New 26kw system - some weird usage results after a month of use.

[aimetti]

As promised here are some videos. System isn’t producing full amount due to time of day but crystal clear no clouds.

Video one shows current generation and home usage. I then turned off inverter one of 3. You can see the home usage drop from 5/6kw to 1.1 instantly along with the solar generation.


Video two shows the opposite. Starts with inverter one powered down and house only drawing 1.2ish kw. Once the inverter powers up and starts generating power the home usage again spikes to 5kw or so.

This is actual usage as it mirrors the usage on my home meter.

 

[aimetti]

Whoops files didnt carry over. Hopefully these work

RPReplay_Final1664468584.mov RPReplay_Final1664468296.mov

 

[T0MMY]

Ya there was definitely some clouds today. The peaks and valleys are most likely that.

Mine started having those spikes when there were no clouds and Tesla confirmed the fan in my inverter died so the Tesla fast fail panels would shut down until they cooled down. Looks like you have multiple problems.

 

[aimetti]

Has anyone had any luck with tesla support? Prior to power on they would respond and be fast service all the time. I have been waiting 2 weeks for a response on this issue and reached out again yesterday only to be told they wouldnt get a tech out closer to OCT 20th. Gave excuses for back log of issues / tickets etc. Thats awful service for something that cost so much money and is brand new.

 

[BGbreeder]

Has anyone had any luck with tesla support? Prior to power on they would respond and be fast service all the time. I have been waiting 2 weeks for a response on this issue and reached out again yesterday only to be told they wouldnt get a tech out closer to OCT 20th. Gave excuses for back log of issues / tickets etc. Thats awful service for something that cost so much money and is brand new.

Keeping calling support. Be polite, ask for the status as you are still having issues.

There isn't much else to do at this point. Tesla offers low cost installations by doing things their way, which right now doesn't include lots of customer service representatives nor lots of repair staff sitting around waiting on customer calls.

I suspect that Elon has a view along the lines that correctly engineered items shouldn't fail and that investing in service is a guaranteed loss.

Good luck, keep persevering.

BG

 

[CrazyRabbit]

….
I suspect that Elon has a view along the lines that correctly engineered items shouldn't fail and that investing in service is a guaranteed loss.
…

BG

I agree, on both points. I wish Tesla solar inverters were air cooled, no liquid loop. Better to spend the money on increasing inverter efficiency then a liquid cooling loop. It makes sense with PW’s.

 

[aimetti]

Little update for anyone who cares.

Tesla sent a tech out today to review the system. Thankfully I wasnt going crazy and sure enough there seems to be some serious issues. The tech checked everything and cannot pinpoint what would cause the issue.

He followed the same steps I did to reproduce the issue. We took entire power down at the house from the main breaker and just had the solar running and could clearly see the house using roughly 2/5ths of the power generating. If we took down the inverters the power generated would drop , as would the house usage.

Its as if the power is being consumed by thin air at this point. They are going to send engineers to the house next to take a look.

 

[cwied]

Little update for anyone who cares.

Tesla sent a tech out today to review the system. Thankfully I wasnt going crazy and sure enough there seems to be some serious issues. The tech checked everything and cannot pinpoint what would cause the issue.

He followed the same steps I did to reproduce the issue. We took entire power down at the house from the main breaker and just had the solar running and could clearly see the house using roughly 2/5ths of the power generating. If we took down the inverters the power generated would drop , as would the house usage.

Its as if the power is being consumed by thin air at this point. They are going to send engineers to the house next to take a look.

Hmm, this sounds like a pretty simple misconfiguration of the current transformers that measure the current. I think if one (or more) of the CTs for solar were mistakenly configured as a house load CT, the numbers would do exactly what you're describing. Did anyone go into the installer screens for the Powerwall and look at what the CTs were measuring in this configuration?

 

[taphil]

Seems like the first step in diagnostics would be to take the covers off the Gateway and inverters, see where the CTs are installed, use a clamp meter to measure what the correct currents are, then check in the GW software if the CTs are configured correctly (in terms of what they're measuring and if they're reversed).

A tech coming onsite to do flippity-flop of circuit breakers to confirm something is broken is IME the first step for Tesla though.

My random guess is one of the CTs is configured wrong and reversed.

 

[aimetti]

I am not 100% what he tried as he was out there for a long time. The question I have tho is if it was actually just a ct / reporting issue the usage amount wouldn’t be accurate no? My bill and usage shows accurate. Even if the ct was showing it incorrectly my bill and charging my batteries wouldn’t be accurate. But the massive amount of kwh used is dead on accurate. It’s actually being used it seems not just reporting incorrectly.

Thinking outside the box here, if my main breaker of the house is off and I literally just have the solar on I should be either charging my batteries or sending to the grid. Let’s say my batteries are 50% capacity and my house is generating 20kw. I would be showing in app that 12kw or so would be going to the powerwall and 8kw would be going to the house. Based on 3 batteries I hold roughly 31.5 kw I believe. I can see quite easily that the batteries are not charging at the full rate. But at the same rate the meter on the house actually reflects the correct amount that’s being used. Makes no sense. The house is off.

 

[taphil]

If your house main breaker is off, no electricity will go to the grid. If there is excess solar production beyond charging the batteries and supplying home usage, the PW+ or inverter will ramp down solar production as needed.

If your electric bill is correct, it’s because it relies only on your power meter to count power being sent to or received from the grid and is not affected or aware of whatever your Tesla system is doing.

So it still seems like a misconfigured CT.

The GW has 4 CT ports I believe. I only have one in use in mine since I just have one pair of wires from one inverter connected to the GW. After a recent repair service unrelated to the GW or CT, the tech added on a separate Neurio meter, and I have yet to figure out why or what its purpose is. I think the Neurio meter is configured in the inverter web interface, whereas the CT in the GW are configured in the GW web interface.

 

[aimetti]

Gotcha.

So if the main breaker is off and I’m producing let’s say 20kw and 8 of which is going to house 12kw to batteries, seems odd right ? Especially if none could go to grid.

I believe I have a similar setup as you. Think if I remember correctly I had only one pair of wires going to the GW and have a neurino in the breaker box. I asked the tech the purpose and he said it’s to manage all the lines into one unit , whatever that means. I’m no electrician by any means but do find it interesting trying to learn how the system works.

Curious what the engineers find next Friday.

 

[aimetti]

Well everyone. Seems you were right. They had the ct on an inverter not hooked up correctly. Was essentially showing double the generation then it was actually doing and thus causing it to read as power used. Essentially it was a wash as they corrected the ct and now the solar production is just showing lower and house usage back to normal.

The whole time I thought my system was just killing it with solar generation lol. Does seem abysmally low now.

My system is a 26kw 3 inverter 3 pw system. Today full sun and only generated 22 kw and a peak of 5.9kw. Granted sun is going down earlier and I got some trees but seems a bit low. Gonna do some digging to find out if that’s accurate.

 

[h2ofun]

Well everyone. Seems you were right. They had the ct on an inverter not hooked up correctly. Was essentially showing double the generation then it was actually doing and thus causing it to read as power used. Essentially it was a wash as they corrected the ct and now the solar production is just showing lower and house usage back to normal.

The whole time I thought my system was just killing it with solar generation lol. Does seem abysmally low now.

My system is a 26kw 3 inverter 3 pw system. Today full sun and only generated 22 kw and a peak of 5.9kw. Granted sun is going down earlier and I got some trees but seems a bit low. Gonna do some digging to find out if that’s accurate.View attachment 868965

I have about 30kw. Lots of north facing. My best is 185 kwh. Its really dropping. My yesterday was like 50kwh, peak about 10kw. Does seem low. I look at my solar edge data, and my PGE data that can show me 2 data points to compare what folks are seeing

 

[Zabe]

Well everyone. Seems you were right. They had the ct on an inverter not hooked up correctly. Was essentially showing double the generation then it was actually doing and thus causing it to read as power used. Essentially it was a wash as they corrected the ct and now the solar production is just showing lower and house usage back to normal.

The whole time I thought my system was just killing it with solar generation lol. Does seem abysmally low now.

My system is a 26kw 3 inverter 3 pw system. Today full sun and only generated 22 kw and a peak of 5.9kw. Granted sun is going down earlier and I got some trees but seems a bit low. Gonna do some digging to find out if that’s accurate.View attachment 868965

I think you still have metering or inverter issues as the production number seems pretty low.

 

[aimetti]

I think you still have metering or inverter issues as the production number seems pretty low.

ya could be , i gotta figure out how many tiles i got on roof per inverter. Going to take down an inverter at a time tomorrow to see what it looks like in the app. Last 2 days I only generated 22 KW. Unless its just the trees blocking all the sun now which is possible.

 

[aimetti]

So , a weird thing is going on today. I have full cloud cover and yesterday was fully sunny. I am pulling in 3.1 KW right now , same time yesterday was 1.5. I am installing python and going to try and run pypowerwall to get some data and report back. Going to see if tesla can send me my final install documentation / diagram as well. But can anyone explain more generation with complete cloud cover??

 

[cwied]

How thick are the clouds? I have a SW-facing array and in the mornings before the direct sun shines on the panels I get slightly more production with light cloud cover than with clear skies. Your numbers sound pretty extreme, though, so there may still be a measurement error somewhere.

 

[jboy210]

So , a weird thing is going on today. I have full cloud cover and yesterday was fully sunny. I am pulling in 3.1 KW right now , same time yesterday was 1.5. I am installing python and going to try and run pypowerwall to get some data and report back. Going to see if tesla can send me my final install documentation / diagram as well. But can anyone explain more generation with complete cloud cover??

You can't really eyeball it too much with cloudy days. Some days I think we would product nothing, and we are generating a ton. This is especially true if you have clouds going in and out and not a consistent flat cloud layer. Then you get a lot of cloud edge effect where light going through thin clouds gets concentrated as the light passes through wisps of water in the clouds that act like a magnifying glass.

I 100% agree with getting some sort of logger. I wrote my own solar production logger and am constantly amazed at how much the shadow from tree branch or two, a cloud, etc. can impact solar production. With the Tesla app the granularity is so poor you don't see all these issues. But if you log every minute or less the variability is pretty eye opening.

 

[aimetti]

thanks for the replies ! Its quite heavy cloud cover today. infact havent seen the sun really at all. I peaked out around 10KW generation today with cloud cover. Last 2 days I peaked at 5.1 or so.

I think since the CT issue seems to at least be solved I may post a new thread w/ some details on my system and see if anyone with the no how can provide some thoughts. Tesla gave me my layout drawings and string detail. I was able to log into all the inverters and see they are producing etc.

Tried to install pypowerwall and was able to get connected and view all the data , except the strings command came back with blank data. If I post another thread ill link it here.

Thanks again.