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I think the power is out for most of New Jersey...
- Thread starter morbidz
- Start date
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
So are you raising the fee to charge the neighbor's phones and power banks?
Wow.. Is it common for people to have generators there where you live? Where I am, its not common at all, so people would truly be without power that long.
Dukeybootie
Member
Lived through two prolonged (over a week each) power outages in NJ years ago during Hurricanes Sandy and Irene. Vowed never to be crippled like that again. Bought a top-of-the-line portable Honda generator (eu5000is or something at the time) with 4 extra gas tanks and had a transfer switch installed. Luckily, never had to use it before leaving NJ for CA. Unfortunately for our old neighbors, they are re-living those scenarios all over again this week and I am getting ugly flashbacks to those freezing cold, miserable days without power. So yeah, I would say it is common enough on the east coast. I also remember massive price gouging at the hotels that still had power, 5 hour lines at the gas stations, and reports of generator theft all over the state. It did not take long for civilization to start fraying at the seams.
Looked into standby natural gas generators from Generac et al but they were limited by gas pipeline flow capacity. On our cul-de-sac, if only one or two other homes also chose to install such generators, there would not have been enough flow capacity during a power outage to turn them on at the same time. Plus the potential maintenance and repair issues with those devices, essentially gas engines mounted on a slab.
So yeah, I love my Powerwalls =)
Looked into standby natural gas generators from Generac et al but they were limited by gas pipeline flow capacity. On our cul-de-sac, if only one or two other homes also chose to install such generators, there would not have been enough flow capacity during a power outage to turn them on at the same time. Plus the potential maintenance and repair issues with those devices, essentially gas engines mounted on a slab.
So yeah, I love my Powerwalls =)
Power came back. Total off grid run time for me was 49 hours 27 mins.
Did you have to change much about how you normally live? It sounds like you had enough power to run what you wanted to with your PV + Powerwalls, but just curious if you just kept going as normal, or did you shed loads or what?
On a side note, the biggest advertisement for some "power independance" with batteries + PV (or generator, or SOMETHING) is some form of power outage one has to live through. I know many do this with generators as well, but for me, PV + powerwalls is the right solution for where I live, and I suspect demand will be even higher in places where stuff like this happens.
Glad to hear you are ok!
No, still ran the dishwasher overnight, microwaved some things here and there. AC on all night.
While I was watching the battery like a hawk, I made a decision not to tell wife and kids to change anything about their routines.
While I was watching the battery like a hawk, I made a decision not to tell wife and kids to change anything about their routines.
As I’ve been running in my ‘extended offgrid testing mode’ before I get my official PTO I’ve discovered a few things which I think could come in very helpful in the event of a real extended power outage. I’ve been going on grid for short times as necessary, but so far my longest stint completely off grid has been 228 hours and 33 minutes. I’ve spent a total of 921 hours off grid since my system was installed a bit more than a month ago. Obviously some of this may not apply to people with different sized systems.
First, I discovered that I have no problem making it through the night with my four powerwalls. On a typical day my solar production starts really dropping off around 7:00 or 7:30pm. Up until that time the PV production can support the house with some left over for charging the powerwalls, but at that time the production goes down and if the house is drawing a lot, because of my AC compressor or whatever it will start drawing some power from the powerwalls, then by about 8pm the solar production stops and I’m completely running on the powerwalls until the next morning.
With my normal overnight usage I’ll use about 50% of the power in the powerwalls by morning. So this means that if they’re at 100% by 7pm, then I can expect them to be around 50% by the next morning. However, I’ve had some days where it’s been cloudy and rainy, especially in the afternoons. In that case my house will start relying on the powerwalls well before 7pm and in the worst case, if the weather is bad enough during the day then it might not even have a full charge to start with.
I had one day where it was pretty cloudy all day and the powerwalls only got up to about 85% by 3pm, then it just rained for the rest of the day and I got a little PV production, but very little. By 7pm the powerwalls were down to 68% and by morning they were down to about 18%. Even in that case I was able to make it through the night with my normal usage, and luckily the next day was pretty sunny, but I’m not sure how well I’d do with two or three cloudy and rainy days in a row.
On sunny days, especially when I have several sunny days in a row and the powerwalls don’t deplete too much overnight I find that the powerwalls will be fully charged by about 2 or 3PM, which is right in the middle of my peak production times. On those days I have a good 5 or 10kWh more than the house needs that I can put into my car or use otherwise.
Especially since the weather is so unpredictable here in Florida I have found that I do try to shift things like running the dishwasher or doing laundry to the afternoons of sunny days when I know that I have excess power available. I certainly have enough capacity in the powerwalls that I could do those things at night, but I tend to feel like doing that is kind of borrowing from the next day’s solar production. That’s great if I have a sunny day and can get the powerwalls back up to 100%, but if the next day winds up being cloudy and rainy then I might have ‘borrowed’ too much power and I’m not able to get the powerwalls fully charged.
Overall though, short of charging the car, I have discovered that I can easily run my house off grid for extended times, at least during the summer. I certainly hope I’ll have PTO by the time winter comes, but I may still try to do another extended off grid test in December or January and see how well I can do during that time.
First, I discovered that I have no problem making it through the night with my four powerwalls. On a typical day my solar production starts really dropping off around 7:00 or 7:30pm. Up until that time the PV production can support the house with some left over for charging the powerwalls, but at that time the production goes down and if the house is drawing a lot, because of my AC compressor or whatever it will start drawing some power from the powerwalls, then by about 8pm the solar production stops and I’m completely running on the powerwalls until the next morning.
With my normal overnight usage I’ll use about 50% of the power in the powerwalls by morning. So this means that if they’re at 100% by 7pm, then I can expect them to be around 50% by the next morning. However, I’ve had some days where it’s been cloudy and rainy, especially in the afternoons. In that case my house will start relying on the powerwalls well before 7pm and in the worst case, if the weather is bad enough during the day then it might not even have a full charge to start with.
I had one day where it was pretty cloudy all day and the powerwalls only got up to about 85% by 3pm, then it just rained for the rest of the day and I got a little PV production, but very little. By 7pm the powerwalls were down to 68% and by morning they were down to about 18%. Even in that case I was able to make it through the night with my normal usage, and luckily the next day was pretty sunny, but I’m not sure how well I’d do with two or three cloudy and rainy days in a row.
On sunny days, especially when I have several sunny days in a row and the powerwalls don’t deplete too much overnight I find that the powerwalls will be fully charged by about 2 or 3PM, which is right in the middle of my peak production times. On those days I have a good 5 or 10kWh more than the house needs that I can put into my car or use otherwise.
Especially since the weather is so unpredictable here in Florida I have found that I do try to shift things like running the dishwasher or doing laundry to the afternoons of sunny days when I know that I have excess power available. I certainly have enough capacity in the powerwalls that I could do those things at night, but I tend to feel like doing that is kind of borrowing from the next day’s solar production. That’s great if I have a sunny day and can get the powerwalls back up to 100%, but if the next day winds up being cloudy and rainy then I might have ‘borrowed’ too much power and I’m not able to get the powerwalls fully charged.
Overall though, short of charging the car, I have discovered that I can easily run my house off grid for extended times, at least during the summer. I certainly hope I’ll have PTO by the time winter comes, but I may still try to do another extended off grid test in December or January and see how well I can do during that time.
Very impressive. I am also waiting for PTO and your story has inspired me to make this weekend an off-grid weekend. We only have 2 PWs but I should find out now, before PSPS season, if I need to get a 3rd!
Do you experience any side effects from the inverter frequency being raised to control the output of the PV as the Powerwall charge cycles up and down from 100% during the day?
It's definitely worth doing (just noting that different utility agreements may have different verbiage with respect to how allowable off-grid operations are, pre-PTO.)
For us, we confirmed what we pretty much knew - our solar only covers 80% of usage, so we would have to cut back to make things work. Of course, since we had the option, we just turned on the grid for a few hours. But even then, as @BrettS talked about, there can be some planning to manage the load - with 2 PWs and potentially generating almost 45kWh in a day, we could start with mostly depleted batteries and still hit full in the afternoon if the A/C wasn't running. So a little bit of planning on when might be best to run certain appliances really helped.
Assuming you have sufficient solar to fill them, no doubt a 3rd could help, but it is worth getting a feel for how much it is potentially necessary (if regular usage can't get you from sunset to sunrise, for example) versus juts more convenient to not have to stress over planning usage during an outage.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
Yeah, to me this is a concern. It's why I haven't pulled the plug and stayed disconnected from the grid. In the app and on my own monitoring with pvoutput.org, I see prolonged periods (2-10 min) where the system is exporting or importing from the grid. It's not a lot, few hundred watts, but it's enough to make me think the grid is acting as a stabilizing factor in the entire setup. This is particularly noticeable when the powerwalls are doing firmware upgrades, or there are large changes in load (i.e. wife has the oven on and one or both AC units kicks on in short order).
I have not, although I was able to get Tesla to change the max frequency to 62.5Hz on install day, so I have no experience with the 65Hz frequency. I also try to avoid getting to that point. Instead of letting the system turn off the power and ‘waste’ it I will plug in my car to let it charge to use some of the excess power when I see the powerwalls getting up to 95 or 96%.
However, there have definitely been times where the system has raised the frequency and shut off the inverters, either because the powerwalls got charged faster than I was anticipating and I didn’t get the car set to charge in time, or the car wasn’t at my house or was already full. I haven’t noticed any side effects during those times. 100% of my light bulbs are LED and I have seen no issues with those, I have 60+ Z-Wave devices and I have seen no issues with those. I have one low end APC UPS and it has no problems, nor do I have a problem with my microwave during the high frequency periods.
The powerwalls are certainly designed to take over that function when you are off grid and I have seen no issues during my extended off grid testing. My system was installed on 6/22 and 6/23 and since then, according to the app, I have spent just under 1000 hours off grid, with my longest off grid period being more than 228 hours.
Interestingly it would appear that the powerwall firmware upgrade doesn’t happen when the system is off grid (which probably makes sense). I saw mention of a 1.48.0 firmware a few weeks ago, but my powerwalls have stayed on 1.47.0 since the day they were installed. I figure they’ll probably upgrade eventually (probably after PTO) when I go back on grid for a while.
Thanks.
Did you just call up Tesla and have them change the max frequency to a lower value?
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