.
charlesj
Active Member
If you want those important items to stay on like modem, router, tv, and dvr, you need a good UPS that I decided to add so the iimportant stuff is on when I need them.
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