Patient, but ... really? CT clamps installed incorrectly?

[Pcjackson06]

I had two Powerwalls installed over the past two weeks. A number of delays including a rain out, a one day install that turned into two, a bad backup gateway ... and now a seemingly incorrect installation of the CT clamp at the meter... I'd love for someone to take a look at these images and help me understand which clamp is installed incorrectly. I opened a ticket with Tesla (who was very helpful), and they acknowledged a CT clamp issue. It's with Tier 2 now...

 

[Pcjackson06]

Images also here:
Imgur

 

[boaterva]

Just had my PWs installed, and watched everything pretty closely, which is why I’m a little confused. I was under the impression the gateway did all the ‘CT’ work here. When I had solar only, we had the Neurio taps on the grid and solar side but you’re saying there are still discrete taps for PW installs?

If so, what do they look like, because I sure didn’t see any installed.

In your case, it looks like hardware or programming is inverted.

 

[woferry]

They're black squared donuts, probably about 2"x2"x3/4" or something like that, wire back to the Neurio near the top of the Gateway.

The Gateway gets the Powerwall current directly from them. But it still needs to be able to measure what's going to/coming from the grid, and what's coming from the solar. So my system has 4 CTs in the raceway between the inverters, gateway and service panel, 1 pair with the two inverters going through them, and 1 pair with the grid power going through them. AFAICT the home reading is simply deduced from the other 3 (whatever it can't account for must be going to the home).

I certainly got wacky readings from the Tesla app until I corrected the wiring (I was comfortable doing that myself, I've worked in my panel before). One of my two inverters went through the CT backwards so the one solar output was being subtracted from the other rather than added, and the grid connection wasn't quite right due to some improvisation they had to do to adapt to my service panel (no good place to get the CTs in the true grid path), where again one of the circuits was fed through the CTs the wrong way. Given that during provisioning they seem to test the various conditions (battery charging/discharging, solar, etc) I'd have expected them to have gotten it right, but it was obviously wrong as soon as I had switched things on post-PTO.

 

[boaterva]

Gotcha, I’ll have to pull the gateway cover and take a look. Wasn’t aware the Neurio was still separate. Yeah, we did power on/off also and all is well, so, weird they got it wrong when they tested it on OP’s end. (EE here, quite familiar with power cabling, not gonna fry myself. )

Seems like a flip of a pair should fix it, no? The good thing we had was we had PTO for solar so PWs were trivial.

I have seen a lot of variation in quality of installation crews. The PW crew told me a lot of the people let go in the recent downsizing were the lesser quality ones. And the ones that did the inverter install on my solar didn’t have any clue. (Used a piece of pallet wood to support the inverter.). All that was fixed when it was remounted as part of the PW install. Excellent work by the Jessup, MD crew.

 

[Jeff P]

I had this with my installation yesterday. Sun went down and my solar was powering the grid. I went into the installation wizard, and for the "site" meters checked the flip boxes. Saved, restarted the Powerwall, all monitoring was as expected. I even through off the mains to see if it was correct when off-grid.

 

[Musterion]

Just had my PWs installed, and watched everything pretty closely, which is why I’m a little confused. I was under the impression the gateway did all the ‘CT’ work here. When I had solar only, we had the Neurio taps on the grid and solar side but you’re saying there are still discrete taps for PW installs?

If so, what do they look like, because I sure didn’t see any installed.

In your case, it looks like hardware or programming is inverted.

If you look in the gateway, the default location for the CTs is called “site” and they are around the top feed bars. They are oriented correctly if the label saying “this side toward source” cannot be seen (it is facing toward back of gateway).

 

[Pcjackson06]

Is it possible to change the CT clamp configuration as a customer when logging into the backup gateway? It looks like it wants a Installer login. I’m on day three waiting for Tesla to straighten out my configuration and growing impatient. Ugh.

 

[cwied]

Is it possible to change the CT clamp configuration as a customer when logging into the backup gateway? It looks like it wants a Installer login. I’m on day three waiting for Tesla to straighten out my configuration and growing impatient. Ugh.

You have to log in as an installer, but that's pretty easy to do using the password recovery mechanism.

 

[Musterion]

Is it possible to change the CT clamp configuration as a customer when logging into the backup gateway? It looks like it wants a Installer login. I’m on day three waiting for Tesla to straighten out my configuration and growing impatient. Ugh.

I was able to log in as installer just by following the instructions here (Monitoring from Home | Tesla) using default Gateway password.

 

[Pcjackson06]

15 days post install: replaced gateway components and now replacing the synchronizer in the gateway, as it is bad. Hopeful this will be the end of the road with issues.