Parzival
Member
Every time I flip the breaker that takes me off-grid, I have about a 1/4 second power interruption. I wonder why the difference?
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First actual loss of grid - success for Powerwalls!
- Thread starter Bigtanuki
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Every time I flip the breaker that takes me off-grid, I have about a 1/4 second power interruption. I wonder why the difference?
I won't speak for the OP, but my 9.8kW PV system with PW1 will run my fridge and some lights and computers indefinitely even in wintertime. And from spring into fall I could also partially charge one of my Teslas during peak solar production.
zanary
Active Member
That's really weird.
I know that if you have LED pot lights lights, they may flicker as a means to tell you that you're running on backup now, but I've never notice any interruption in any of my electronics.
zanary
Active Member
I've looked at my usage, and with no conversation, I can go just over 48 hours. With conservation, I think I can go about 5 to 8 days (and my conversation I mean, using just enough electricity to keep the fridge going (gotta keep my Grey Goose nice and chilled), and maybe provide a light or two throughout the house, and two charging ports for our iPhones for communication.
Parzival
Member
I wonder if it's a software difference? Maybe that's why some folks noticed they reverted from 1.7.0 to 1.6.0. ¯\(◉◡◔)/¯
Definitely get inverter type motor. It lasts longer and is quiet when running. And it has no load spike when turning on.
OnOff type is like a fridge. It does nothing. Then it runs at maximum load. Then it does nothing.
Inverter is the same like all EV's have for AC compressor.
Also make sure your heat pump installation can deliver
a) hot water (heat exhanger)
b) heating floors/radiators (water loop)
c) cooling radiators (water loop)
PS: one heatpump can not generate heat and cold simultaneously.
Well, look at the reading and just switch off breakers one by one. Then those phantoms, switch them on again one by one
hunt them down on the house. Unplugging stuff to be sure which appliance under one specific breaker does that.
Should take like 10-15 minutes.
True, but there are units that will automatically control a valve to provide domestic hot water during the cooling season (switches between modes based on water tank temperature).
Parzival
Member
I am looking to just replace the electric water heater, changing it from a resistive model to a heat pump model. I doubt there are any that use DC motors. There are only about three or four brands on the market, but they all use less than half the energy of a resistive heater.
Look into units like Chiltrix, costs more than a HP WH, but it has a mode for domestic hot water, and can also do A/C and heating. It is solar friendly, so should work with Powerwalls. I do not have one, but have been looking at installing one for my garage/ barn (radiant floor heat).
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
We found ours by switching off all all the devices in the house (that we were aware of) and then all the breaker switches on the distribution board. Then we turned the breaker switches on, one by one, and saw which one(s) used power. In the end the culprit was a transformer on the door bell. It looked really old, so probably original when the house was built 60 years earlier!
Perhaps outage is too rare to bother, but if not worth considering insulation?
Our house is built to Passive House standard (masses of insulation) and it needs almost no heat input in Winter - outside temperature is typically lows of 0C-5C / 32-40F, we are also a lot cooler in a heat wave (for us that is 30-35C / 85-95F) than other folk in conventional housing. We don't have Air Con here, and Max internal temperature this Summer was 25C (and we did have a week of hot weather this year)
I have absolutely no idea how it compares, energy-wise, but we have a (very well insulated) walk-in "cool room". We keep that at 10C / 50F so less energy, per se, than cooling everything to 3-4C. We store all bottles in there (e.g. both the Gin AND the Tonic
) along with all veg and so on, and only have a very small fridge. In theory it should use less energy overall than a big fridge, but I don;t have any figures to back that up.
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Top loading freezers (fridges? why, not convenient to use daily) are more efficient as they fit more stuff than shelves and do not let cold out when opened.
If one is able to keep fridges/freezers in a room between +5 C to +15 C it will have dramatic effect on energy draw. It will be reduced a lot!
Actually fridge will consume almost zero in +5 C environment
PS: It's not ok to to keep freezers below freezing ambient.
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
We used to keep our top-loading / "Chest" freezer in the garage, as it was cooler, but I believe that UK Freezer compressors are now optimised for normal room temperature - so no longer more efficient at lower temperature. Have I got that right? I think it is something to do with the compressors running for longer, so less cycling (than old types), but drawing less power overall.
Our walk-in cool room has shelves made of slate, so good thermal mass, and also much better insulation than a regular fridge or freezer.
We've got the same sort of deal with washing machines and dishwashers - they are only plumbed, now, with cold water, because so little water used (i.e. when they want hot water they use so little that the hot water would have only partly filled the pipe from the hot water tank!), and at a lower temperature than before, so washing machine hot water is electrically heated in the machine nowadays - which is annoying for me as we have Thermal Hot Water, so in effect "free" - but I still couldn't get it from hot water tank to machine, given hot little they use
If I was doing it again I would probably not bother with Thermal Hot Water and just install more PV and a heat-pump for Hot Water.
Our walk-in cool room has shelves made of slate, so good thermal mass, and also much better insulation than a regular fridge or freezer.
We've got the same sort of deal with washing machines and dishwashers - they are only plumbed, now, with cold water, because so little water used (i.e. when they want hot water they use so little that the hot water would have only partly filled the pipe from the hot water tank!), and at a lower temperature than before, so washing machine hot water is electrically heated in the machine nowadays - which is annoying for me as we have Thermal Hot Water, so in effect "free" - but I still couldn't get it from hot water tank to machine, given hot little they use
If I was doing it again I would probably not bother with Thermal Hot Water and just install more PV and a heat-pump for Hot Water.
Parzival
Member
I've tried this, but it's proven unrepeatable, and the way my house was wired is really wonky. I have a clamp ammeter, so I'll open the panel and see if that yields anything interesting. I've already considered the doorbell transformer, but regrettably it's buried somewhere under several feet of insulation (no exaggeration) in an area of the attic that's generally inaccessible. There's only a few places it could be connected from, so rather than find it, I may just try to disconnect it and install a new one in a new location. I can get to the doorbell wires easily enough.
I did manage to get my always on power consumption down to about 300W. I think 100-120W is probably the lowest it can go.
I'm disappointed the Powerwall only shows "Today" and "Yesterday" and has no historical data beyond yesterday. That, combined with my love of data and gadgets, really makes me want an eGauge system.
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
I reckon you need Plan B then - the Scream Test
Breaker switches all off, turn back on one by one, any that consume power turn back OFF. Leave like that and see if anyone screams
Breaker switches all off, turn back on one by one, any that consume power turn back OFF. Leave like that and see if anyone screams
Ulmo
Active Member
Yes, and incandescent bulbs made sense in a dual capacity as heaters and lighting all the way up until we started running into higher energy demands on our planet (due to more population), and civilization started to expand into non-waterside areas (also due to more population) that tend to not be as cool as the waterside places civilization starts at, and suddenly we invented compressors to cool our homes, which due to higher energy demands were quite expensive, which meant that incandescent bulbs suddenly didn't make any sense any more compared to LEDs in those areas in which you didn't always want an electric heater on (i.e., anyplace not near the cooling effects of water).PS: incandescent bulbs are thermal appliances as they are better at making heat than light
Incandescent bulbs were never evil before. They were almost always a perfect fit; they would warm you when you needed warming. We're in the first generation of people where it makes sense to upgrade to LED, and it does make sense today, except for those areas that are always naturally cool all day and all year and have copious power for resistive heating (such as from solar or hydro power). Never use florescent, for it was and always will be evil and unnecessary.
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Ulmo
Active Member
After a week, it shows a week, and same for month. No, I'm not kidding; totally buggy programming style.
Not knowing this, I made my database that records everything from the Tesla Gateway (which required a database and recorder process, and simple visualization cooking utilities which I did by hand). (Try
Code:
curl -s http://192.168.4.5/api/meters/aggregates | json_ppBut, lo and behold, I was done with that before a week had passed, and then after 7 days, the app started showing the last week. It's a pretty bad UI from that perspective. Guess what? You then have no access to that week once it passes, for another 3 weeks, until a month has passed, then you get to look back a month. Doh! Unfortunately, both are bar charts, and don't graph each day, but an overview of total energy for each source and destination per day is useful. My personal logs are much more detailed.
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Ulmo
Active Member
I experienced this only when I have excess load in my home for the PowerWall system, and the power-outage causes some big loads to drop (such as the dryer, etc.), which don't come back on when the PowerWalls come back on. I was only able to duplicate this behavior by turning off one of my PowerWalls, to handicap the system's total capacity; I don't have this problem when both my PowerWalls are on. Do you have heavy loads that do not work with only the PowerWalls and are jettisoned for backup use?
Otherwise, if you don't find some big devices being shedded through this behavior, I think you have something wrong in your installation. I find the seamless nature of the cutover to be one of the features of the Gateway.
Another possibility is that the electronics needed in your setup are different than those used in ours because you have higher current connections. How many amps is the breaker to and from the Gateway?
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WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
Sounds like my Heatmiser controller for the house heating system. Supposedly it had an interface for downloading temperature from all the thermostats. It used a 31 day buffer, and if you downloaded the data on the 01-March then the values for 31, 30 and, 3-years-out-of-4, 29 too were those from January ...
It was all pretty-formatted, well sort of ... as TEXT fixed spacing padded out with spaces - so bit of a nightmare to import into anything else.
And although the Thermostats all show to 0.1C the export was all to 1C, and no indicator for heat-demand on/off - so the only way to know that it was heating was if the temperature rose a degree. I have a Passive House, the temperature in winter is not intended to rise nor fall by more than a degree!!, so basically "no indication of when heat demand occurred"
Some, presumably, bright people thought all this up ... and that was as good as it got, which pains me. The building control, automation, system we have put in in place has absolutely no export at all - which is even worse of course. It has fancy graphs that I can scroll sideways for a week or more history ... but only one thermostat at a time ... so I'm not really going to be using it to find if the thermostat in the Conservatory is wrongly set and brings on the heating at 1AM for a frost setting (defined as temperature below 10C and "night time" rather than temperature below 5C Grrr ...). Yup, that did happen and took me a while to find, and even longer for the Installer to find the appropriate Config Setting to turn it off. All this would be so much more easily controlled by something more modern ...
Sorry about that, I'll get off my soap box now! Presumably the Powerwall has over-the-air updates, so will get better, where as my useless Heatmiser control system was fixed only by replacing it ... with a better, but still useless, replacement
Ulmo
Active Member
This is why I prefer open source user interfaces; we have a lot more capacity to right these wrongs than bottom line corporations.Sounds like my Heatmiser controller for the house heating system. Supposedly it had an interface for downloading temperature from all the thermostats. It used a 31 day buffer, and if you downloaded the data on the 01-March then the values for 31, 30 and, 3-years-out-of-4, 29 too were those from January ...
It was all pretty-formatted, well sort of ... as TEXT fixed spacing padded out with spaces - so bit of a nightmare to import into anything else.
And although the Thermostats all show to 0.1C the export was all to 1C, and no indicator for heat-demand on/off - so the only way to know that it was heating was if the temperature rose a degree. I have a Passive House, the temperature in winter is not intended to rise nor fall by more than a degree!!, so basically "no indication of when heat demand occurred"
Some, presumably, bright people thought all this up ... and that was as good as it got, which pains me. The building control, automation, system we have put in in place has absolutely no export at all - which is even worse of course. It has fancy graphs that I can scroll sideways for a week or more history ... but only one thermostat at a time ... so I'm not really going to be using it to find if the thermostat in the Conservatory is wrongly set and brings on the heating at 1AM for a frost setting (defined as temperature below 10C and "night time" rather than temperature below 5C Grrr ...). Yup, that did happen and took me a while to find, and even longer for the Installer to find the appropriate Config Setting to turn it off. All this would be so much more easily controlled by something more modern ...
Sorry about that, I'll get off my soap box now! Presumably the Powerwall has over-the-air updates, so will get better, where as my useless Heatmiser control system was fixed only by replacing it ... with a better, but still useless, replacement
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